More on the parental fallacy and the daimon, thanks to Hillman

 Hillman’s depiction of mother and father is not intended, at least from this perspective, to be a rejection of the family. Rather it is a highly articulate and relevant critique of the various excesses, perfections even, that are expected, adopted and then suffered by many parents. Rather than be overcome by the ‘family-systems’ approach there is a case to be made for considering, reflection upon and then embodying a different perspective on the whole ‘business’ of parenting.

Whether parents live through their child’s accomplishments as a vicarious surrogate for their own somewhat ‘empty’ and ‘unfulfilling’ and ‘unfulfilled’ lives, or whether, on another hand, the parents over-reaches in setting expectations and demands on the child, (as only two possible both determinative and detrimental approaches), seeing the ‘acorn’ in the unusual, unique, different and potentially defining qualities of the child, as Hillman’s counsel suggests, requires a different perspective that one based on either accomplishment/reward/conditioning in order to validate the parent.

If and when the parent who gets to know what his daimon is about, and sets about to validate that process, there is a significantly reduced likelihood that the child’s life and daimon is either ignored or denigrated. It is the intensity and the degree of control over the conventional perks of childhood success, on the part of the parent, that Hillman is attempting to moderate. It is also the attempt, by Hillman, to help parents get to ‘know’ the deep and demanding voice of the child’s daimon,

a process best facilitated and enhanced by the parent’s claiming his/her own profound reality and truth.

A few words, from Hillman, about the envisaged father lying on the couch, ‘shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things, more infotainment, and an almost fanatic dedication of his mature male life to the kids so that they can grow up straight and straight up the consumer ladder in pursuit of their happiness…A ‘happy’ child was never and nowhere the aim of parenting. An industrious, useful child; a malleable child; a healthy child; an obedient mannerly child; a stay-out-of-trouble child; a God-fearing child; and entertaining child—all these varieties, yes. But the parental fallacy has trapped the parents also in providing happiness, along with shoes, school-books, and van-packed vacations. Can the unhappy produce happiness? Since happiness at its ancient source means eudaimonia, or a well-pleased daimon, only a daimon who is receiving it due can transmit a happy benefit to the child’s soul. Yes, I am saying that ‘care of soul,’ as Thomas Moore has written, may thereby help the child’s soul prosper. Should the onus of soul-making in the parent shift to making the soul of the child, then the parent is dodging the lifelong task set by the acorn. Then the child replaces the acorn. You feel your child is special, and you care for it as your calling, seeking to realize the acorn in your child. So your daimon complains because it is avoided, and your child complains because it has become and effigy of the parent’s own calling. Your mother…may be a demon, but she is not your daimon; so your child, too is not your daimon. (Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 83)

Hillman then goes into the details of the then current sociological condition of children in the U.S. using Michael Ventura’ observation that Americans hate their children….

What culture in history ever spoke more as a child, felt more as a child, thought more as a child, or was more reluctant to put all childish things away? And what culture today campaigns more to save the children globally, provides more emergency help for preemies and for surgical transplants in infants whatever the cost, and engages in more frontline defense of the fetus? Yet all this is a cover under which hides an appalling neglect. Just look at the evidence. Of the 57 million children (under fifteen years of age) living in the United States, more than 14 million are living below the official poverty level. The United States ranks below Iran and Romania in the percentage of low-birth-weight babies. One of every six children is a step-child, and half a million make their ‘homes’ in residential treatment centers and group and foster homes. More children and adolescents in the United States dies from suicide that from cancer, AIDS< birth defects, influenza, heart disease, and pneumonia combined. Each day at least 1 million ‘latchkey children’ go home to where there is a gun. Besides these children who  find their way into sociological statistics, there are those from all economic classes in treatment for attention deficit disorders, hyperactivity, obesity, defiance, bulimia, depression , pregnancy, addiction….Gross economic injustice, political passivity, and the delusions of circuses (without bread) are responsible for the plight of children. But also I accuse the parental fallacy of sponsoring this negligence. Parents’ deficient attention the individual call they brought with them into the world and the hyperactivity of their distraction from this call betrays their reason for being alive. When the child becomes the reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here. And the reason you are here as an adult, as a citizen, as a parent? To make the world receptive to the daimon. To set the civilization straight so that a child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life. This is the parenting task. To carry out this task for the daimon of your child you must bear witness first to your own. Any father who has abandoned the small voice of his unique genius, turning it over to the small child he has fathered, cannot bear reminders of what he has neglected. He cannot tolerate the idealism that arises so naturally and spontaneously in the child, the romantic enthusiasms, the sense of fairness, the clear-eyed beauty, the attachment to little things, and the interest in big questions. All this becomes unbearable to a man who has forgotten his daimon. Instead of learning form the child, who is living evidence of the invisibles in everyone’s life, the father capitulates to the child, disturbing its growing down into civilization by setting it us in a toy world. Result: a child-dominated fatherless culture with dysfunctional children with pistol-packing power. Like the vampires that so fascinate them children in our culture, sentimentalized for their innocence and neglected on account of the other they cause, drain away the blood of adult life. (Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p.83-4)

This scribe, without either the language or the conscious awareness of the words and perspective of Hillman, has experienced both the vicarious living out the daimon of the mother, and the flat-lining of the unfulfilled father. As an aspiring vocalist, partially trained, and highly ambitious for at least an audition for operatic roles, all of it lying relatively dormant and deployed occasionally in community choirs, especially when assembled to present Handel’s Messiah, mother was both insistent and over-weening in her determination that I study piano from a very early age. And then, as seemed somewhat natural, there were Conservatory examinations, Kiwanis Festivals, and solo performances at ‘high-society’ dinners of local service clubs. Performance, achievement, social recognition and reputation were the ostensible goals, as a path to her vicarious self-fulfilment, through my fingers. Never was the quality of the music, the intentions of the composer, the intonations of the dynamics or the over-all musicality of each piece a topic of conversation with her. Length of practice time, correct counting of each bar, perfect execution of each note, and hubristic extolling of the competitive grade on those exams, as compared with peers, comprised her intense focus. As the piano instructor told me, decades later, “It was your mother who had to win the competitions; that was not nearly as important for you.”

On the other side of the parental cast, my father harboured a deep-seated passion to become a dentist. And yet, after the death of his father, and his sense of responsibility for his younger sisters and widowed mother, he began work at seventeen, in a lumber yard. Years later, when he had married his partner, and when, as a graduate nurse, she pleaded with him to enrol in dentistry, he deferred. One can only speculate that, having attained only a grade ten education, he considered himself academically unworthy even to contemplate a professional university education and dental practice. A similar deferral emerged when, after decades as a successful hardware store manager, having been offered the purchase of his own store by the widow of a colleague. Again, his deferral became a pattern which hung like an unspoken and virtually unidentified cloud over the home.

A daimon, unlike a profession, or a talent, is more like a calling, in that it expresses how rather than ‘what’ a person is called to be. “In the beginning, even before Socrates and Plato, was Heraclitus. His three little words ‘Ethos anthropoi daimon” frequently rendered as ‘Character is fate,’ have been quoted again and again for twenty-five hundred years. No one can know what he meant, though few fail to offer interpretations as this list of English translations demonstrates:

                                ‘Man’s character is his genius.’

                                ‘Man’s character is his daimon.’

                                ‘A man’s character is his guardian divinity.’

 ‘A man’s character is the immortal and potentially divine                     portion of him.’

 ‘Man’s own character is his daimon.’

‘Man’s character is his fate.’

‘Character is fate.’

‘Character for man is destiny.’

‘Habit for man, God.’

The daimon part is easy enough, for we have already accepted the translation of daimon as genius (Latin) and then transposed it into more modern terms such as ‘angel,’ ‘soul,’ ‘paradigm,’ ‘image,’ ‘fate,’ ‘inner-twin,’ ‘acorn,’ ‘life companion,’ ‘guardian,’ ‘heart’s calling.’ ….Among native peoples on the North American continent, we find a parade of terms for the acorn as an independent spirit-soul: yega (Coyukon); an owl (Kwakiutl); ‘agate man,’ (Navaho); nagual (Central America/southern Mexico); tsayotyeni (Santa Ana Pueblo); sicom (Dakota)…these beings accompany, guide protect, warn. They may even attach to a person, but do not merge with your personal self. In fact, this ‘native’ acorn belongs as much to the ancestors, the society, the ambient animals as it does to ‘you’ and its power may be invoked for crops and hunting, for community inspiration and health—the actual world. The acorn stands apart from the inflated self of modern subjectivity, so separate personal and along. Though your acorn, it is neither you nor yours…..

