MEDITATIONS ON OEDIPUS Becker’s Kafka, Nietzsche’s Metamorphoses

Beach Hut J. Urbain 6/97

Ed Mendelowitz for Rollo May child of paradox

They do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre. Heraclitus, Fragments As that which completes the primal images, it is called the Creative; as that which imitates them, it is called the Receptive. The Book of Changes However, one should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. Soren Kierkegaard, Fragments

2 Family Maps Kristiana 5/98

I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the world crystallizes for us . . . They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life . . . Such images constitute a program, establishing our soul’s fixed fund of capital, which is allotted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings. It seems to me that the rest of our life passes in the interpretation of those insights, in the attempt to master them with all the wisdom we acquire, to draw them through all the range of intellect we have in our possession. These early images mark the boundaries of an artist’s creativity. His creativity is a deduction from assumptions already made. He cannot now discover anything new; he learns only to understand more and more the secret entrusted to him at the beginning, and his art is a constant exegesis, a commentary on that single verse that was assigned him. But art will never unravel that secret completely. The secret remains insoluble. The knot in which the soul was bound is no trick knot, coming apart with a tug at its end. On the contrary, it grows tighter and tighter. We work at it untying, tracing the path of the string, seeking the end, and of this manipulating comes art. Bruno Schultz

3 MEDITATIONS ON OEDIPUS Becker’s Kafka, Nietzsche’s Metamorphoses

I shall with your help make search and inquiry, for the story of this case is strange to me. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex “So now we are at home again.” Kafka smiled sadly. “At home? I live with my parents. That is all. It is true I have a small room of my own, but that is not a home, only a place of refuge, where I can hide my inner turmoil, only in order to fall all the more into its clutches.” Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka I approach knowing what they are and what I am, and fearing that I will become them even for a time—and fearing that time could become forever. I am imprisoned by freedom. It is better to settle for the feel of those walls against the palms of my hands, bearing in upon me, than pushing through and not knowing where I may be or where I may end up. But even in this confession there is no peace. Knowing my own human weakness, I am infinitely aware of my own need to press through, my own curiosity to see what lies beyond these surrounding walls, to stride to the destined whatever it may be: be it life, be it death, be it mystery. I say all this, and then I am back again: wanting to live, wanting to die, wanting freedom and fearing it. In the end, I fear only myself. We are just little pieces of other people. We are just little pieces of our parents, and they are just little pieces of theirs. I wonder if I will ever be happy with the pieces of me that are the pieces of them that I will never be rid of. A young woman in psychotherapy an’ so I step back t’ the street an’ then turn further down the road poundin’ on doors . . . without ghosts by my side t’ betray my childishness t’ leadeth me down false trails an’ maketh me drink from muddy waters yes it is I who is poundin’ at your door if it is you inside Robert Zimmerman, Eleven Outlined Epitaphs Step out of your cave: the world awaits you like a garden . . . All things want to be your physicians! Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Broader and deeper we must write our annals . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson, History

4 I have felt for some time that if there were to be one book recommended in order to shed light on the vast complexities of psychoanalytic understanding, on the dynamic of existential-humanistic psychology generally, that book for me would be Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, a masterwork published in 1973 just one year before the author’s own death when he was not yet fifty. Amid a resurgence of interest in Becker’s life and work, the original book still staggers the mind in its ability to see straight through to the heart of things. The careful reader is dazzled by brilliance, mortified by Becker’s persistent hearkening to what he likes to call the body’s “creatureliness” with its inexorable fate, and yet, in the end, strangely ennobled to understand just what it means to find oneself in the world at all, alive, and capable of something more than irrelevance, superfluity, failure. Of course, there can be no single name or work that has any corner on the market. So many artists, poets, sages, authors, psychologists, analysts have shed light on the darker recesses of human nature and the problems of being such that the mere thought of singling out this or that illuminator seems almost absurd. But the theorists (and here psychology, let us confess it, is conspicuous) generally miss their mark through too narrow an aim. And among this group, Becker is quite special in his ability to cull through shelves of literature in order to come up at last with his own statement of things, theory which even the confirmed skeptic can only marvel at in its ability to throw light on human perplexity. Becker’s work cuts a broad swath. Regarding Freud and his Oedipal complex, Becker (1973) observes with typical clarity of vision:

Freud often tended to understand human motives in what can be called a “primitive” way. Sometimes so much so that when disciples like Rank and Ferenzci pulled away from him they accused him of simple-mindedness. The accusation is, of course, ludicrous, but there is something to it—probably what they were driving at: the doggedness with which Freud stuck to his stark sexual formulas. No matter how much he changed later in life, he always kept alive the letter of psychoanalytic dogma and fought against a watering down of the motives he thought he uncovered. (p. 34)

“Take the Oedipus complex,” begins the next paragraph and with this we are on our way. In truth, however, Becker had already taken up the matter in an earlier work now out of print and entitled Angel in Armor: A Post-Freudian Perspective on the Nature of Man. In this collection of essays one finds a few gems, among them one that concerns us especially: “Kafka on the Oedipus Complex.” This is an amazing piece, one that presages Becker’s magnum opus perfectly. It is one of those seminal moments in our own humble field when we are afforded privileged sanction into the mysteries of child before parent, acolyte before master, man/woman before cosmos. Becker approaches the short story he is

5 about to consider as if holy: like Job humbled before the voice in the whirlwind or Arjuna’s induction into the ways of God and Heaven by a charioteer who turns out to be none other than Krishna (the deity incarnate), like Moses before the burning image of Yahweh (who sounds, indeed, strangely Kafkan in his enigmatic reply: “I am that I am”). Becker is a daunting explorer of the heights and depths and so finds fertile ground in the example of Kafka, that consummate neurotic but also that staggering Western seer who had apprehended, like Shakespeare and Pascal long before him, that humankind’s central problem—that of identity (indeed, the very problem posed by the Sphinx and answered with an eye to temporality by the man whose name would loom so large over twentieth century psychology)—is one with the problem of cosmic overarchingness. As above, so below. Even as the frail human specimen must try to figure out the riddle of self and family, so will he or she have one day to confront the larger puzzles, those of Existence and Infinity, Time and Void, Life and Death. Leave home and, sooner or later, you will encounter the great themes. Questions about the “knowability” of the beyond and the possibility of human transcendence or at least some semblance of human dignity and courage in the face of self- knowledge and limitation, the All and the Ineffable, smallness and dread, acceptance and awe. It is all a grand Zen koan and, as Kafka (in Janouch, 1951/1985) had almost nonchalantly observed, most are stumblers at best:

The road from appearance to reality is often very hard and long, and many people make only very poor travelers. We must forgive them when they stagger against us as if against a brick wall. (p. 35)

It was in a letter to Felice that Kafka remarked, again almost casually, about humankind’s “terror of standing upright.” These matters and paradoxes Becker, too, discerned before ever coming to as comforting a resting place as he would ever find in the work of Otto Rank, the psychoanalytic revisionist who would make possible for Becker the project, as Bob Dylan once put it (speaking then of music rather than theory), of “bringing it all back home.” When a man of Becker’s perspicacity finds a worthy guide his enthusiasm is unabashed. He has, after all, been so long casting about. Becker begins his essay on Kafka’s short story, “The Judgment,” by calling it

one of the great self-analytic documents in the whole history of human reflection. It may well be the greatest, if we judge it by the wealth of insight woven with the highest artistry into the briefest space. This interweaving literally leaves the informed student breathless. (1969, p. 41)

And, indeed, “The Judgment” (written during the course of one long and sleepless night on the Jewish Day of Atonement, itself a symbolic day of

6 judgment no less than a preparation for the one that aid to lie beyond) was the work Kafka counted as his favorite, perhaps because it contained in undisguised form the central problem of his own life: how to extricate its author from the authority of the family (typified in Kafka’s case by the purportedly Old Testament form of a whimsical and severe, at times devastating, father figure) in order to establish its own autonomy. In short, it is a story about Freud’s Oedipus, “yet,” cautions Becker, “with a breadth, depth, and subtlety which would have surprised and taught even Freud” (p. 41). Broader and deeper we must write our annals. Kafka, says Becker, had no superior in “his understanding of the situation of the child in relation to [its] parents” (pp. 41-42) and must as psychologist be placed alongside Freud and Kierkegaard. Becker makes some amazing remarks here concerning the relationship between artist and academic:

There is a certain scavenging in such an undertaking, which the “man of knowledge” cannot deny. After all, he earns his respectability and his imposing title in a somewhat “dishonest” way: he is not fully involved as a person with his subject matter; if he masters it, it is with grace and ease, with the sly shiftiness of symbols, there where the artist literally squeezed his insights out of his own flesh, blood, and bones, and expired young because of the effort. Freud, who got many things backward, thought it was just the other way around: he once remarked—almost pompously—that the scientist has to work so hard to get the insights that the writer tosses off so easily. And this is the hubris of the scholar, who becomes imposingly gray at the temples, rummaging around and putting order into the anguished insights of tormented youth who leave behind the distillation of their genius and collapse early into their graves. Especially is this characterization true of Kafka’s life and his document, which not only lays bare the pathetic human condition, but also must reveal Kafka’s own anguish. Let us then approach it with proper respect, and some fear and trembling, and let us follow our teacher reverently. (pp. 42-43)

An amazing homage coming from someone himself so gifted. Becker is exonerating himself no less than Freud, thinkers before the artist. But if ever there were an artistic thinker, it must surely have been Becker who, like Kafka, paid dearly for his daemon and did not last much longer than his tubercular mentor before finding his way into one more early grave. Further, Becker is underscoring his point about the universality of Oedipus: even men and women of brilliance struggle with autonomy and must lean on something. Pirandello and Laing had said it as well: the wholly self-created man or woman simply does not exist.