The ‘self’ that permeates our daily language has expanded to titanic proportions. (op. cit. p 256-7)

Dentistry, for example, may have been only a possible iteration of my father’s daimon. His work with his hands, however, continues to light up his legacy in and through iron-wood lamp polished from its drift-wood salvage into a virtual sculpture; his hand-therapy, too, clings to hundreds of hangers, in the webbing of his patient wrapping. And his ‘grasp’ of hand, when encountering another, was memorable not merely for its muscle strength but for its authenticity. Similarly, performing ‘in’ the opera, may not have been mother’s daimon; yet performance at a very high level (including singing soprano), whether in nursing, gardening, food preparation, or  smocking of a two-year-old’s dress, had a quality of attention to detail and patience that discipline that accompanied each of her activities.

The daimon, however its voice emerges, does not bring a moral code, or a precise direction or vocation. It can also be, as Hillman calls, a “bad seed.”

And the bad seed is next.

Reflections on Hillman's critique of 'family systems' and the myths of both mother and father

How many of us are, have been and perhaps always will be enmeshed in the notion that our parenting is primarily responsible for our ‘fate’?

For a long time, and especially in my teens, I thought/perceived/believed that two parents were encapsulated in two historic models: hitler and chamberlaine. While stark and obviously black and white, to an adolescent mind, the conversation with my father that unearthed this comparison, authored by my father, has been a prevalent image for decades. Assigning responsibility for various traits which seemed inexplicable seemed to be easily and readily attached to one or other of those parents. Passive-aggressive behaviour on my part, seemed to have its root in the father, while bursts of anger, impatience and unpredictability seemed more easily and coherently the legacy of mother. And then, the images began to become fuzzy, and the ascribing of source/blame/responsibility for specific behaviours, attitudes, beliefs, perceptions seemed much less clearly rooted in one or other parent.

In the ‘outside world,’ however, there were cultural, social, political, and even what appeared to be epistemological and metaphysical ‘winds’ that tended either to underline the binary picture of inherited parental traits, whether psychological or biological or both, or to refute its claim. Embedded in the mid-twentieth-century public square of conventional ‘wisdom,’ along with Dr. Spock, was the concept of parental bonding. Closeness, warmth, affection, acceptance, and bonding with the very young and developing child was considered to be the prime requisite for highly effective, ethical, and responsible parenting. Another of those prominent winds, perhaps a precipitate left at the bottom of the social and cultural test tube (weren’t and aren’t we all examples and imitators of some kind of social, cultural, historical, political, religious experiment?) was the adage, “spare the rod, spoil the child” as a legacy of Puritanism, premised on the conviction that man was basically evil and that such evil proclivity had to be curtailed, if not actually erased. In the 1950’s, the second world war was over and peace brought a renewal of optimism, hope, prosperity and the rise of the middle class in North America. Baby bonus cheques from Ottawa were designed and delivered to encourage and support the growth of families. National Health Care was introduced in Ontario in 1961, and government bursaries for aspiring university applicants were another of feature of the bounty to which our generation was gifted.

The church as a highly influential institution on families and especially on youth, a superficial yet ubiquitous psychology from a pediatrician ‘guru’ whose book was in many homes, and post-war prosperity and opportunity were among the more influential, predictable, and thereby trust-worthy influences (influencers?) in an adolescent’s life. There was however, as it more clearly “seen” from decades later, a kind of tension between what passed as “good and proper” as opposed to authentic attitudes, behaviours as king of cultural pastiche. Religiosity as opposed to ‘a faith’ offered social standing; strict discipline as opposed to nurture, substituted for healthy parenting; fathers were bread-winners, mothers home-gardeners; a new car was a symbol of respectability, if not wealth; a profession (medicine, law, engineering, accounting, clergy) was the epitome of achievement, accomplishment and also trust. Entertainment, whether in the new invention of television or Hollywood movies, depicted moral dramas of predictable plots, with characters clearly visible as ‘good guys’ or ‘bad guys.’ Sex, religion and politics, among friends and neighbours, was never mentioned, given the ‘respect’ of the other, the ‘fear’ of disagreement, and the ‘privacy’ of each family’s secrets. Adolescent pregnancies were shameful, and the young women who became pregnant were moved out of town to homes for unwed mothers, to carry and deliver their children. It is as if ‘stick or line’ drawings comprised the social, cultural, ethical, moral and political canvas, on which the colours of the lines were almost exclusively in pastels. A rare occurrence, a suicide, a major fire, or a doctor driving his navy Mercury into the carcass of a cow on a backroad, compromised what today we would call, water-cooler chatter. Also on the list of public chatter were the scores of the local hockey team, the Shamrocks, the latest hole in one at the golf course, and the return of local young men and women from their first year at college or university, symbols of the pride of the whole community.

This ‘sketch’ is a highly reductionistic rendering, from the perspective of several decades later. So much has been unearthed, (re-discovered, researched, probed and anatomized about various instrumental intellectual, cultural, organizational, and religious and scientific affairs, in the intervening decades, including the generation of the atom and the hydrogen bomb, nuclear medicine, pharmaceutical compounds and interventions, the impact of ‘discharge’ of various kinds,  human and material, of a physical, political, ethical, communication, education and cultural green-housing impact) that we can barely remember or recognize those early days.

From the perspective of human psychology, (Dear reader, you knew this was coming, didn’t you?), there are some insights, perceptions, attitudes and even convictions that now confront many of the previously ‘sacred’ cows, especially pertaining to the relationship of the culture to its children (focused on America, with clear spill-overs in Canada) in our shared culture with views designed to help to release us from many of the previously infallible factors that seemed to ‘govern’ us.  

James Hillman in The Soul’s Code (1997), references Peter and Ginger Breggin’s “The War Against Children.” Hillman writes:

 (The book) threatens American children with an epidemic of troubles caused by the methods that would cure them of their troubles. (Hillman writes): The familiar evils of other ages reappear in the guise of helping programs, pharmaceutical prevention, and apartheid segregations. It’s all back again—eugenics, white racism, sterilization, forced removal, banishment to beggary punishment and starvation. As in colonial days, drugs to ease the coolies’ pain and increase their indifference, will be provided by those who cause the pain. Children have become the sacrificial victims of “Saturn-Moloch (God of Money) as in the ancient Mediterranean. They are also the scapegoats for scientistic fears of the anomalous, of the excessive, and of the paradigm-shifting movements of imagination that first appear as new—that is, in the young. What is already taking place in our ‘mental health facilities,’ where drugs are dispensed with less shame than condoms, would have benumbed during their childhoods probably every one of the extraordinary people told about in this book. The vicious inadequacy of treatment is not intended by practitioners, who mean well. It results willy-nilly from the inadequacy, or viciousness, of theory. So long as the statistics of normalizing developmental psychology determine the standards against which the extraordinary complexities of a life are judged, deviations become deviant. Diagnosis coupled with statistics is the disease; yet diagnosis coupled with statistics is the very name -Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (or DSM)—of the universally accepted guide produced by the American Psychiatric Association and used by the profession. The health care providers, and the insurance payers. Yet the whole of that thick, heavy and lightweight book provides accounts of the various ways the daimons affect human fate and how sadly and strangely they often appear in our civilization. This book prefers to connect pathology with exceptionality, exchanging the term ‘abnormal’ for ‘extraordinary’ and letting the extraordinary be the vision against which our ordinary lives are examined. Rather than case history, a psychologist would read human history; rather than biology, biography; rather than applying the epistemology of Western understanding to the alien, the tribal, and non-technological cultures, we would let their anthropology (their stories of human nature) be applied to ours. …The extraordinary reveals the ordinary in an enlarged and intensified image. The study of the extraordinary for the sake of instruction has a long trail, from biographies of classical greats by Varro, Plutarch, and Suetonius, through later exemplars like the Church father and Vasari’s lives of Renaissance artists, and across the Atlantic to Emerson’s Representative Men. This tradition is accompanied all along by the moral lessons to be drawn form the stories of biblical types such as Abraham, Ruth, Ester, and David, and from the lives of the saints—all heightened examples of character. (Op Cit. p.30-31)

It is difficult to imagine such words, thoughts, criticisms, especially the incisive thrust against the idolatry to Moloch, being part of the conversation over the dinner table in a Canadian or American family in the 1950’s. Given the food shortages, the stamps for butter and other provisions, and the desperation that hung over the people, still a residual cloud on the horizon in that decade, the prospect, vision, and aspiration of rising ‘boats’ through prosperity in peacetime, was embodied in the popular music, and the highly celebrated movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s and High Society. The rise of mega-corporations, dedicated exclusively to the ‘bottom line’ of both profit and shareholder dividends, had not yet abandoned all pretense to providing good jobs for the middle class, as they were to do over the next four decades plus. Working for a large meat-packing company, the Canada Packers of 1961, for example, I learned that as a sales representative faced with a customer complaint about a defective or damaged product (meats, lard, margarines) it was  very important to balance the interests of both the customer and the company. Good business, then, required a diligent and careful balance, not tilted in favour of  the company, as it seems to be sixty years later.

There were, however, basic assumptions with respect to parenting and relationships between parents and their children that Hillman sees through, in his chapter entitled, The Parental Fallacy, in The Soul’s Code. He writes:

If any fantasy holds our contemporary civilization in an unyielding grip, it is rthat we are our parents’ children and that the primary instrument of our fate is the behavior of your mother and father. As their chromosomes are ours, so are their mess-ups and attitudes. Their joint unconscious psyche—the rages they suppress, the longings they cannot fulfill, the images they dream at night---basically form our souls, and we can never, ever work through and be free of this determinism. The individual’s soul continues to be imagined as a biological offspring of the family tree. We grow psychologically out of their minds as our flesh grows biologically out of their bodies…..(T)he idea of parenting and parents is more hardened then ever in the minds of moral reformers and psychotherapists. The shibboleth ‘family values,’ expressed by catch phases like ‘bad mothering’ and ‘absent fathering,’ trickles down into ‘family systems therapy,’ which has become the single most important set of ideas determining the theory of societal dysfunction and the practice of mental health. Yet all along a little elf whispers another tale: ‘You are different; you’re not like anyone in the family; you don’t really belong.’ There is an unbeliever in the heart. It calls the family a fantasy, a fallacy. (p.63-4)

And debunking the way the culture ‘sees’ and considers the family, Hillman continues:

The myth of Mother in our culture carries the higher dignity and force of theory, and we are a nation of Mother-lovers in the support we give her by adhering to the theory. ….As nuclear one-on-one motherhood wanes, the myth hangs in there, clutching at the archetypal breast. We still believe in Mom even as we watch everything change: day-care centers, spread-out families, daddies doing diapers, homeless kids caring for younger siblings, teenage mother of two or three kids, forty-five-year-old mothers of their first….Nonetheless, the myth of the mother as the dominant in everyone’s life remains constant. For behind each birth-giver and care-provider sits the universal Great Mother, upholding the universe of that belief system I am calling the parental fallacy, which keeps us bonded to her. She appears shaped by the style of your personal mother, and she is as bad as she is good. Smothering, nourishing, punishing, devouring, every-giving, obsessive, hysterical, morose, loyal easygoing—whatever her character, she doo as a daimon, but her fate is not yours. (p.67-8)

And later, in a section entitled, “Absent the Father,” Hillman also writes:

Maybe Dad’s true task is not knowing about coffee, bleach, and mouthwash or how to resolve pubescent dating dilemmas and maybe his dumbness shows that this is truly not his world. His world is not shown in these sets, for it’s offstage, elsewhere and invisible. He must keep one foot in another space, one ear cocked for other messages. He must not lose his calling or forget obligations to the heart’s desire and the image that he embodies….Fathers have been far away for centuries: on military campaigns; as sailors on distant seas for years at a time; as cattle drivers, travelers, trappers, prospectors, messengers, prisoners, jobbers, peddlers, slavers, pirates, missionaries, migrant workers. The work week was once seventy-two hours. The construct’ fatherhood’ shows widely different faces in different countries, classes, occupations, and historical times. Only today is absence so shaming and declared a criminal, even criminal-producing, behavior. As a social evil, the absent father is one of the bogeys of the remedial age, this historical period of therapy, recovery, and social programs that try to fix what we do not understand. The conventional father-image, of a man at his job, comping home at dusk to his family, earning, sharing, and caring, with quality time for his kids, is another fantasy of the parental fallacy. This image is way off its statistical base…..Rather than blaming fathers for their absenteeism and the concomitant unfairness of loading extra burdens onto mothers, mentors, the schools, the police, and taxpayers, we need to ask where Dad might be when he’s ‘not at home.’ When he is absent, to what else might he be present? What calls him away? Rilke has an answer:

             Sometimes a man stands up during supper

             And walks outdoors, and keeps on walking

             Because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

              And his children say blessings on him as if her were dead.

 

              And another man who remains inside this own house,

              Dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

              So that his children have to go far out into the world

              Toward that same church, which he forgot.

Rilke accounts for the father’s absence. What about the quality of his presence—that anger, that hatred? Why is father such an abusive, brutal family destroyer? What is this rage? Is it his wife he hates, his children he wants to beat, because no one does what he says and they cost so much? Or might there be another factor, less personal and more demonic, that has him and doesn’t let up?

I have come to be convinced that the parental fallacy itself has harnessed Father’s spirit to a false image, and his daimon turns demonic in kicking against the traces. He is trapped in a construct of called American fatherhood, a moral commandment to be the kind of good guy who likes Disneyland, and kid’s food, gadgets, opinions and wisecracks. This bland model betrays his necessary angel, that image of whatever else he carries in his heart, glimpsed from childhood into the present day…The man who has lost his angel become demonic; and the absence, the anger, and the paralysis on the couch are all symptoms of the soul in search of a lost call to something other and beyond. Father’s oscillations between rage and apathy, like his children’s allergies and behavior disorders and his wife’s depressions and bitter resentments, form part of a pattern they all share—not the ‘family system,’ but the system of rip-off economics that promotes their communal senselessness by substituting ‘more’ for ‘beyond’. (p.81-2)

Perhaps, Hillman has a significant point about how we have been enmeshed in a ‘fixing’ system that fails to take in to account the radioactive energy of the worship of Moloch. 

In Lent, reflecting on death, psychologically and theologically

 Lent, 2023, a time when the people of Ukraine must be wondering if their God is dead, given the rampant, senseless, remorseless, criminal, heartless slaughter being inflicted on their land, their people, their institutions and their resilient faith and spirit. Their leaders’ (both president Zelenskyy and his wife) fortitude, stoicism, endurance and leadership are trumpeted universally as heroic models of strength under extreme duress (evocative of the Hemingway trope). And there is a potential beacon, in this political, military, criminal and existential crisis, that might find  resonance in unexpected source.

In his Revisioning Psychology, James Hillman, points to the image of Christ that “dominates our culture’s relations to pathologizing. The complexity of psychopathology with its rich variety of backgrounds has been absorbed by one central image and been endowed with one main meaning: suffering. The passio of suffering Jesus—and it is as translation of Jesus’ passion that ‘suffering’ first enters our language—is fused with all experiences of pathology. The crucifixion presents pathologizing first of all in the guise of emotional and physical torment. We read this suffering in the story (the days leading up to the crucifixion and the act itself) and we see it in paintings (the distressed agon in the scene). The allegory of suffering and its imagery has functioned so successfully to contain the pathologizing that one tends to miss the psychopathology that is actually so blatant in a configuration at once distorted, grotesque, bizarre, and even perverse: Golgotha, place of skulls; betrayal for money, Barrabas the murderer, the thieves and gambling soldiers; the mock purple robes and scorning laughter; the nails, lance, and thorns; the broken legs, bleeding wounds, sour sop; persecutory victimization along with route; women lovingly holding a greening corpse and their post-mortem hallucinatory visions. Quite an extraordinary condensation and overdetermination of psychopathological motifs….I am simply pointing out an obvious truth: religions always provide containers for psychopathology. (p.95)….However—by containing pathologizing, religion constricts it to the significance established by the allegory. The crucifixion model holds pathologizing to the one narrative and its governing idea of suffering, the theology of the passion. Therapy in our culture eventually comes up against the Christian allegory; whether the pathologizing is going on in an individual who is consciously Christian or not. (p.96)…If as some report, the Christ vehicle no longer carries our culture’s religious requirements, then it can no longer contain our pathologizings either. Fantasy no longer restscontent with the imitatio Christi (where sin means pain or pain sin, where love means torture and goodness means masochism, but all is redeemable for there is no real death, and so on)….It is, therefore, imperative to be as iconoclastic as possible toward vessels that no longer truly work as containers and have become instead impediments to the pathological process. (p.97) By iconoclasm, (I mean) shattering is crusted allegorization into a too-specific meaning which impedes us from recognizing the other figures within the Christ image and the other voices speaking through our pathologies, telling us neither of sin nor suffering, necessarily presenting neither testimonies of love nor gates of resurrection. As one instance: depression. Because Christ resurrects, moments of despair, darkening, and desertion cannot be valid in themselves. Our one model insists on light at the end of the tunnel; one program that moves from Thursday evening to Sunday and the rising of a wholly new day better far than before. Not only will therapy more or less consciously imitate this program (in ways ranging from hopeful positive counseling to electroshock), but the individual’s consciousness is already allegorized by the Christian myth and so he knows what depression is and experiences it according to form. It must be necessary (for it appear in the crucifixion), and it must be suffering; but staying depressed must be negative, since the Christian allegory Friday is never valid per se, for Sunday—as an integral part of the myth—is preexistent in Friday from the start. The counterpart of every crucifixion fantasy is a resurrection fantasy. Our stance toward depression is a priori a manic defense against it. Even our notion of consciousness itself serves as an antidepressant: the be conscious is to be awake, alive, attentive, in a state of activated cortical functioning. Drawn to extremes, consciousness and depression have come to exclude each other, and psychological depression has replaced theological hell. In Christian theology the heavy sloth of depression, the drying despair of melancholy, was the sin of acedia (apathy or not caring) (as it was called in the Church Latin). It is just as difficult to manage today in therapeutic practice because our culture on the New Testament model has only the one upward paradigm for meeting this syndrome…Depression is still the Great Enemy. More personal energy is expended in manic defenses against it, diversions from, and denials of it that goes into other supposed psychopatholgical threats to society: psychopathic criminality, schizoid breakdown, addictions. As long as we are caught in the cycles of hoping against despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology. Yet through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking (p.98) oneself out of it, caught in the cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering it through till it turns, nor theologizing it—but discovering the consciousness an depths it wants. So begins the revolution in behalf of soul. (p. 99)