7 “The Judgment,” we may say, is an existentialist’s Oedipus. It is the story of a man who cannot escape the tyranny of the father and will end his life according to paternal instruction rather than take further steps into an unknown with which he had been on the verge of coexistence. It is Oedipus turned on its ears, the son never able to overcome the doddering patriarch. (“One’s family is like small pox,” Sartre once remarked; “It gets you in childhood and marks you for life.”) Alone, the anti-hero Georg makes a mock show of courage: “‘That’s the kind of man I am and he’ll just have to take me as I am,’ he said to himself; ‘I can’t cut myself to another pattern that might make a more suitable friend.’” (1913/1971, p. 80). But confronted with the sheer physicality of the aged and ailing father, he is at once, states Becker, in “a minus position” and now sees before him—the words are here again Kafka’s—“a giant of a man.” This giant seems very much a god with his awesome, if irrational, pomp and circumstance and, hence, defines for a hyper-vigilant son the very nature of things. Listen:

Georg shrank into a corner, as far away from his father as possible. A long time ago he had firmly made up his mind to watch closely every least movement so that he should not be surprised by any indirect attack, a pounce from behind or above. At this moment he recalled this long- forgotten resolve and forgot it again, like a man drawing a short threat through the eye of a needle. (p. 85)

Georg tries to see the old man as the self-righteous and persecutory geriatric case that he is, tries to turn him in his mind into what he is more nearly in fact, talk him back down to smallness and farce:

“He has pockets even in his shirt!” said Georg to himself, and believed that with this remark he could make him an impossible figure for all the world. Only for a moment did he think so, since he kept on forgetting everything. (p. 86)

Primal transference. The mind and the introjected father have taken on lives of their own; the young man will never be free. “The organism,” states Becker, “literally fights against itself in its urge toward freedom” (1969, p. 63) and will go to its death rather than breach authority. Why does the world prostrate itself before such a self-effacing writer, one whose story is always the same and for whom resolution comes only in death? It is because, I think, there is a very real and harrowing sense in which this is the human predicament. We are, when we lay our theoretical schemas and socially constructed identities aside, insubstantial beings forever on the way and never having wholly arrived. Again, it is the invert-mystic Kafka whose words come to mind: “There is a goal but no way. What we call the way is mere wavering.” When the youthful admirer Gustav Janouch (1951/1985) presses

8 Kafka for something more sanguine and certain, something to grasp hold of, this dialogue ensues:

“But how does one do that? How does one proceed? Is there some sure guide?” “No, there is none,” said Kafka, shaking his head. “There is no route map on the way to truth. The only thing that counts is to make the venture of total dedication. A prescription would already imply a withdrawal, mistrust, and therewith the beginning of a false path. One must accept everything patiently and fearlessly. Man is condemned to life, not death.” (p. 156)

It is this aspect of existence—limitation, inscrutability, insubstantiality—of which Kafka is the master spellbinder. Becker understood this and knew, too, that the Oedipal struggle was, at its core, had more to do with ontology than mere sexuality. Just read Sophocles. Becker understood also, as Rank had before him, that insight is hard- won. Kafka, too, had said it, that physical health and self-awareness are all but incompatible. And at once I think of Nietzsche, another long-suffering genius who, though less family-immersed than the pained Czech aesthete, contemplates as well the difficulties that inhere in standing on one’s own. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, the philosopher who was—he himself proudly proclaimed it—no less a psychologist, makes clear what he is after: an individual, one who feels and thinks, indeed experiences, for him- or herself:

You had not yet sought yourselves when you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account. Now I bid you to lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have . . . denied me will I return . . . (in Alderman, 1977, p. 114)

Indeed, Nietzsche’s oft-misunderstood “overman” is nothing more (though, also, nothing less), when all is said and done, than this: a “single one” (we do not say hermit), one who has overcome the given self and everyday world in order to discover self and world anew. It is a process at once tortuous and exhilarating, one that does not end and is its own reward. Self-creation (personified by the fictional Zarathustra), observes the philosopher (the tormented and very real Nietzsche), is, in the end, “the rarest and most difficult art” (p. 142). Nietzsche, no less than Kafka, had a penchant for parable, with Zarathustra his most eloquent orator. After ten years in his mountain retreat, the prophet, chastened in silence, returns newborn to the world of “sleepers.” “I teach you the overman,” he tells an uncomprehending crowd (1883/1954, p. 124); “Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” (p. 124) The crowd reacts with the bewilderment with which the commonplace routinely meets the sublime. Only gradually does Zarathustra

9 come to the realization that he has returned not for the many but for the few: “To lure many away from the herd—for that I have come” (p. 135). And so he offers up a speech on “The Three Metamorphoses,” a parable of servitude and discipline, resistance and courage, spontaneity and self-overcoming: a triptych of human striving that leads the creative type from the camel’s plodding deference to the lion’s rebellion, and, at long last, to the child’s amazement and newborn innocence. A metaphor for creative struggle and self-becoming—in a word, growth. (“Shall we, then, as children enter the Kingdom?” urges the gnostic Jesus.) This is no naive obeisance to freedom simplistically conceived, for Nietzsche understood, like Kafka, that risks and incompleteness permeate. Humankind, says Nietzsche, is a rope: we exist only insofar as we stretch ourselves over the abyss of uncertainty. Determined but not exhausted, one screws up one’s resolve and creates one’s own self:

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. (p. 127)

Here the world dictates but does not define, and it is the allure of possibility that prevails. The victory of the individual over the travails of existence, of child over parent, flight over gravity, moment over time. Listen:

I have become one who blesses and one who declares Yes: and for that I wrestled long and was a wrestler, so that I might one day have my hands free for blessing. (in Alderman, p. 99) And again:

The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes. (p. 35)

Thus, does imagination escape for a while the samsara of stimulus and response that characterizes the unenlightened state, as one now dwells—the words are Zarathustra’s—in “respect and awe” (p. 32). For the moment, it is life over death and Kafka redeemed.

And so we have the two horns of the human predicament: Oedipus as plaything of parents and gods and Oedipus as suffering hero who would create something new. Human rootedness and limitation, self-overcoming and self- creation, freedom and destiny, child and parent, success and failure, the uncanny struggle to become who one is. The paradox is expressed, quite profoundly, in a session with a young patient of mine, a multiple personality, a twenty year old woman returned for “vacation” from her bible belt college to the family setting that had once been the scene of unspeakable atrocity:

10 “Kristiana” enters the room quietly, walks on the furniture as was her habit in the past, smiling at me as she does so, then becomes silent. She has been beaten down emotionally at home. She sits down conspicuously in my colleague’s antique-replica chair, a chair clients are instructed not to use. I say nothing. Cara [the inner guide for whom words are sacred] picks up a pad of paper and writes: The colors get louder at home. Every time we come back brighter and louder. I tell her that she is outgrowing her family, like it or not. She writes: What will we do when we outgrow them? Would there not be more to outgrow? It is a fair question, one that, if we are honest, suggests no easy response. “It is the nature of things,” I tell her. “It has its own meaning.” Cara writes: This is growing larger and larger until you lose track of who you were “You are afraid,” I tell her; “You will change into something new, but still it will be you. Life is movement, identity is never fixed.” Then always there is death, even in your creativity “Yes,” I tell her. She is frightened because you may become someone else without knowing it No Birth/No Death “It’s too late for that,” I tell her. Cara becomes more immersed in her inner torment: no turning . . . no hope . . . no symphony . . . no melody of words . . . no finish . . . She is tired of the inner pain and outer war that does not cease and writes: Meg [the six year old “alter” who was left behind in childhood to take the worst of the abuse] is crying. It is dead when people fail to understand. She is the red spilling all over the place—no one to catch her and clean it up but me and I don’t want to anymore. I tell her that the memory of trauma will lessen with time. Cara writes: In order to forget it takes remembering. Can you remember to forget? I smile. They are all so proficient with these word games. Cara puts her head down on the ottoman in front of her (she has been sitting, most recently, on the floor), and leaves. A child named Emily now arrives, begins to take out the various play objects used in her sessions with the child psychologist, proceeds to set up several scenes involving good and bad people and objects, including her two therapists, “the