There is a social and political, indeed even a professional price to be paid for one’s darkness, truly acknowledged. One is unlikely to be hired, invited, selected, promoted, or even included in whatever activity one aspires to enter. One is also likely to be alienated from family, friends, neighbours and acquaintances. And while these implications of a protracted darkness are socially and political ande professionally distasteful, for a host of possible reasons, everyone knows that we all either have gone through, or will go through darkness, often when we least expect it.The Hillman ‘take’ on the culture’s embeddedness/indebtedness/dependence/reliance in and on the Christ/crucifixion/resurrection myth, however, can be said to be little if ever acknowledged, confronted, from a psychological perspective in North American culture. And while the church leaders, thinkers, ethicists, and professors of such subjects as Christology will defend their relative and nuanced perspectives on the theological significance of this Lent/Easter story, (which Hillman is neither denigrating nor dismissing), its psychological implications, as portrayed by Hillman seem both relevant and also significant.

Having participated in the liturgical rituals in which the Crucifixion/Resurrection story is enacted, I have noted the impact of the darkness on several men and women, without fully being conscious of the wider ‘anima mundi’ impact of the story. Indeed, when in a Lenten study session, I heard a senior woman utter these words, “Well, we all know there never was a Resurrection!” I retorted, unequivocally, “If there was no Resurrection, then this whole faith is a fraud!” I was not at that moment conscious of whether the woman’s understanding was literal or metaphoric; my own perspective, as best I can recall, was that the Resurrection had to have at least metaphoric significance if I or anyone was to believe that, although beyond intellectual or cognitive comprehension, it completed the story of the crucifixion, and the concept of metanoia that is embedded in the narrative.

· The practice of brushing ashes on a forehead, to commemorate Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, along with the tradition of ‘giving up’ a favourite food or activity, as a sacrificial commemoration of the suffering of the Christ;

· the Lenten study sessions that seek to dive more deeply into the meaning and application of the story to the people of the Christian faith;

· the Maundy Thursday washing of the feet, in imitation and commemoration of the act as recorded in the John 13:2-17, as an act of humility and selfless Jesus’ love for the apostles;

· the loud noise called the strepitus representing an earth quake when Jesus dies and the confusion following or perhaps the rolling away of the stone from the tomb;

· the recitation of the “Stations of the Cross”….

these are all part of the gestalt of ‘entering’ into the darkness, the grief, the deep reflection about the lives we are living and have lived, as a prelude to the symbolic moment of ‘forgiveness’ in and through the Resurrection and the promise of both metanoia here and eternal life in the hereafter.

Juxtaposing the Hillman psychological analysis of the crucifixion/resurrection story with the ecclesial embodiment is done neither to sanitize or justify the belief of Christians nor to denigrate the psychological and cultural influence of the narrative. It is done to pay witness to the legitimacy of their co-existence. Indeed, it is the poetic basis of mind, as the lens through which Hillman considers this narrative, that has, from a decade-plus serving inside the church, been found to be largely absent from any and all conversations, dialogues, liturgies and papers included in the “professionelle formation” of apprentice clergy, at least from this scribe’s limited experience. The confluence of poetry and faith can neither be denied nor easily accommodated whether from an intellectual or an emotional perspective. Things ‘ethereal’ and ‘ephemeral’ and ‘eternal’ and ‘metaphysical’ that cannot be isolated from the ‘earth,’ the ‘blood,’ the ‘words,’ the ‘acts,’ and the ‘food,’ the ‘books,’ the ‘money’ of those whose lives flow in the ‘between’.

And while the history of the church, foundationally embedded in the writings and teachings of the scholars and the beliefs and the visions and dreams of the mystics, it is a cliché that most of what is taught/learned/absorbed/digested/prayed over in preparation for ministry never finds its way into the parish. Indeed, the obsession with filling news and coffers, analogous to the marketing plans of mega-corporations, has so taken over the aspirations, perceptions, psychology and even the theology of too many church hierarchy. This leaves the church institution co-dependent on the value of ministry being assessed in terms of literal numbers of people and dollars. Here may be where the 

Hillman exegesis of the dominance of depression as sin, and the exhilaration of full pews and coffers as the success/joy/evidence of the promise and abundance of the gospel’s message intersect.

Clergy celebrate “life” in many ways. These include baptism of a newborn, the ritual passage in and through Confirmation, the celebration of love of two people in marriage. They also ‘pray with’ families whose parents, siblings, children are in ill health. However, too often, from the perspective of ordinary people, such illness is conceived as some form of ‘punishment’ or penitence, from a judging God. And then, when life in this sphere ends, clergy also preside over burial rites, sometimes preceded by ‘last rights’. The notion undergirding these last rituals is the ‘promise that the deceased will return ‘home’ to a heaven which is the reward for a ‘good life’.

Expanding on the over-riding image of depression in the Christian lexicon, and the cultural implications is the exhortation to all Christians to life a “good” as opposed to an “evil” life, with the promise of life in heaven as the reward. The intensity of the acceptance of the promise, however, follows on the literal interpretation of both scripture and church teachings, from both purveyor and parishioner. Hillman’s exegesis, however, attempts to disconnect the experience of death, as well as all other experiences in our lives, from the immediate and pressing, the anxious and defaming, and too often debilitating judgement of morality, as the first and most important consideration of all human behaviour.

From Psychology Today, August 18, 2020, in a piece entitled, Death is Among IUS, by Elizbeth Chamberlain, quoting Hillman from Suicide and the Soul, we read: (D)each can impinge upon the moral ‘how’ of the individual’s life: the review of life, one’s faith, sins, destiny; how one got to where one is and how to continue. Or whether to continue. {(p.54)…(It, Death) need not be conceived as an anti-life movement; it may be a demand for an en counter with absolute reality, a demand for a fuller life. (p.52)Indeed, the interface of psychology and religion, as depicted, detailed and posited by Hillman, is worthy of the most serious consideration not only by the psychological community, but also by the ecclesial community. In this century, there is a wide and

In ‘The Acorn Theory,’ Hillman himself writes, just after recounted Houdini’s death from a ruptured appendix, after evading the ‘outer coffins’:

1.     Even the escape artist meets necessity. Ananke’s (fate) chains are both visible and invisible. When the ‘couldn’t be otherwise’ occurs, then the most plausible account of how life works and why they do is the acorn theory. The truer you are to your daimon, the closer you are to the death that belongs to your destiny. We expect the daimon to have prescience about death, calling on it before an airline flight or during a sudden attack of sickness. It is my fate, and now? And when the demands of our calling seem undeniably necessary, again death appears: ‘If I do what I really must, it will kill me; and yet if I don’t, I’ll die.’…Perhaps this intimacy between calling and fate is why we avoid the daimon and the theory that upholds its importance. We mostly invent, or prefer, theories that tie us tightly to parental powers, encumber us with sociological conditionings and genetic determinations; thereby we escape the fact that these deep influence on our fates don’t hold a candle to the power of death. Death is the only complete necessity, that archetypal Necessity who rules the pattern of the life line she spins with her daughters, the Fates. The length of that line and its irreversible one-way direction is part of one and the same pattern, and it could not be otherwise. (p.212-213)

Maybe during this Lent, we might reflect on the significance of ‘death’ both from the perspective of our individual psychological perspective and attitude, and from the perspective of our faith beliefs and their attitudes.

Another glimpse into imagining the myths...with thanks to Hillman

In the last post in this space, myth was the focus of our meanderings. Considered perspectives, rather than ‘objective things,’ by Hillman, tending to ‘shift the experience of events’ as he puts it (p. 101, Revisioning Psychology). By expanding on his theme, Hillman continues to elucidate some of the possibilities in his approach to the gods and goddesses.

 We can refer the manifestations of depression together with styles of paranoid thought to Saturn and the archetypal psychology of senex. Saturn in mythology and lore presents the slowness, dryness, darkness, and impotence of depression, the defensive feelings of the outcast, the angle of vision that sees everything askew and yet deeply, the repetitious ruminations, the fixed focus on money and poverty, on fate, and of fecal and anal matters….Eros in relation with Psyche, a myth which has been depicted in carvings and painting and tales for more than two thousand years, offers a background to the divine torture of erotic neuroses—the pathological phenomena of a soul in need of love and of love in search of psychic understanding. This story is particularly relevant for what goes on in the soul-making relationships which have been technically named ‘transference.’ In addition to these examples, it is also possible to insight the ego and ego psychology by reverting it to the heroic myths of Hercules, with whose strength and mission we have become to caught that the pattern of Hercules—clubbing animals, refusing the feminine, fighting old age and death, being plagues by Mom but marrying her young edition—are only now beginning to be recognized as pathology…..(Revisioning Psychology, p. 102)

And yet….. Hillman interjects:

(These) first entr(ies) into myth need an important correction. (They) commit the ego fallacy by taking each archetypal theme into the ego. We fall into an identity with one of the figures in the tale: I become Zeus deceiving my wife, or Saturn devouring my children, or Hermes thieving from my brother. But this neglects that the whole myth is pertinent and all its mythical figures relevant: by de3ceiving I am also being deceived, and being devoured, and stolen from, as well as all the other complications in each of these tales. It is egoistic to recognize oneself in only one portion of a tale, cast in only one role. Far more important than oversimplified and blatant self-recognitions by means of myth is the experiencing of their working intrapsychically within our fantasies, and then through them into our ideas, systems of ideas, feeling-values, moralities, and basic styles of consciousness. There they are at least apparent, for they characterize the notion of consciousness itself according to archetypal perspectives; it is virtually impossible to see the instrument by which we are seeing.  (Op Cit, p 103) …No longer is ego able to cope by will power with tough problems in a real world of hard facts. Our falling apart is an imaginal process, like the collapse of cities and the fall of heroes in mythical tales—like the dismemberment of Dionysian loosening which releases from overtight constraint, like the dissolution and decay in alchemy. The soul moves, via the pathologized fantasy of disintegration, our of too-centralized and muscle-bound structures which have become ordinary and normal, and so normative that they no longer correspond with the psyche’s needs for nonego imaginal realities which ‘perturb to excess.’….Falling apart makes possible a new style of reflection within the psyche, less a centred contemplation of feeling collected around a still point, thoughts rising on a tall stalk, than insights bouncing one off the other. The movements of Mercury among the multiple parts, fragmentation as moments of light. Truth is the mirror, not what’s in it or behind it, but the very mirroring process itself: psychological reflections. An awareness of fantasy that cracks the normative cement of our daily realities into new shapes …..Ego consciousness as we used to know it no longer reflects reality. Ego has become a delusional system. ‘Heightened’ consciousness today no longer tells it from the mountain of Nietzsche’s superman, an overview. Now it is the underview, for we are down in the multitudinous entanglements of the marshland, in anima country, the ‘vale of Soul-making. So heightened consciousness now refers to moments of intense uncertainty, moments of ambivalence. Hence the task of depth psychology now is the careful exploration of the parts into which we fall, releasing the Gods in the complexes, bringing home the realization that all our knowing is in part only, because we know only through the archetypal parts playing in us, now in this complex and myth, and now in that; our life a dream, our complexes our daimones. (Op. cit. p 109-110)

Perhaps high-sounding and intensely challenging, especially from the perspective of our highly reputed, highly references, and highly fragile Herculean ego. At one point, Hillman blurts words to the effect, it is highly justified to be depressed living as we do in this western world dominated by such features a literalism, nominalism, fundamentalism and greedy capitalism. Taking the ‘moment’ (writing from the 1970’s until his death in 2011) Hillman is attempting to turn the psychological ‘ship’ around from the high-minded, highly sophisticated highly constraining and constricting ‘ego’ (now disintegrating) to the opportunity this disintegration offers. Challenging is the shift from a perspective that takes and reflects on metaphors (in poetry, for example) as compares their effectiveness within the poem dependent on the theme, tone, colour and intent of the poet, to a more fluid and non-literal, non-definite and non-limited flow of mythic images themselves swimming together in a river of both consciousness and unconsciousness, in a moment in time, begging our imagination to mine the various voices that have joined the chorus in our psyche….opens each of us to a reservoir of imaginal experience, beyond our feelings, beyond our genetics, beyond our environment, beyond our historical time period, beyond our culture into a shared, universal, timeless and far more nuanced and complex abundance that most of the contemporary therapies and mental constructs with which we have been working for decades, if not centuries.

It is not, in and through this creative, innovative and challenging imaginal, mythical and poetic lens that we generate a new theology; there is no worshipping Greek or Roman Gods, rather an appreciation of such voices and perspectives we have mysteriously ‘inherited’ without being conscious of the process of ‘osmosis’ which takes place in each time period in each culture. There is no longer a tight and perfectionistic clinging to the question of morality in each and every act, and each and every person, as the primary path to either understanding or appreciating ourselves and each other. And yet, in a courageous and imaginal process of asking ‘what has this event to do with my death?’ Hillman is revisiting the conventional, traditional and often frightening perception of death itself, from something to be feared and worried over, to something profoundly deep, quiet and still.

When, in the process of apprenticing in pastoral counselling, the issue of suicide was treated very delicately. If a client were to express suicide ‘ideation’ or thoughts of committing suicide, the therapist was to ask, matter-of-factly, if the client had a plan in order to flesh out how serious were the thoughts. Often, too, the notion of continuing in therapy with that therapist was to be discouraged, in order to separate the client from the implications of influence from the therapist, as well as to draw attention to the seriousness of the client’s desperation. Although Hillman’s work, Suicide and the Soul, has not arrived in my hands, I have begun to ,read reviews and this one written by Lex in the United Kingdom on November 12, 2020 got my attention:

His (Hillman’s) respect for the soul of the analysand is so great that, in Suicide and the Soul, he forbids the analyst from trying overtly to ‘save’ them from suicidal thoughts. He implores the analysts not to bring the medical mode of thought into the consulting room. He implores the analyst to acknowledge the suicidal person’s willingness to die as the very core of their agency. Denying this agency in the name of ‘commitment to saving life’ simply kills the analysand’s soul. Is Hillman really advising the analyst not to try to save the analysand’s lives? No. He simply proposes that the only way to save their lives is to save their souls first—and to save their souls, you need to acknowledge their willingness to die. You can then proceed to sit beside them in the absolute darkness of their isolation so that they may feel a little less isolated…and in due course, they may come out of the darkness on their own accord.

Not only from reading and reflecting on this review, but also from dog-paddling in Hillman’s thoughts, ideas, and challenges, is one prompted to ask if and whether much of our lives is/has been/ and continues to be focused on avoiding really dark ‘experiences’ when, in truth, we all know that ‘dark’ experiences are both inevitable and potentially dangerous and/or life-giving. The messes, inevitable and complex, dividing and alienating, frightening and potentially freezing, exhausting and inspiring, have commanded the attention of both the medical and legal/law enforcement professional communities, with the support and sanctions of the church, for centuries. We have excommunicated, ostracized, chained, electrified, medicated, and essentially put the persons at the centres of our social and political and religious and moral crises “away” as our way of creating a situation that can be legitimately described as “out-of-sight-out-of-mind”….so that we do not really have to face those who have “failed both themselves and their society” as we like to put it.