11 five” (introjects of the patient herself and her siblings, protected within as in a cocoon as though waiting to be reborn under more favorable circumstances), Alpha and Omega (parental introjects), mother and father. She sets up an apparent rape scene but refuses to elaborate. “Too many bad people, not enough good people,” she repeats several times. I tell her that it always seems like that, but that the good people have here been well chosen, that they will win out in the end. The child is unconvinced. There is much signing throughout the session, all expressive of inner noise and inner pictures and the desire for stillness and peace. At one point, Cara takes my own hands and—adding her own—forms a square within which she points with her finger to an imagined center or still-point. She looks at Emily’s last arrangement of play figures, which consists of several central and benevolent characters encircled by all the rest, wants me to get the analogy. She is telling me that Kristiana has created a whole array of alters (thrown up against an inhospitable world) while a deeper self remains hidden within, protected, perhaps, but obscure. She writes: The thousands of words in my head never spoken, never written. They would be too loud, too long even for an entire universe, it seems, and yet it is all contained in this head. Only my ears can hear it. It condemns me, doctor. It mocks me and I can never run away from it. No matter how loud it becomes, it will be my haunting. I read and remain silent. My body is not genius enough for my brain. I will never be at peace until it is free of this. All I can do is cover my eyes to hold back the tears, cover my ears and pretend that I can’t hear it—just like you can’t hear it—and smile because I have at least fooled you. “Me?” I ask. The patient smiles faintly: Them, these people. I am tired, I am tired. Tell me it’s OK for me to be tired. Tell me that if I sleep when I wake up this will all be gone. Tell me I will never have to run so fast as to catch all of these thoughts and all of the ideas and all of the pictures. Tell me I will be able to write it all, paint it all, and still be like every other person. I remain silent. The music of it all makes me mad because I can’t keep up. I want to, Doctor. I will never become exactly what I was meant to now. The patient is sobbing gently as we set up a follow-up appointment. “Because of all that you have been through,” I tell her, “you have certain gifts you wouldn’t otherwise have.” She nods faintly in sympathy, for she knows I am right. Still, it is understood that such gifts have exacted, and will continue to exact, a terrible price.

12 My patient is an artist of self-creation in the inner world, the possibility of external heroics having been long since eclipsed by familial abuse and familial fascism. Like Kafka, she has learned to make herself small. It will take Ariadne’s thread to find her way back to some faraway point of original leave-taking, her inward departure from home. The weight of the matter and the difficulty of travel is a mirrored variation of what, in the end, remains a normative theme. It is Oedipus masquerading as Alice in Wonderland, the refracted integrity one finds through the looking glass when all others routes of escape have been blocked. The prospect of triumph seems all but miraculous, freedom she would almost deny: like Georg (and, at times, too, each one of us), she would keep herself small.

Of course, Kafka and Kristiana are by no means alone in their understanding of the paradoxes of freedom and the complexities of self. Dostoyevsky also is no shabby psychologist and reveals his own genius in embracing the fathomless entanglements of Oedipus in his masterwork The Brothers Karamazov, a classic study of one more dysfunctional family typified by yet another inadequate father. We may distinguish there between three types of filial response to what we might call, respectfully, the problem of the parent: Dmitri or Mitya—abandoned by his father, angry, competitive, but (it is hardly surprising) ultimately his father’s copyist; Ivan—the detached middle son, philosophical, intellectual, skeptical, cool; and Alyosha—the youngest, sensitive and upward-looking, the son whose essential goodness presses him to superimpose the holy family of the Church upon the admittedly flawed family into which, at the behest of that ethereal family’s holiest father, he has been cast. Like Kristiana and Kafka, Dostoyevsky apprehends the interconnection between this world and that, the problem of child before parent and that of man/woman before Cosmos and Void. Nowhere has Oedipus been more forcibly articulated than in the parable of “The Grand Inquisitor” that Ivan in his infinite restlessness has composed and now relates to his beloved brother Alyosha. The parable deals, you may recall, with the topic of Christ returned to earth in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition and harkens back to the biblical promise: “Behold, I come quickly . . . Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, neither the Son, but the Father.” Christ returned says nothing but quietly, and with “a healing virtue,” restores sight to a blind man, returns the dead child to life. The cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, sees everything and with the wave of a finger has his “gloomy assistants” arrest the silent saint. “Is it Thou? Thou?” beseeches a father of a son. The son remains still. But the old man himself is no mean psychologist. He admonishes Jesus for his offer of freedom: it is not what people want, not something they can even stand. The masses, he says, are like children:

13 For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good. Dost Thou not believe that it’s over for good? . . . [T]hey have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing. Was this what Thou didst? Was this Thy freedom? . . . Thou didst reject the only way by which men might be made happy. But, fortunately, departing Thou didst hand on the work to us . . . Why, then, hast Thou come to hinder us? (pp. 308- 309)

Do you see? For we are like George before father, insubstantial things just made for a crutch. Nothing, says the cardinal, is more insupportable than freedom “which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread.” (And here we card-carrying psychologists should take especial note; for we have our own church with its texts and ministries, its denominations and attendant roadmaps to truth, its assurances of freedom and comfort and, God knows, its henchmen as well.) The old man recalls Satan’s offer of power over the Nietzschean herd:

“But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest Thou withdraw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread . . . Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! . . In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” . . . Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but . . . can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man? And if for the sake of the bread of Heaven thousands and tens of thousands shall follow Thee, what is to become of the millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures who will not have the strength to forego the earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly? Or dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the great and strong, while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, who are weak but love Thee, must exist only for the sake of the great and strong? No, we care for the weak too . . . They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful . . . —so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name . . . That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie. (pp. 310- 311)

Where did Dostoyevsky complete his APA-approved postdoctoral training? “So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship,” he writes. Dostoyevsky is on target,

14 of course: we seek certainty and certainty (to be certain) must be shared—a “craving for community”: man is “weaker and baser” than Jesus had thought. The Grand Inquisitor speaks here, not without compassion, for what we are not:

By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him—Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter . . . How is the weak soul to blame that it is unable to receive such terrible gifts? . . . Thou art proud of Thine elect, but Thou hast only the elect while we give rest to all. (pp. 314-316)

One cannot do much better than this, really, in articulating the problems of self and Oedipus and what Nietzsche had called the slave morality that typifies a “wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery.” Both men understood, in Dostoyevsky’s phrase, “the value of complete submission.” It is just too much to reach the sea on one’s own:

There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there is something in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they. (p. 318)

We must understand that the cardinal is no ruthless despot. He, too, has been in the wilderness, subsisted on locusts and roots. He, too, understands the nature of freedom and its mind-boggling impact on “incomplete empirical creatures created in jest” (p. 321). He expresses the problem with patriarchal compassion and speaks for the children who will not stray far from their homes. What is needed is Parent and System and maybe a ballgame, an SSRI or even a Drug. Of course, all systems have lacunae, all chemicals their side effects, all heavenly fathers their shortcomings, their earthly counterparts their own. “What is the answer?” (in Miller, 1949, p. 84) beseeches Willy Loman of a brother bound for fortune and Alaska. Platitudinous direction offered to sons cannot mask father’s essential depletion. “Ben, am I right? . . . I value your advice” (p. 87). “Exactly what do you want from me?” (p. 129) asks the son of the father who asks the brother if he’s right. And it is by no means father who must play the contrapuntal role. In Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere (1974), a mother and son confront each other without the mitigating influence of an absentee father: pater absconditus. Here

15 Oedipus has nothing to do with competition for the mother for her presence is assured, indeed imposed, from the start. It is, rather, a question of whether the son will get out from under: the son’s “very existence as a separate individual is at stake” (in Banerjee, 1992, p. 85). Despite genuine talent as a lyric poet, the protagonist Jaromil does not escape the maternal grasp. “Alas, dear Jaromil . . . You will walk the world like a dog on a long leash! Even when you are far away you will still feel the collar around your neck!” (1974, pp. 120-121). And, indeed, the young poet can have no idea of what he is up against, the circumstances engendering the maternal psychology having occurred years before he was born. Life is elsewhere: it is a phrase of Rimbaud’s—the plaintive lament of the poet who has failed, entrapment of a child of “an offended womb” (in Banerjee, p. 85) doomed forever to live in another’s time slot and zone. (“Oh, miserable soul,” says Jocasta to Oedipus, “may you never know who you are!”) On his deathbed, young Jaromil confesses to his mother that she is the only woman he has ever loved! It is Woody Allen’s famous Jewish mother in the sky. And, so, even the poet must wrestle with sphinx and lineage. One of literature’s most gorgeous renditions of family and Oedipus transposed into myth and lyricism must surely be the bizarre stories of the Polish writer Bruno Schultz. Schultz was raised on Kafka and Mann, masterful storytellers themselves. He achieved some degree of literary fame before being shot dead by the Gestapo, sons not willing to think for themselves. His purpose, he wrote, was to “mature into childhood.” (Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?) In Schultz’s imaginal world, family is metamorphosed into myth, into language and art. Son is named Joseph and father is Jacob, myth is implied from the start. And this father of his is the strangest of fathers—part prophet, part scientist, part philosopher, part fraud (or, perhaps, Freud). Father is the lynchpin in Schultz’s fantasied world: father who labors over ledgers of the family business downstairs, accomplishing nothing more in the end than the pasting of colored decals onto blank pages; father who imports eggs of the rarest species of birds and hatches them in the attic; father who sees life in tailors’ dummies and exhorts that they be accorded the same courtesy and respect as human beings; father who tries his hand even at psychoanalysis, filling the table of his study with the “isolated complexes of [Uncle] Edward’s ego,” reducing him thereby to that “indispensable minimum” (1934/1977, p. 150). Father as philanthropist, father as alchemist, father as luftmensch, father as myth. Father “who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city” (p. 10), father “that very strange esoterist” (p. 144). Exasperated at last with his metaphysical proclivities, the “incorrigible improviser” finally lets down his guard: “Principium individuationis—my foot,” father is overheard to confess, “thus expressing his limitless contempt for that guiding human principle” (p. 145). Just try figuring out an old man like that! It is interesting to note that this little-known spellbinder did not start writing about the shop and the father until shop and father were gone. He

16 protected his privacy as if sacred as he created a mythology that transformed childhood memory into art. But the artist as poet must still lean on something, images of the parent if not the parent him- or herself. And, so, Schultz retreats into myth as he still leans on something, now on the very language itself. His fate, he had written, was to be “a parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along” (1937/1977p. 193). The son, then, who, like Kafka, traveled so far from pedestrian beginnings (though, like Kafka, not straying far from the home), who succeeded in creating something utterly new (achieving fame among European literati which he cherished without losing his head), was shot dead by Nazi children one fine autumn day, thus putting an end to the mind and world of another strange esoterist. So closed the book on a poet’s poignant search for “the mythical sense . . that dusky, allusive atmosphere . . that thickens around . . . family history . . . anticipations characteristic of the dawn of life” (p. vii). Individuation, my foot.