There are, and always have been, perhaps undisclosed and undesired, complex energies behind a mother’s beating of a child, or even of taking her child’s life, and behind a person’s desperation to want to end his/her life, and also behind the apparently indelible imprint of the Roman adage, ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’ as an imprint on cultures from the beginning. We are far more complex, interesting, challenging and ‘infinite’ than our literal empiricism either permits or warrants. We are all both capable and easily induced into not seeing what it is we find ‘too difficult’ to see, effectively into denial. Perhaps it is in lifting the mask from our blind denials even to our own most dark thoughts and feelings, those most frequently if not invariably, directly connected to our “messes,” where our access to a new, different, resonant and resilient perspective, not only of our own lives, but of the lives of all of those with whom we are connected, lies.

Personal experience of the chosen or seriously considered with a plan, of men whose lives had become too full of personal, internal and inescapable torment that they wished to terminate their existence, while, in the various moments, was distressing, those experiences have left their mark on a psyche that has been walking beside their stories for decades.

It is not in search of absolute, unequivocal, or even acquitting and excusing explanations for the decisions of those men that this scribe is motivated. The search and the inquiry is more about searching for (and admittedly believing it exists) a far more realistic, even if ironically far more imaginative, perspective on those lost and seriously scarred men’s live, and the lives of their close loved ones, that these readings, reflections and scribblings are directed.

Not to answer, ‘Why did he kill himself?” but rather the proverbial and exhaustive and challenging question, “What did we all miss?” and “Why?” …..Essentially, none of us lives in  a vacuum and how the aggregate of our cultural habits, patterns, perspectives, ideologies and theologies impacts some of our permanently wounded, or deceased by their own hands is a compelling question. And to focus on the demographics, and the sociology, and the neuroscience, and the morality/immorality seem to have proven to be less than adequate to address the questions.

More to come….

Seeking to discern myths through mythical imagining...with a thanks to Hillman!

 Over coffee in the then Empire Hotel (North Bay) dining room on McIntyre Street, Early Birney discussed his poem, David, in which two young sixteen-year-olds were mountain climbing, only to witness a slipping by one and then a deeply pathetic  ask from him to ‘push me over’. It had been brought to Birney’s attention that another Canadian Poet, Margaret Avison, was reportedly convinced that Birney was referring to a specific event, from news reports in which a similar act became part of the public record, at about the same time as the poem was written. ‘Why would I ever even think about writing a poem in which I killed my friend?’ was the question Birney asked. Decades later, why would one Canadian poet consider it feasible to inquire about another poet’s account of a homicide for which he was alleged to be guilty? The question as to whether the reader believed, trusted and even entered the tragic tale is the one the poem is written to answer. And for this reader, the answer is, “Absolutely!”

The evocative poem, intimately and provocatively depicts an adventure of brotherhood which ended, metaphorically, imaginatively, poignantly and memorably, tragically. No reader can come away from reading the poem without being drawn into both the climbing companionship and the shared tragedy. Their shared and intimate knowledge of the flora and the skills necessary for their adventure resonates decades later, after a first and multiple readings.

The paradigm of the intersection of language of the literal and the metaphoric in our culture is another of the inescapable and interminable tensions of all of our lives. When is one speaking, writing, thinking, praying, sermonizing, imagining or even dreaming in and through literal language and meaning and when is one engaged in metaphor, poetry, legend, fantasy, myth? And how to discern the sometimes nuanced and at other times the glaring gap between the two?

Pedagogy and parenting, as well as all forms of moralizing, legalizing, accounting and scientific experimentation rely almost exclusively on the literal. Do this, not that. Read this, calculate this. Clean this, complete that…..Put this chemical into this test tube and heat to this degree and observe the change. Believe this rule, do not commit this act/sin/lie/theft/deception.

There is a black/white kind of clarity to literalism while there is also a considerable degree of ambiguity, numinosity, abstraction, interpretation, fluidity and uncertainty in and through the lens of poetry. When we put a name on a ‘thing’ (whether than thing is a disease, or a social condition, or a membership in a religion or group, or an identity with a race, a language, or a geographic region et cetera), we are claiming a degree of ‘knowledge’ and awareness, consciousness and sensate and intellectual cognizance of that ‘thing’. Most of our discourse in everyday interactions uses the literal meaning of words. Business, medicine, law, accounting, teaching, preaching and legislating are all dependent on a common understanding and deployment of words in their literal meaning. And the people engaged in various cultures, coming as they do from similar backgrounds, have a common understanding of the meaning and definition and purpose of those words in the contexts of their respective professional practice. As Frye puts it, ‘this is the language of practical sense’. And this language seeks to divide, for the purpose of clarity. Frye also reminds us, however, ‘figurative language seeks to unite through the devices of metaphor and simile and personification through which one thing becomes another. “He is a bull in a china shop!” is a mundane example.

Each of the various historic time periods, with all of their respective ‘thought leaders’ has recorded spoken and written words that seek to convey the essential kernel(s) of their perspective. And we have come to call such perspectives a “world view” as a way of encompassing the gestalt of that individual’s contribution to the world’s knowledge, and indeed its perspective.

One’s lens: the eyes, ears, imagination, intellect, culture and experience, through which one experiences one’s reality, surroundings, relationships, curiosities, tragedies, dreams, fantasies, and even essential ‘concepts’ like purpose, meaning, identity, hopes, are all both the product of and generate new notions of whatever it is that the individual is ‘feeling, thinking, imagining, believing, experiencing.

In the vernacular, we tend to throw around words about things and concepts as if they were all considered to be so well understood and comprehended and grasped and integrated into our brain receptors/perceptors/integrators/interpreters, that we need not explain if and when we might be consciously or unconsciously shifting from one mode of using words to another. This general use of and encounter with words, from a variety of persons, in a variety of situations, can and does, almost inevitably and certainly predictably, generate multiple opportunities for confusion, irritability, conflict and even withdrawal. And the boundaries, situations, expectations and familiarities we each have individually as to the meaning and intent of the words we both use and hear/read, as well as those we share with others, have become so porous that we can justifiably be experiencing a melting-pot of words, ideas, meanings, purposes and innuendoes the precise import we ‘take’ or ‘get’ may well be distanced from the original intent and meaning of the speaker/writer.

Not only are there differences in the meanings/purposes/overtones of words, there are also significant differences in the way we pronounce words, not only from a cultural perspective as in dialects, but also from the perspective of our ‘emotional intent. We have the capacity to tilt our words in a tonal expression that conveys a positive emotion, a negative emotion, a flat and cold affect, or even a highly combative, militaristic tone. Like notes and phrases on a musical manuscript, our verbiage comes in complex, nuanced and coloured dimensions, and those dynamics, while they are able to be curated into a curriculum, that curriculum is not one that has received universal or even modest dissemination.

While poetry, novels, plays, short stories and essays comprise the core of language curricula, and in the course of those explorations, students are expected to write and speak their thoughts and feelings in a variety of different situations with different ‘audiences’. Like the gaps in many curricula for adolescents that fails to address the important and fundamental concepts of relationship development, financial management, how to ‘speak’ to create and deliver various nuanced forms of rhetoric, not merely the kind that attempts to market/sell/propagandize/persuade, seems to be still missing from many educational institutions. How to write and deliver a homily, while taught and practiced in seminary, where the theoretical, s theological, and qualities of cogency, coherence, unity and an attempt to ‘connect’ with the audience, the choice of words, their contextual meanings, their nuances and colours, tones, appropriateness and even the ambiguity that might be part of their unique ‘freight’ is, or at least was, never mentioned. Presumably, those ‘in the weeds’ aspects of language were considered far too obvious, and beneath the ‘standards’ of the various levels of formal education.

Failure to pay attention to the colour and tone and context of a word, including the intended meaning of the initiator, is not merely a social and political and intellectual blindness. It is also a foundational base for how important, valued, treasured and even elevated is language. We love to name things, in an almost unconscious acknowledgement that because we know the name of something; we understand that something, and we grasp its full meaning and import; we expect and even require that our audience also understands and grasps the full meaning of that word when we use it.

Let’s take a look at the word myth, for example.

Merriam-webster.com defines myth this way: a usually traditional story of historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people of explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon; an unfounded or false notion; a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence (e.g. Superman, unicorn). One application of myth….int he phrase urban myth is quite new. Curiously, an urban myth does not usually have anything to do with the city; it is simply ‘a story about an unusual event or occurrence that many people believe is true but that is not true. (e.g. Elvis Presley still lives decades after his death.) Merriam-webster continues with this, under the title Kids Definition of myth: a story often describing the adventures of superhuman beings that attempts to describe the origin of a people’s customs or beliefs or to explain mysterious events (e.g. the changing of the seasons); a person or thing that exists only in the imagination (e.g. the dragon is a myth); a popular belief that is false or unsupported.

From Britannica.com, we read myth, a symbolic narrative, usually of unknown origin and at least partly traditional, that ostensibly relates actual events and that is especially associated with religious belief. It is distinguished from symbolic behaviour (cult, ritual) and symbolic places or objects (temples, icons) Myths are specific accounts of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from ordinary human experience. The term mythology denotes both the study of myth and the body of myths belonging to a particular religious tradition. As with all religious symbolism, there is not attempt to justify mythic narratives or even to render them plausible. Every myth presents itself as an authoritative, factual account, no matter how much the narrated events are at variance with natural law or ordinary experience. By extension from this primary relig9ious meaning, the word myth may also be used more loosely to refer to an ideological belief when that belief is the object of a quasi-religious faith; an examples would be the Marxist eschatological myth of the withering away of the state. While the outline of myths from a part period or from a society other than one’s own can usually be seen quite clearly, to recognize the myths that are dominant in one’s own time and society is always difficult. This is hardly surprising, because a myth has its authority not by proving itself but by presenting itself. In this sense the authority of a myth indeed, ‘goes without saying,’ and the myth can be outlined in detail only when its authority is not longer unquestioned but has been rejected or overcome in some manner by another, more comprehensive myth. The word myth derives from the Greek Mythos, which has a range of meanings from ‘word,’ through ‘saying,’ and ‘story,’ to ‘fiction,; the unquestioned validity of mythos can be contrasted with logos, the word whose validity or truth can be argued and demonstrated. Because myths narrate fantastic events with no attempt at proof, it is sometimes assumed that they are simply stories with no factual basis, and the word has become a synonym for falsehood or, at best, misconception…..Myth has existed in every society. Indeed, it would seem to be a basic constituent of human culture. (I)t is clear that in their general characteristics and in their details a people’s myths reflect, express, and explore the people’s self-image. The study of  myth is thus of central importance in the study both of individual societies and of human culture as a whole.

Why all this clomping through the underbrush of the word myth?

James Hillman, in and through his articulation of archetypal psychology, seeks to draw out from situations of human ‘pivotal and arresting moments and decision’ the relevant voice of a myth or god or goddess, as a way of re-considering the moment of the crisis. Rather than labelling it a sickness, or a criminal act or decision, first, he admonishes us to seek to find a different way of seeing the drama. In Revisioning Psychology, Hillman writes:

(T)he task of referring the soul’s syndromes to specific myths is complex and fraught with dangers. IT must meet the philosophical and theological arguments against remythologizing, arguments which would see our approach as a backward step into magical thinking, a new daemonology, unscientific, un-Christian, and unsound. It must meet as well its own inherent pitfalls, such as those we find in Philip Slater’s work, The Glory of Hera. Though he indeed recognizes that mythology must be related to psychology for myths to remain vital, his connection between psychological syndromes and myths puts things the wrong way round. He performs a wrong pathologizing upon mythology by explaining Greek Myths through social culture and family relations. His is the sociological fallacy; i.e. one Reads Greek myths for allegories of sociology. I would read sociology as an enactment of myths….But the chief danger lies in taking myths literally even as we aim at taking syndromes mythically. For if we go about reversion as a simple act of matching, setting out with the practical intellect of the therapist to equate mythemes with syndromes, we have reduced archetypes to allegories of disease; we have merely coined a new sign language, a new nominalism. The Gods become merely a new (or old) grid of classificatory terms. Instead of imagining psychopathology as a mythical enactment, we would, horribile dictu, have lost the sense of myth through using it to label syndromes. This is the diagnostic perspective rather than the mythical, and we are looking not for a new way to classify psychopathology but for a new way of experiencing it….So we must take care, remembering that mythical thinking is not direct, practical thinking. Mythical metaphors are not etiologies, casual explanations, or name tags. They are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events; but they are not events themselves. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen. They give an account of the archetypal story in the case history, the myth in the mess. Reversion also provides a new access to myths: if they are directly connected to our complexes, they may be insighted through our afflictions. They are no longer stories in an illustrated book. We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives. (Hillman, op. cit. pps. 101-102)

This dynamic perspective presents, not only a fresh way of perceiving our unique crises but also a way for the whole of humanity, irrespective of its unique cultural and historical myths, to be integrated back into a shared human species.

Questionnaire for men on critical moments in your life....

 As men, we have all faced critical moments, when we felt and experienced a turning point, when we decided to do, or to withdraw, or to engage, or to fight, or to commit to some adventure. And, while we might not have been conscious of the voices, stories, epithets, adages, proverbs, or even the penetrating lines from a parent, a coach, a clergy or a mentor that seemed to take on a prominence in our decision-making, nevertheless, on reflection, such voices were active in our imaginations, in our mind’s eye, and in our bodies, if we experienced them physically.

Not all of our decisions turned out as we expected; indeed, some likely turned out far worse than we had imagined, while others turned out far better than we could have imagined. As Kierkegaard reminds us,

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

In the interest of attempting to collect, curate, interpret, apply and make sense of many of the decisions/turning points and their guiding voices men have made, this is an opportunity for as many as feel moved to tell your story, (in fewer than 100 words) to begin some anecdotal research-gathering, as part of the further investigation of Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology in real lives.

Some examples of such voices:

“Men of my generation did not leave their spouse, believing that such an act was immoral.”

“I simply did not believe that the situation was ever going to change.”

“We had completely different ideas about what a ………(carrier, marriage, divorce, promotion, geographic move, significant purchase, parenting strategy, etc. should, could, must be.”

“I believed that my vocation justified my complete involvement, even if it meant my family had to sacrifice.”

She followed “Apollo” while I was more comfortable with “Dionysos”

(Apollo, god of divine distance, who made men aware of their own guilt and purified them of it. Dionysos was god of wine, vegetation, pleasure, festivity, madness and wild frenzy.)

“The voice of Venus/Aphrodite (goddess of love, beauty, prosperity, fertility and victory) was in tension with the voice of Hera, goddess of marriage, a deep and high-minded commitment to the civilization in my marriage.”

Ares, the god of manliness and manly qualities: men are fighters, most of a man’s emotions should not be public, a man is responsible for and to others seemed to be in tension/friction/conflict with the was always present in my mind, to the exclusion of other voices, including those of the goddess of women, marriage and profound and mutual love.

Respectfully, we ask that, after some thought, and without using your name or location (your age and gender would be very helpful), you consider responding to the following inquiry, the results of which will be gathered and reported back to readers of this space.

This is not a site for therapy, for coaching, for mentoring or for any form of professional counsel. It is a blog that seeks to explore masculinities, and to reflect on how those masculinities came to be, what implications they have generated and whether or not a different perspective of and by men, of their/our masculinity is either feasible or warranted.

The message space at the bottom of this page will provide adequate space for your considered responses.

 

Looking backwards at my life, I believe that I made this decision:

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

while hearing and paying attention to the voices/ideas/words/example/mentorship of________________________________________________________________.

In a similar situation today, I would make a different decision, _________________________________________________________________

For the following reason(s)___________________________________________________________

Taming the gods of war...another tilting at windmills?

 We often hear the adage, cliché, maxim that in order to continue to function, humans have to reconcile both the ‘good-and-the-bad’ as if to say that, regardless of what happens, both will continue to provide intractable tension and conflict..So, we must not only get used to the turbulence, for it is inevitable, and also adjust your expectations and perceptions that war might be eliminated from the planet. It wont ever disappear.

And literally ship-loads of ink have been poured into the study of, the details of, the motivations for and the probable outcomes of all wars. The humanitarians among us, cannot be anything but dismayed at the carnage in lost lives, twisted limbs, fractured and crumpled apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and the dismantled infrastructure for heat, water and electricity that is both visible and inexcusable in Ukraine.

Regardless of whatever percentage of Russian people support the war in Ukraine, the rest of the world, including both China and India one would hope, have or will take the position that ‘unprovoked and illegitimate invasions’ of national boundaries is a proposition that has to be etherized from the geopolitical lexicon. Note, however, that elimination of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, while attempted through various treaties and agreements, remains unfulfilled, incomplete and still a blight on the human psyche. Indeed, there is still evidence, or at least the perception that some of the most dangerous operatives/leaders/nations either have or strive to acquire lethal instruments and agents, as a matter of ‘self-protection’.

Indeed, the American ‘war budget’ is, at least publicly, based on the clear and unequivocal premise that it is essential for the ‘protection’ of the American people and nation state. Defensive posture, as opposed to offensive posture, however, in a world in which straight talk has gone the way of thousands of dead and obliterated species over the last few decades, has taken on the characterization of mere political rhetoric, having neither truth nor legitimacy. Like laws conceived, drafted, debated and passed, in order to ‘prevent’ heinous acts of the abuse of power, only to seed, to nurture, to grow and to inflate whatever state apparatus that has then been given ‘power’, there is a predictable, and seemingly inevitable over-reach among those charged with such ‘protection’.