A few days later, another session with my patient:

Kristiana enters sadly, goes to my colleague’s chair, sits down indelicately, puts her head down, says nothing. After several moments of silence, I say, “Tell me what’s wrong.” She remains silent and I ask again. Cara picks up her clipboard and writes: Why “Why not?” I ask. Cara underlines what she has written: Why “Why not?” I repeat. Why why why Why not why not Don’t ask another question until you answer the first one please Talk way too much I tell her the obvious, that our talking is meaningful and has its own value and—though it does not itself resolve grief or pain—may lead gradually in that direction over time. Cara writes: When Cara dwells now on inner “death” aggravated by the outer chaos, noise, and coarseness that is her family: all the dead all the dead some are unfortunate to have survived to bury them

I read what she has written and remain silent. Cara writes: all the dead not enough gods to mourn don’t sacrifice to them anymore—they can’t produce miracles

17 She is run down, the prospect of inner death now made more nearly reality by the return home to very real parents. She expresses her sense of defeat and her (only partly felt) wish that I divest in her case and its outcome: you can’t do anything—besides it wouldn’t matter if you could it would mean nothing to them it isn’t my life—it’s everyone else’s “You’ve made progress,” I tell her. “No one can stand up to your parents without support, but that doesn’t mean they’ll defeat you.” Cara writes: What are miracles for anyway? To make you believe that there is hope? And what is hope? It is believing that life can be better than it is and that goes back to the miracles. Life can never be what it isn’t and there can never be miracles. I tell her that she has returned home just for a while, that she will survive the family and her “vacation.” Cara writes: What if I cannot survive myself? How many can? “Can what?” I inquire. Survive I tell her what I believe, that she has now what she needs (inside and outside) in order to make it. She is, however, given, as she often is during these sessions, to lamentation: I think all kinds of bad things here When I’m alone my thoughts scare me because they can move and walk and fulfill “What are you afraid of?” I ask. thoughts with hands Like many other dissociative identities, Kristiana is inclined toward self-mutilative behaviors under duress. Superficial cuts along the wrist (neatly disguised by her watchband) or the legs have served at such times to restore inner balance. Confronted with weightier stressors however, these maneuvers quickly take on more sinister aspects. These issues are now taken up. Later in the session, Cara writes: doctor—why can’t those people let us talk at home? you let me talk do I say wrong things? are my words so powerful as to make them afraid? “They are more fragile than they look,” I say, referring to her parents.

No. No, they aren’t. “Don’t kid yourself. The self-righteous are always the most fragile. They fear your scrutiny.”

18 Isn’t everyone fragile? “Yes, but some are so fearful as to resort to absolute faith in their rightness.” Then I will never speak “You should keep talking but with the right people. Your parents aren’t likely to change.” Doctor Someday you can tell the people who aren’t so fragile— tell them what you know This is a train of thought that is familiar to me yet deeply disturbing, referring as it does to the patient’s death-immersed reflections on a time when she may no longer be here and her parents, perhaps, healed in the aftermath of her passing. She has identified since childhood with the one to whom she is namesake: the martyr dangling from his Cross, mother grieving at his feet. I have always been emphatic that this would be a very poor bet, that possibility and healing reside with the patient, that it is a long and torturous (indeed, tortuous) undertaking, that I can only have the faintest notion of what it is like, that I will remain with her throughout. Cara writes: There is danger in working with us— we may be a disappointment “You have already changed a great deal. You have reasons to live now and will have more. You have people who will help you. Our relationship helps, doesn’t it?” Cara writes: yes, doctor a light in the dark brings some shadow that is good enough for us, doctor thanks for the shadows She refers, possibly, to the irremediable despair that dwells even in relationship but also, perhaps, to the arduousness of change. Cara drifts back into apprehensiveness: I don’t want your ability wasted on us

“You are afraid to change,” I tell her. “That is natural.” yes—but I do anyway— slowly— when I am your age I should be halfway to normality doctor alyssa wants to die “Why does she want to die?” it is always dead or death when we are here and always the failure that is living living is a mistake

We see here, as through a microscope, the dynamic that so many (I want, really, to say all) of us go through: the hesitant yet desperate attempt to

19 beat the odds and outpace resistance, the life and death struggle to make something of ourselves. Like Kafka, Kristiana has learned the magician’s trick of disappearance. It will be the work of psychotherapy to facilitate reemergence. She is right we all know: we cannot promise her guarantees of success or happiness; we can only accompany her in her struggle to be. (“Who speaks of victory?” muses Rilke.) It isn’t my life, it’s everyone else’s. Have you never felt like this? Even in our professional family, I’ll bet that you have. It is Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith,” his “dizziness of freedom,” Rank’s fear of life and Rank’s fear of death. How many of us will outpace authority, how many of us will survive ourselves?

Biff: He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong. Happy: Don’t say that! Biff: He never knew who he was . . . Why don’t you come with me, Happy? Happy: I’m not licked that easily. I’m staying right in this city, and I’m gonna beat this racket! The Loman Brothers! Biff: I know who I am, kid. (Miller, 1949/1958, p. 138)

Will she make it? It is impossible to say. It is a precipitous climb and a daunting angle, but the spirit is willing and she is no longer alone:

“You are afraid to change,” I tell her; “That is natural.”

yes—but I do anyway— slowly— when I am your age I should be halfway to normality

Halfway to normality? I doubt it. Kristiana is already far beyond normative conceptions of change and the median. Her path will be a high road, her goal further growth. She is right to be humbled by the difficulty of travel. We are all, at some level, inexpert in journey, incomplete creatures created in jest. “The roads are all crooked now,” Bob Dylan says somewhere, “and all the signposts point the wrong way.” Who speaks of victory? Normality, my foot.

You may think this is just so much gibberish, the muted psychosis of a young woman very nearly beyond the pale, but it is rather inward dialogue now shared with her therapist on matters of fundamental significance. Let us compare it with an excerpted dialogue with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (1973), one the most splendid of the Indian sages:

Questioner: What is necessary? Maharaj: To grow is necessary. To outgrow is necessary. To leave behind the good for the sake of the better is necessary. Questioner: To what end? Maharaj: The end is the beginning. You end where you start—in the Absolute.

20 Questioner: Why all the trouble then? To come back to where I started? Maharaj: Whose trouble? Which trouble? Do you pity the seed that is to grow and multiply till it becomes a mighty forest? Do you kill an infant to save [it] the bother of living? What is wrong with life, ever more life? . . The universe is perfect as a whole and the part’s striving for perfection is a way of joy . . . Questioner: Yet we are afraid of the better and cling to the worse. Maharaj: This is our stupidity, verging on insanity. (p. 284)

Do you see? It is very nearly the same conversation I have had with Kristiana, though the guru, encumbered with fewer forms and department meetings and continuing education requirements, is far more aware, far less distracted, and, God knows, more eloquent. Life is change and cannot be fixed. You cannot nail a block of wood into empty space, something both mystic and dissociative have ascertained.

By no means are all Oedipal complexes are comprised of parental over- involvement. Kafka’s later writing is typified by father-substitutes who become increasingly detached, surreal, opaque. Read The Castle, for example, or the priest’s telling of the parable of man before law in The Trial and try figuring out what is going on. In such tales, authority is always distant, retreating, obscure. (Or, perhaps, it is the offspring who retreat to positions of safety, the apparent remoteness of the parents merely reflective of filial slight of hands: distortion and mirage.) In Louis Sass’s erudite Madness and Modernism (1992), the author tells of a schizophrenic man who sends a postcard to his mother: “You have been just like a mother to me” (p. 112). Do you see the safety implied in ironic aloofness; do you see the psychotic defense? It becomes more extreme in another example in which patient retreats utterly behind concept (like a good diagnostician) in defining the word “parents,” thereby forestalling the possibility of even remotest contact:

Parents are the people that raise you. Any thing that raises you can be a parent. Parents can be anything, material, vegetable, or mineral, that has taught you something. Parents would be the world of things that are alive, that are there. Rocks, a person can look at a rock and learn something from it, so that would be a parent. (p. 152)

Kafka and dissociative make themselves small, even invisible. Unalloyed schizoid types (and, often, professionals as well) retreat behind theory and category. Just try reaching them there. In Samuel Beckett’s (1955) novel Molloy the protagonist resides in his head in the room of his mother through a set of circumstances that is anything

21 but clear. He recalls her without rancor though one could hardly say fondly. Listen:

She never called me son, fortunately, I couldn’t have borne it, but Dan, I don’t know why, my name is not Dan. Dan was my father’s name perhaps, yes, perhaps she took me for my father. I took her for my mother and she took me for my father. Dan, you remember the day I saved the swallow. Dan, you remember the day you buried the ring. I remembered, I remembered, I mean I knew more or less what she was talking about, and if I hadn’t always taken part personally in the scenes she evoked, it was just as if I had. I called her Mag, when I had to call her something. And I called her Mag because for me, without my knowing why, the letter g abolished the syllable Ma, and as it were spat on it, better than any other letter would have done. And at the same time I satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to have a Ma, that is a mother, and to proclaim it audibly. For before you say mag you say ma, inevitably. And da, in my part of the world, means father. (p. 17)

We find here a startling example of radical ambiguity said to typify modernist consciousness. As we have said, just try reaching them there. Before mother dies, Molloy communicates with her by knocking on her skull, one knock meaning yes, two knocks being no, “three I don’t know, four money, [and] five goodbye”:

I was hard put to ram this code into her ruined and frantic understanding, but I did it, in the end. That she should confuse yes, no, I don’t know and goodbye, was all the same to me, I confused them myself. But that she should associate the four knocks with anything but money was something to be avoided at all costs. (p. 18)

Let us forgo for the moment the obvious point, that Beckett is describing communication as a form of numeric reduction (the prospect of encounter having been long since eclipsed), a methodology blithely embraced by our managed care era and managed care therapists as well. And, of course, Beckett, irremediably, provides humor and pathos (whereas our managed care industry does not) and is moved by the way in which mother finally loses in old age the faculty of counting beyond two. It was “too far for her, the distance too great” (p. 18). One day it will be for us too.

The schizoid defense, of course, cannot work in the end, for one retreats from the world and into one’s head and just how long can you last there? Notice that they’re still thinking about parents. One of the most bizarre of these

22 modernist reflections on Oedipus is found in Donald Barthelme’s (1975) The Dead Father, an odd post-Kafkan tale with a dead father thirty-two hundred cubits in length (“dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead”) who controls what the son Thomas “is thinking, what Thomas has always thought, what Thomas will ever think, with exceptions” (p. 4). We find here one of the queerest riffs on Oedipus we have encountered:

We were going to see the Great Father Serpent, they said, the Great Father Serpent would if I answered the riddle correctly grant me a boon but it was one boon to a customer and I would never answer the riddle correctly so my hopes, they said, should not be got up. I rehearsed in my mind all the riddles that I knew, trying to patch the right answer to the right riddle . . . (p. 43-44) Here is the riddle said the Great Father Serpent with a great flourishing of his two- tipped tongue, and it is a son-of-a bitch I will tell you that, the most arcane item in the arcana, you will never guess it in a hundred thousand human years some of which I point out have already been used up by you in useless living and breathing but have a go, have a go, do: What do you really feel? (p. 45-46)

Do you get it? I mean, after fathers above and fathers below and fathers and mothers between, how would you know if you had a feeling or thought of your own, how would you know who you were? Thomas still struggles with the specter of father even when father is dead; and father himself goes pattering on, not knowing, it would seem, when to quit. Consulting a “Manual of Sons” for Oedipal instruction, Thomas reads of twenty-two kinds of fathers (of which only nineteen are apparently important!), but more to the point this passage on “the death of fathers” and the impossibility of reprieve:

The death of fathers: When a father dies, his fatherhood is returned to the All-Father, who is the sum of all dead fathers taken together. (This is not a definition of the All-Father, only an aspect of his being.) The fatherhood is returned to the All-Father, first because that is where it belongs and second in order that it may be denied to you . . . Fatherless, now, you must deal with the memory of a father. Often that memory is more potent than the living presence of a father, is an inner voice commanding, haranguing, yes-ing and no-ing—a binary code, yes no yes no yes no yes no, governing your every, your slightest movement, mental or physical. At what point do you become yourself? Never, wholly, you are always partly him. That privileged position in your inner ear is his last “perk” and no father has ever passed it by. (p. 144)

23 It is the riddle of Oedipus and the enigma of self, the problem of the child who tries “to put the world together” (p. 61). It is the core of psychology and the human dilemma, the author’s humor belying with uncanny accuracy an aspect of existence which we may take as universal. Barthelme satirizes here a philosophy that he has nonetheless pondered in earnest. It is important to underscore the weight of the matter, the capacity of the story to teach. At what point do we become completely ourselves? We are always partly other and partly them, amblers and stumblers who lean. We are just little pieces of other people. We are just little pieces of our parents, and they are just little pieces of theirs. I wonder if I will ever be happy with the pieces of me that are the pieces of them that I will never be rid of. (Dustin Hoffman, contemplating his portrayal of Willy Loman as well as more recent roles, remarks casually: “We are all just playing our parents.”) Oedipal resolution, my foot. It seems fitting to include here the bracing clarity of the Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, whose words pierce the soul of like a pistol shot, like a rebuke:

For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defenses of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality. (in Becker, 1973, p. 47)

We cannot, then, penetrate the inner meaning of Oedipus and sphinx without taking on the riddle of life. Oedipus and Freud were wrong to be so sure of themselves, each resorting to curtains of fantasy as scarecrows against the dark. We are mostly, in the end, very poor travelers, children afraid of what lies beyond and beneath. Broader and deeper we must write our annals. Individuation, my foot.

Returned to her college, Kristiana e-mails her psychologist. The message is “peace,” the problem the parents; the author is Cara:

Her parents called today. She hasn’t been out at all and doesn’t want to be either. Her father started harping about the phone bill. Your name was mentioned. They want everything just so. Their lives were so pleasantly balanced and they act as if, now that they know that we still see a therapist, we have again somehow shaken their tiny world. What of this little world of theirs which hangs so precariously in balance? It is when we are making the grades, staying sane,

24 smiling and making them proud that they are the happiest. They are surprised that we speak to someone, ask “why? do you still have 'problems'?” as if somehow to condemn me if I did. How do they think that I survive in a very turbulent world. Never is there any attempt on their part to delve into her psyche, to really know their offspring. Instead the conversations wade around the bills and the grades and the unmeaning. How dare they call her up and question her attempt to find some will, some connection, some realness. They could not have woven their web of guilt at a worse time. If there is anything that Kristiana will not handle it is her parents questioning her life. She only knows that she has survived, that she is back, and that she is better than she ever was. She does not know why they cannot see that.

Notice once more the vacillation, the back-and-forth movement, the desire to connect and the awareness one cannot. It is really not so different with anyone else. We are in some all sense multiple, all incomplete: some of us move through anxiety and some of us don’t. Will Kristiana overcome her inner architecture and pain and find her way back? She has read neither Rank nor May but has a kitten named Will.

Kristiana grew up in a fundamentalist home not unlike that of Sybil’s, a torture chamber of fanatical religiosity, brazen self-righteousness and heinous parental/fraternal abuse. Her art and consciousness are overflowing with crucifixes and depictions of metaphysical struggles between darkness and light. Parental figures (mother especially) loom ominously over the scattered remains of an inchoate self. This business of religion especially interests me for, in her radical interiorization, the patient upholds, paradoxically, the possibility of getting things right. Religion and family, Oedipus and Void—the ineradicable link that Dostoyevsky and Kafka understood so well. Leaving home requires belief in the process, spiritualization of quest. In the Gospel of Mark, we read:

There came then His brethren and His mother, and standing without, sent unto Him, calling Him. And the multitude sat about Him, and they said unto Him—“Behold Thy mother and Thy brethren without seek for Thee.” And He answered them saying— “Who is My mother, or My brethren?” And He looked round about on them which sat about Him, and said—

“Behold My mother and My brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is My brother, and My sister, and mother.” (3:31- 35)

25 This biblical passage alludes to the possibility of spiritual family, something that may one day cut more deeply even than blood. This is the Jesus who speaks to the few and not to the many, to those strong enough to find their own way. It is a pervasive theme in the spiritual lore. The Buddha, too, is compelled to leave home in search of his truth and is reluctant to tell others what to do. “Be a lamp unto yourselves,” he says on his deathbed. (“This is my way,” says Zarathustra; “what is yours?”) And from the Awakened One, it is, geographically, only a stone’s throw to these words from Shankara, the ninth century Indian mystic and teacher:

Who is your wife, and who is your son? Whose son are you, and where do you come from? Realize who you are, deluded man, Realize what is real and what is not. (in Mitchell, 1991, p. 195)