The over-reach is so significant that one has to be either or both sceptical and/or cynical about the cultural roots of the need for such protection.
Rooted in the history of the human race, is the seed of fear. The ancient Greeks had a god named “Phobus” who represented panic, flight and rout, as well as a god names Deimos who represented terror and dread. Both were sons of Ares, the god of war and Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It can never be overlooked, too, that in Slavic mythology, Perun, was the “thunder god of the ancient pagan Slavs, a fructifier, purifier, and overseer of right and order. ‘He is representative of the destructive masculine force of nature.’(symbolikon.com). His actions are perceived by the senses: seen in the thunderbolt, heard in the rattle of stones, the bellow of the bull, or the bleat of the he-goat (thunder), and felt in the touch of an axe blade.” (Britannica.com) In China, too, Guandi, also called Guan Gong, or Wudi,

(is) the Chinese god of war whose immense popularity with the common people rests on the firm belief that his control over evil spirits is so great that even actors who play his part in dramas share his power over demons. Guandi is not only a natural favourite of soldiers but has been chosen patron of numerous trades and professions. This is because Guan Yu, the mortal who became Guandi after death, is said by tradition to have been a peddler of bean curd  early in life. (Britannica.com)

Some contemporary thinking and theorizing about the force and dark side of masculine force and power would shine a light on the deep roots of the abusive force in the lives of contemporary women. It is not surprising, too, that “Eirene, the ancient Greek goddess of peace, is less well known than the god of war, Ares, who in his Roman guise of Mars was an ubiquitous deity invoked by men who went to war.” (greekreporter.com)

Considerable contemporary chatter would have it that, if the world today were ruled by women, there would be no war, or at least far fewer wars and they would be far less lethal and brutal. In a piece entitled,” Women challenging war; a feminist lens on patriarchy and conflict,” (atlanticfellows.org) we read:

In our globalized world, violence permeates all spheres of life. From sexual and gender-based violence, to racialized violence, to larger structural and systemic violence, to economic inequality and disparity, all violence is interconnected. A feminist analysis of war allows us to see how all these systems of violence are interconnected. In contexts of violent conflict, gender is produced and maintained as an extension of the violence manifested within society, politics, the economy, culture and family structures. Dominant hierarchical systems of oppression maintain power relations such that gender roles not only persist, but intensify the divide between women and men. In such contexts of exaggerated masculinity and exaggerated femininity, and the normalization of militarism and daily insecurity in all spheres of life, it is immensely difficult to fight against harmful gender norms, stereotypes and patriarchal values….(A) critical feminist lens shows the extent to which war, violence and weapons are significant factors in the construction and maintenance of masculine identity and crucial for the continued functioning of  patriarchy-a system in which women are at best devalued and at worst, eliminated. If women are to enter military institutions and contribute to the perpetuation of war, their role will be merely to support masculine ways of being for the benefit of a patriarchy that will continue to oppress both women and men.

It is both risky and potentially reductive for a male scribe to take on destructive masculine models, like Putin, for example, or the American Pentagon, or the Chinese government, and even to ask politely and respectfully, for a critical re-think of the underlying fears, anxieties, and even the demons that lurk in the imaginations of too many men in positions of leadership. It is neither rocket-science, nor especially prophetic, to note that the pursuit of power, status, honour, legacy and authority has been a constant drive among men forever. What is not so obvious is that such pursuit, motivation, obsession and compulsion, however, is also a significant and irrefutable signal of an underlying insecurity. Indeed, much has been written and researched about the link between insecurity and the abuse of power among men.

The masculine stereotype of ‘alpha male’ is so deeply embedded in the culture of western and most likely also eastern political attitudes, that media too have come to reinforce the model as the epitome of good leadership. Biden “ordered the Pentagon to shoot down the Chinese balloon” when it would cause the least damage to human life. Decisive and forceful images of power, especially for leaders like Biden whose Achilles heel, in the eyes of the Republican opposition, is described in words like “too soft” and “too weak”…Some would even argue that Biden’s reticence, foot-dragging, cautious and protracted release of tanks, missiles and those to-be-hoped-for fighter jets, to Ukraine, indicates his spineless approach to the Russian invasion.

On the Kremlin side, the alpha-male, Putin, while beating drums of threats should German tanks enter the war, champions the alpha-male leadership model in a one-man-ruled-state.

Depicting this Russian invasion of Ukraine in terms of the military (masculine) and the humanitarian (feminine) stereotypes, does little to tear down the psychic (and thereby the political, military, economic and nationalist) architecture/infrastructure/archetypes of past and current conflicts. Men are not only fully engaged as warriors on the battlefield; they are also fully engaged in the humanitarian effort. Women, too, while not specifically recruited by the Ukrainian forces, play a pivotal role in the effort to keep life-sustaining resources flowing to survivors.

One of the more notable aspects of the pursuit of power is the embedded perception that power has to have empirical evidence of acquisition. Epaulets stars, titles, a hierarchical structure of command, numbers of tanks, missiles, recruits, and, of course, territory. Deeply embedded in this last, territory, of course, is the disputed concept that many who live in Ukraine are in fact Russian in origin, in language and in cultural preference. That thread is one to which Putin clings, in his blind, hubristic and alpha-male pursuit of acclaim, honour and status in the history books. His unveiling a statue of Stalin just this week is another piece of information that indicates his dream, in emulation of the heinous Russian tyrant.

While there are those who argue with justification that such issues as LGBTQ rights, and both racial and gender equality are among the perceived cultural demons from Putin’s perspective (as well as from the perspective of American far-right Republican voices), hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children have died, and many thousands more will likely follow before this war ends.

Pleading for peace, for the institution of war crimes legal charges in the courts, and for the maintenance of adequate food and oil and water for Ukrainians and for all Europeans, while legitimate, will likely leave but a small dent on the Putin breastplate of hubris. Indeed, such pleas might well serve to enhance his motivation to complete his scorched-earth approach to Ukraine. The Cuban missile  crisis was de-escalated through tough, armed and credible diplomacy. Such diplomacy depended on both the willingness of Khrushchev to climb down from his hubristic perch of installing those missiles in Cuba and the sensitive and calculated and sophisticated decision of the Kennedy administration to leave the Russian leader room to withdraw without losing face completely.

Those conditions, in their gestalt and in their intimate detail, are absent here and now. Putin is no Khrushchev, and neither Biden nor Lloyd Austin replicate Kennedy and McNamara. The conditions, too, at the political, economic, technological and international levels, today are far different from those in 1961. American credibility, international trust and reliability have all been undermined by the forces of conspiracy theories, a former president who bought into and supported those conspiracy theories, and a large segment of the American population who have drunk the same Kool-aid.

We are collectively in the throes of such a tectonic and rapid shift in language and culture, at home and around the world, where words have been both weaponized and stripped of their meaning and value, in imitation of Orwell’s newspeak, that, it is not a stretch to imagine that no leader is about to trust the words of another leader, especially leaders, like Zelensky, whose nation’s fight for survival is still not fully embraced as the fight for the free, democratic and rights-based governance. Depicting Xi Jinping and Putin, and Orban and…and…as demonic tyrants, while generating considerable public support, will only enable their strongest and most dramatic moves, potentially in league. And no god of war encased in whatever supersonic, high-tech weapon, even unconsciously embraced by any or all alpha-males is likely to be subdued, restrained and brought to peace and/or justice in the foreseeable future.

Just as we have faces on our demons, so too Putin et al have faces on their demons. And for each side to be the demon of the other neglects the inner demons and the inner daemons among all sides. Is it too much to speculate that Putin might come to a conscious perception that his war is destroying the very land and people he seeks to include in Russia? Can Putin be expected to detach from the Russian obsession with military conflict, perhaps as a role model for the rest of the world, thereby ensuring Russia of a place of honour at the world’s tables of power? Can the American military behemoth start to reflect on just how inflated, exaggerated and over-propagandized it has become among the American populace, and start to see the legitimate limits of its power?

Masculinity, in its raw unleashed deployment is a sabotage not only for the specific purpose it has been deployed, but also for all of the men on the planet. And, only in and through a significant transformation of perceptions of both legitimacy and collaboration, in a world of finite resources, will our children and grandchildren even survive. And it will not matter whether those grandchildren bear the names of Biden, Putin, Xi Jinping, or Zelensky.