The notion of selfhood as individuation from the family scene is made more forcefully in many of the gnostic texts of Christianity that do not concern themselves with canonical authority (one more father figure at yet a higher level of abstraction) and hence did not make it into the official liturgy. This, by the way, is precisely Rank’s “great conflict between our biological and our purely human self” (in Kramer, 1996, p. 46). In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus underscores the distinction between parents earthly and divine. This text is directed toward the few, the individual, the “single one.” We find here moving, though oddly enigmatic, intimations of deep self:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. (in Meyer, 1992, p. 53)

We encounter here, as Harold Bloom puts it, a “Whitmanian Jesus” who urges Awareness rather than Belief: “Knowledge only is the remedy and such knowledge must be knowledge of the self” (in Meyer, 19992, p. 112). “Be passersby” (p. 41) says the Jesus of Thomas. He is unconcerned with the stasis of things. Again, I quote Bloom:

The trouble of finding, and being found, is simply the trouble that clears ignorance away, to be replaced by the gnostic knowing in which we are known even as we know ourselves. The alternative is precisely what Emerson and Wallace Stevens meant by “poverty”: imaginative lack or need. (pp. 111-112)

This Whitmanian Jesus is not the Jesus who urges obeisance to the powers that be but rather the Jesus who Dostoyevsky’s cardinal would put to death. Here is Whitman (1855/1921, p. 289) as Jesus as gnostic:

26 Piety and conformity to them that like. Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like. . . I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue, questioning everyone I meet, Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before? Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense? By Blue Ontario’s Shore

It is in this sense that Nietzsche proposes a solitary path which must lead away before it can ever return. Again, Zarathustra’s admonishments:

You crowd around your neighbor and have fine words for it. But I say unto you: your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves. You flee to your neighbor and would like to make a virtue out of that: but I see through your “selflessness” . . . I teach you not the neighbor, but the friend. (1954, pp. 172-173)

Each of these guides speaks for what Rank would have called “the artist- type,” seemingly forever in conflict with her or his surroundings and epoch. It is not family that such individuals disparage but rather limitation and failure to thrive. They recognize that family may well be the vehicle of such subtle entrapment, often in the name of love. And so, for Rank (1932/1989), Oedipus becomes “collective symbol of a development-process” (p. 69). The friend who Nietzsche would hold before us is precisely the overperson who, like us, has traveled in search of the self and thereby aspired, perhaps, to a higher rung. (“My brothers, love of the neighbor I do not recommend to you: I recommend to you love of the farthest. Thus spoke Zarathustra.”) This is my way, where is yours? But the struggle to be is hardly unilinear. Rank died nearly penniless and hardly embraced. What good did Russia’s outpouring of grief do for the wretched life of the dead Dostoyevsky? Nor does Kafka’s sad story lend any solace. Nietzsche himself never found his soular friend. He wound up breaking under the weight of his genius and isolation and, likely, organic psychosis as well. His final years were spent being cared for by mother and sister who clearly had agendas of their own. It is heartbreaking just to think of it. But then, too, Nietzsche spoke, perhaps, too much for one side, had insufficient compassion for the human frailty (even his own) that is intrinsic. This, after all, was the Grand Inquisitor’s point, something even Kristiana has been able to discern. Listen to Aureus Albus (also known as Aisha), Kristiana’s angelic aspect—the “body” or “circle of light” who comes to the surface during moments of crisis, a shimmering of deep self:

Doctor,

27 Cara is still a ball of nerves. Thankfully, I received a letter from a philosophy professor Anne [Kristiana’s student aspect whose feeling for philosophy amazes instructors] had last semester, along with her final paper on Nietzsche. He sent her this message: Thank you, Kristiana, for your good work and your significant participation in class. You have a very good mind, and, even more important according to Descartes in his ‘Discourse on Method,’ you use it well. He was particularly struck by one of the last paragraphs in her paper: If we are to create whole people of ‘overmen’ who are no longer “deprived of strength,” would we not annihilate ourselves? For there can only be one man on the top, there can only be one winner in a war for power. Someone must lose, someone must submit and this submission—does it make him the weaker? For if he becomes the weaker, he is “to be given every possible assistance” in perishing. And what would “living on the mountain” do for this solitary man, the alone ‘higher type’? For as he looked down in the valley where lived all that was “merely mankind”—all the failures—there would be destruction, there would be nothing to pity, there would be nothing but the loneliness of power. Perhaps this is where this overman would recognize that the success of this annihilation was to become his greatest failure, for he would live lonely and die lonely, basking alone in this uncontested supremacy. If Anne knew how much she did touch this professor, I wonder if she would be so quick to believe that she had “fooled” him into believing in her abilities. Aisha

A profound meditation on the difficulties of departure and the ambiguities of ascent. Kristiana is right once again: Nietzsche did live and die lonely, basking alone in an uncontested, though largely unrecognized, supremacy. And, yet, she also proves Nietzsche’s point in moving away from the nuclear family in order to forge an integrated self with the help of imagination and courage and professional guides, in writing a term paper about a heretical philosopher whose works her parents do not even allow in the home, in her willingness to make the attempt. And she has not yet even gotten to Buber (in

28 Kaufmann, 1964) who teaches selfhood as stepping stone, as springboard to encounter:

One need only ask one question: “What for?” What am I to choose my particular way for? What am I to unify my being for? The reply is: Not for my own sake . . . To begin with oneself, but not to aim at oneself; to comprehend oneself, but not to be preoccupied with oneself. (p. 436)

I teach you not the neighbor but the friend. And so we are returned to the world and the world includes, inexorably, the parents from whom one has—except in the most exceptional of cases—not received all that might have been wished. (No one, Rollo May once reflected toward the end, gets enough love.) And is this not, perhaps, the way it is meant to go? Tribulation and trial often press us to growth, indulgence consorts easily with death. Ortega y Gasset (in Friedman, 1964) writes penetratingly as he articulates the virtue that inheres in necessity and the preordained conflicts of youth:

But if at this period, instead of coming against the world’s resistance for the first time, we find it giving way before us, roused to no waves by our passage, fulfilling our desires with magic docility, our I will fall voluptuously asleep; instead of being revealed to itself, it remains vague. Nothing so saps the profound resources of a life as finding life too easy. (p. 122)

The limitations at home are, in the end, requisite for growth. Kristiana’s experience makes the point poignantly clear, though here, too, we are troubled by the gaping chasm between the few and the many—the Grand Inquisitor’s point yet again. Stephen Mitchell refers in this respect to “unfinished karmic business”: though we change, our themes do not. The relationship between parent and child is fluid, kaleidoscopic, as each generation follows the last. And each one of us constitutes a point on a wave of the present, looking behind as well as ahead. The Tao of things, the ebb and flow of existence, is expressed concisely in a Hindu metaphor:

When the young plant is just sprouting out of the seed or is still weak and tender, it requires seclusion and the protection of a strong thorny fence to keep off cattle that might otherwise eat it or trample upon it and destroy it. But the same shoot, when it develops into a large tree, dispenses with such protection and itself affords shade, sustenance, and protection to cattle and men, without detriment to itself. (In Mitchell, 1991, p. 53)

29 The true Oedipus follows a watercourse way, something difficult for theorists and left-brained psychologists to get. Our templates and theories miss the mark in their linearity. The Indian sage Raman Maharshi was once approached by a novice such that the following dialogue ensued:

Questioner: I want to give up my job and family and stay with you, sir, so that I can be with God. Maharaj: God is always with you, in you. That is what you should realize. Questioner: But I feel the urge to give up all attachments and renounce the world. Maharaj: Renunciation doesn’t mean giving away your money or abandoning your home. True renunciation is the renunciation of desires, passions, and attachments . . . Questioner: At home the bonds of affection are too strong. Maharaj: If you renounce home when you aren’t ripe for it, you only create new bonds. Questioner: Isn’t renunciation the supreme means of breaking attachments? Maharaj: That may be so for someone whose mind is already free from entanglements. But you haven’t grasped the deeper meaning of renunciation. Great souls who have abandoned their homes have done so not out of aversion to family life, but because of their largehearted and all-embracing love for all mankind and all creatures. Questioner: Family ties will have to be left behind sometime, so why shouldn’t I take the initiative and break them now, so that my love can be equal toward all people? Maharaj: When you truly feel this equal love for all, when your heart has expanded so much that it embraces the whole of creation, you will certainly not feel like giving up this or that. You will simply drop off from secular life as a ripe fruit drops from the branch of a tree. You will feel that the whole world is your home. (In Mitchell, pp. 1991, 47-8)

There is no fixity, no blithe resolution, no mathematical schematic for our work and our lives. It is not formulaic but rather process and mystery; humility and compassion are urged. “Every mystery is like a river,” wrote Gabriel Marcel, “which flows into the Eternal, as into the sea” (in Wilde & Kimmel, 1962, p. 434) Emerson had said it quite as eloquently as well: getting stuck in the foothills is Oedipal forfeiture, fear of entering into larger streams.

In Federico Fellini’s masterpiece 8 1/2, we find the protagonist-director Guido at similar crossroads, a bundle of fantasies and memories with no place to go. I have been saying for some time that Fellini is one of the great spellbinders

30 of modern psychology, uncanny explorer of life’s depths and inscrutability. Here is his comment on Mastroianni as Guido as self:

[I attempted] to create the portrait of a man . . . with all his contradictory, nuanced, elusive totality of different realities. A portrait in which all the possibilities of his being happened—their levels, story after story, like in a building whose facade is crumbling . . . A life made up of tortuous, changing, fluid labyrinths of memory, of dreams, of feelings, of the everyday . . . a mingling of nostalgia and presentiment in a . . . mixed up time, where our character doesn’t know who he is anymore or where his life is going. (In Burke, 1976, p.156)

Like Guido (whom Fellini called a “shape-shifting” character), the film itself lacks a unifying thread and begins to “unravel.” “It didn’t have a central core,” said the filmmaker, “nor a beginning, nor could I imagine how it might end” (p. 156). It is the artist-director with vision block, Oedipus mute before sphinx, looking to and fro and stuck in between. Lost and harangued, Guido casts about for direction. In bed with his mistress, he has a dream of his parents, searches for his father as father descends to the grave:

Guido: Father, wait! We talked together so little . . . Father, I have so many questions to ask you.

But father has little to offer in the way of paternal instruction, seems not to have figured out anything of lasting import for himself:

Father: It’s sad for a man to realize how miserably he’s failed, Guido . . . You have been the joy of my life. Ciao, Guido. Ciao, figlio!

Father hands Guido his cape as he lies down in his grave, as though telling the son he is the man he is not, complaining that he would have liked a larger crypt. As Guido turns around, he is embraced by his mother who kisses him on both cheeks and then fully on the mouth before turning into his wife. Once again, it is Oedipal; Guido is stunned:

Mother: Guido, I do the best that I can. What more can I do? Wife: I’m Luisa, your wife. Don’t you recognize me?

And then it’s back to “reality” and the uncertainty of being, to the vagaries of self and the pressures of life. “Do you have a script yet?” asks one of the producers; “Two pages? An idea?” Capisce?

31 Guido is lost without paternal instruction, love and work are a mess. At one point he dons a dough-shaped nose which covers his own as though playing at Pinocchio, the imposter and marionette that he is. Parents unhelpful, he considers the Church and is granted audiences (one real, another fantasied) with yet one more cardinal, a “middle” father of sorts standing halfway between the ones above and below. The omens look good for this Oedipal transfer (“With their backing, Guido,” urges a member of the crew, “you can get everything you need in life”), but listen:

Guido: Your Eminence, I am not happy. Cardinal: Why should you be happy? That is not your task in life. Who said we were put on this earth to be happy? Remember the writings of Origenes—“There is no salvation outside the Church.”

The cardinal’s opening gambit is certainly respectable but quickly devolves into hackneyed talk of further externals while manifesting none of the Grand Inquisitor’s perspective: another surrogate father with substitute verities while the son still looks for the way. Returned to the secular realms, Guido’s assiastants press him for direction. Guido remains unsure without direction of his own, saying, “Don’t you see? I can’t answer.” And the answers that do come when any come at all are hardly what one would expect:

“But how does one do that? How does one proceed? Is there some sure guide?” “No there is none,” said Kafka, shaking his head. “There is no route map on the way to truth. The only thing that counts is to make the venture of total dedication. A prescription would already imply a withdrawal, mistrust, and therewith the beginning of a false path. One must accept everything patiently and fearlessly. Man is condemned to life, not death.” (In Janouch, 1985, p. 156)

“The truth is,” Guido says at last, “I do not know. I seek. I have not found. Only with this in mind can I feel alive.” Just try building a caseload with that!

Do you see here the weight of the matter? Do you see the connection to the lives we each live? Individuals are as rare in our profession as in all the others: try to locate Guido or Kristiana in the theories and techniques we vociferously profess. Mental health, my foot! Family and individual, freedom and destiny, collective and solitary, the gravity of stasis and mystery of self. And, so, Oedipus takes on the most sublime aspects and links us up with the worlds we create. Listen to these words of Robert Coles (1961/1995), the child psychoanalyst who has remained faithful to pretty much everything that matters:

32 When so much of the world faces the anthill of totalitarian living, it is important for us to affirm proudly the preciously individual in each human being and in ourselves as doctors. When we see patients, the knowledge and wisdom of many intellectual ancestors are in our brains, and, we hope, some life and affection in our hearts. The heart must carry the reasoning across those inches or feet of office room. (p. 12)

We could use a few more psychologists to speak up like this: it is Kirk Schneider’s (1998) “science of the heart.” We find an exceptional illustration of what Coles is getting at in Fritz Lang’s (1927/1984) Metropolis, the now classic expressionist film recently updated with color and soundtrack but mostly with scenes which parents called censors had once disallowed. Do you remember the film? The underground city is powered by that same human anthill which Kafka and Coles have described. Father pulls strings from his privileged position in the city above, son chases women in Emersonian poverty; it is the woman as soul who will open his eyes. Father (arch-father) must keep things in line and enlists the master-wizard Rotwang to replace the angelic Maria with a robot, for he fears her role as spiritual rabble-rouser to the throngs below. Father knows just what is at stake, indeed intuits the power of psyche (more powerful, in the end, than instinct or techne): “Keep my son under constant surveillance,” he exhorts. The robot perfected, this conversation transpires between wizard and parent:

Rotwang: The robot is almost perfect. All that’s missing is a soul. Father: You mistaken. It is better without one. Can you decipher their plans?

But the son has already been inspired to venture from home, volunteering his service (in entomological sympathy) at a meaningless shift at “the machine.” His cry as his very strength is depleted recalls Christ on the Cross, his passion and plea: “Father, will these ten hours never end?” And here is Lang as Laing, commenting on family and “family” and the violence implied in self-fulfilling endeavors, immortality projects at home and out there: “The Legend of Babel! We shall build a tower that will reach to the stars!” Of course, plans rarely succeed according to blueprint and this is often why children are called: “Having conceived Babel, yet unable to build it themselves, they hired thousands to build it for them.” It takes a village, my foot. Meanwhile, and before her abduction, Maria preaches to the workers like some timely descendent of John the Baptist. “Be patient,” she exhorts, “he will surely come.” She is heralding none other than Nietzsche’s overperson, the

33 child not afraid to grow up and who will descend “to the depths” in the creative endeavor to become who he or she is and, thereby, inspire and lead: “Between the mind that plans and the hands that build there must be a mediator, and this must be the heart.” And, so, son moved by soul accomplishes his project and takes up the challenge in confronting the old man. “Be their Mediator, Fredor!” urges Maria; “Without the Heart there can be no understanding between the Hands and the Mind.” And it is the spirit of reconciliation that affords us some hope as son—just like Oedipus—bestows grace in the end, reconciling opposites and bringing something new. It is the Indian metaphor, the one with the tree.

We find parallel evocations of what we may call the Electra connection in Russell Banks (1991) elegiac The Sweet Hereafter, a mournful tale about a small town in upstate New York in the aftermath of a school bus accident that takes the lives of its children. We may think of the novel as an updated and inverted telling of Metropolis, one that takes place far, far away from the city. The town, as seen through the successive eyes of several of its members, must deal with the inevitable themes of grieving, loss, and acceptance. The community is besieged with city lawyers all, like Becker’s (1973) suspect psychotherapists, “beaming their brand of inward confident well-being” and communicating their “unmistakable message”—in this case the promise of legal and economic recompense. Much of the town is swayed, aggrieved parents now become children and sheep. Most interesting of all, however, is Nichole, a teenager who has survived the accident as a cripple and whose testimony is now needed to pin the accident (which, in the end, was truly accidental) on manufacturers who are to be held accountable. Nichole, it seems, has been much too close to her father while the mother with a “cheery TV-mom voice” has looked away. After the accident and returned in her wheelchair to a home that had been far, far too Oedipal, Nichole must contend with the platitudes of others who can think of nothing better to tell her than how lucky she is to have survived when so many children did not. Nichole sits in her wheelchair and muses: “I looked at my picture of Einstein. What would he have done, if he’d been in an accident and been lucky like me?” (p. 186). But more than this, the girl is troubled by conscience and by the family’s—and town’s—far too facile recourse to greed. “You have a lawyer? You and Mom?” (p. 167).

At that moment, I hated my parents more than I ever had . . . Dad for what he knew and had done, and Mom for what she didn’t know and hadn’t done—but . . . also . . . for this . . . lawsuit. (p. 197)

Nichole is an astute psychologist in her awareness of the motivation that belies the obsessions with money and blame, “so they didn’t have to face their own pain and get over it.”

34 It is at the deposition that the climactic moment occurs. (“‘I’m ready,’ I said. And I was.”) Although Nichole recalls nothing unusual in events preceding the accident, there, in front of father and lawyer, she suddenly professes to remember it all quite clearly, sees the bus driver Delores and then the speedometer reading seventy-five miles per hour. Do you see? Nichole lies in pursuit of integrity and Oedipal deliverance: more valuable in this instance than facticity or gold. She knows that she has dashed all hopes of successful litigation with a single breath and that the townspeople (because Delores is one of them and has been through enough) can go no further with their scapegoating efforts and will have to face their pain and get over it. In one deft and suspense-filled move, Nichole vanquishes the New York lawyer, triumphs over a hypocritical family and abusive father, and points a way toward rapprochement. “You’d make a great poker player, kid,” concedes the attorney who sees his case disappearing before his eyes. But Nichole is more interested in the reaction of father whom she hopes is not yet beyond reprieve:

I pulled myself away from the table and turned my wheelchair toward Daddy, who was standing now but looking kind of wobbly. (p. 215)

The lawyer can only think in terms of win or lose and, venting evident exasperation and the frustration of defeat, takes the father aside to offer counsel. “A kid who’d do that to her own father is not normal, Sam,” he says, not bothering to mention that he has failed glaringly at parenting himself, his bungled Oedipus following him about like a nemesis. “But Daddy knew why I had lied. He knew who was normal and who wasn’t” (p. 216). As father lifts his crippled daughter into the car to go home, this redemptive dialogue transpires:

“But we knew the truth,” I said. “Don’t we?” “Yes,” he said, and for the first time since before the accident he looked me straight in the face. “We know the truth, you and I.” His large blue eyes had filled with sorrowful tears, and his whole face seemed to beg for forgiveness. (pp. 219-220) And, so daughter, now outgrows the parent and then encourages him along. Nichole is now herself and nurtures the child who is dad. Mark well the pregnant moment, as the earth gives birth to something new. I’m ready I said, and I was. It is the Indian metaphor, the one with the tree. In his painterly film adaptation of Banks’s novel, Atom Egoyan (1997) introduces the theme of the Pied Piper as a backdrop to the story line. It is Nichole herself who first reads the children’s story to children who will themselves perish in the accident. The insertion is altogether fitting, indeed in

35 keeping with all we have been saying about parents and children, conformity and self. The Pied Piper is one who implies authority without merit and, as such, exemplary of what we may call the normative parenting that defines all power plays. The lemming-like children who fall entranced into line are each one of us when we do not think for ourselves: townspeople who follow lawyers with their carrots and suits, psychologists who defer to others (drug representatives, APA shibboleths, insurance agencies, and the like) and who have failed to investigate matters for themselves. This is my way, where is yours? I’m ready I said, and I was.

There is a hallowed film by the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo made in 1966 entitled Father (“APA” in Hungarian: let readers take serendipitous note) and subtitled Diary of A Week. The film begins with a stark frontispiece set against a blank screen that could have come out of Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, or Kafka: “ . . . I confront your failure, you who look human.” In the film, a son looks back on a father who has died in the war and about whom he can retrieve but three childhood memories. It is a pristine meditation on the problem of Oedipus, the son who must create himself. As the boy grows, he fashions his father to suit each passing situation, copying father as he imagines him to have been: father as doctor, father as resistance worker, father as hero, father as friend. In school, the boy is reprimanded for the way he writes the letter “d,” reproduced as he has found it in a postcard among paternal remains. Father is unknown but nonetheless idealized. (“Father never deceived my mother,” boasts the boy to a friend, “nor did she deceive him.”) Father as doctor “dressed in white from head to toe”; doctors of psychology, are you listening? Every year on the day of his birth, the boy is allowed to wear father’s watch—a compelling image, as we have seen: living in another’s time slot and zone. As a youth, the son searches for people who can tell him about his father, about who he really may have been. Despite precious few facts about father’s existence, the son nonetheless clings jealously to the ideas in his head for without these he is cast out to the elements, directionless, alone. “Father gave me such strength,” he reflects to himself, “but why don’t I have courage myself? Why don’t I dare without him?” Just as son lies to himself about father, he is insincere in his dealings with others. And this failing exists in relief against the backdrop of the vast abdication of untold others. From the opening scene right down to the last, we are confronted with images of the ravages of war and totalitarianism, men and women become sheep, and the forgetting of self. Nazis and Communists, fathers and sons, the history of Europe and the failure to thrive. It remains for the youth to meet a young woman (one who will turn out to be the consummate outsider) for his transformation to begin: a diary of a week.

36 Years pass, the boy is “taller than father now” and wears his father’s coat. The son now a young man finds himself as an extra in a film about the war and the deportation of Jews. A yellow star is sewn onto his leather jacket along with the rest. But the scene is problematic, something is not right. “Take off your Star of David,” shouts the director; “Give him a Nazi cap and a gun.” And in an instant, son’s role is changed from suicide case to thug. (In one more our roles have changed from psychologists to technicians, marionettes, and worse.) “Stop laughing,” exhorts the director; “This is not comedy!” Playing the part of one of the victims is a young Jewish woman who, with her own version of the Oedipal puzzle, struggles with past and identity as well. After the filming is done, she walks along the river with the son and reflects:

I want to be proud of that Jewish past for which my parents gave their lives . . . I just don’t know where I belong, where I want to belong, where I can or where I should belong . . . Auschwitz, Auschwitz. I always feel I have something to prove . . .

It is the Holocaust survivor as Pinocchio (indeed, one who considers shortening her nose!). And note, again, the connection between Oedipus and world, the failure at home and the criminal at large:

The Pope at last forgave the Jews for their sins. That means they were guilty of crucifying Christ two thousand years ago. And those who, twenty years ago, let six million Jews be gassed and burned, how soon will they be absolved? You see how maddening this can be, how idiotic this Auschwitz thing is.

For who are those multitudes who turn to look away and who are those brownshirts who carry out their orders? They are sons with fathers not overcome, copyists who haven’t read Whitman or Emerson. The Grand Inquisitor’s scheme has its dark side, it seems. It is interesting, too, that the woman has erred in a converse way, by trying to pass as gentile and thereby flee from the humiliation of her past: a Jungian “running the other way.” The son and the Jewess fall in love, the young man dreams they have a child as if he were already himself. Love outside the confines of family seems to quicken the son’s resolve to rid himself of paternal cobwebs, inhabit his own time and space. He acknowledges now the filling up of uncertainty and emptiness with fantasy and wish. (“No, I only made that story up. Or is it really true?”) Relationship outside the home prompts post-Oedipal scrutiny and confession:

There’s something I must tell you. My stories about Father weren’t true. Not even the one

37 about his coat. Some details were true, I don’t know which anymore. I just had to keep talking. It gave me some relief. Do you understand?

And note, again, the woman as soul and midwife, a reminder of the feminine aspects of change and growth. As the film ends, the son wanders off from a gathering on the banks of the river and takes the existential leap of faith (literally so!) in becoming a man and creating himself, in bringing into being something new:

I must swim across the Danube. For once I must do something by myself. A challenge of strength and perseverance, something that can’t be left half-done and dropped. I must swim alone across the Danube. Not just a boast that father swam across, feeling that I had done it myself. Only the weak make up stories. It’s so good to swim. Calmly, pushing forward with long, measured strokes. I’m still going strong. I can make it. Am I putting on an act? Maybe I am. It’ll be a wonderful feeling reaching the other shore. I must swim across the Danube.

As the camera recedes from the solitary swimmer, we see that there are many others swimming alongside and behind, fellow “single ones,” travelers all seeking to create themselves. I must swim across the Danube. For once I must do something by myself. It is the hero’s journey, the only collectivity we can trust.

The soundtrack to Szabo’s film is based, in part, upon Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony, the Titan, depicting the life of the hero by yet another genius who understood. Mahler seems to have known early in life what his destiny was to be, seems never to have doubted himself—a kind of hallmark, at times, of Oedipal precocity. Father wanted son to become a shopkeeper but knew enough not to stand in the boy’s way. Like Nietzsche, whom he read and indeed quoted (in his music!), Mahler withstood his critics with stoic resolve: “My time will come,” he quietly said. Mahler’s First symphony may be taken as a metaphor for the hero’s quest, an epic work and venture that borrows unabashedly from what it finds at hand, stumbles, loves, and suffers shipwreck (all representations of youth struggling “to put the world together”), yet continues along a wayfaring course. We may think of it—and our film as well—as inward journey, mirror image of the Hollywood version: the psychologist’s Titanic. Gradually, as the music unfolds, we become aware of the preeminent composer of symphonies on grand and metaphysical scales, an individual who has found his own utterly unique voice and work, yet always with a backward gaze, the final movement recapitulating themes from the first as though to remind us of where Oedipus began. It is a quality that will mark all of Mahler’s compositions, the themes and narratives introduced at the start taken up once again at the close. And, further, you can look at Mahler’s oeuvre as a whole,

38 right down to the wistful yet holy Ninth. That symphony concludes with the most moving and ambivalent of endings: a fading out in sighs, but whether resolution or regret it is impossible to say. It is the awareness of ambivalence that inheres in all human endeavor: Oedipus at nightfall as he leans on his cane. I think there is something here, in music as metaphor, as we try to come to terms with the themes of our lives. Schultz was right after all: one’s parents, one’s families of origin, become sphinx-like as myth as the years saunter by. And what is myth in the end but the music of the spheres transposed into narrative and metaphor? Emerson (1893) spoke of “the power of music, the power of poetry to unfix” (p.32). Mahler apprehended this insight as well. That early symphony was accompanied by program notes he would later discard. He was vexed by the excessive devotion of audiences to the nailing down of music, indignant at the over-zealous need to grasp what in the end is never fully disclosed, remains mystery and partly submerged. And, yet, the themes with which he wrestled (the great themes, indeed) were marked by an ongoing dialectic between music and word, experience and reverie, metaphor and metaphor. At the heart of it all, inexorably, and in his own words, was “a program struggling to get out.” It would seem that there is in each one of us, too. Mahler died at pretty much the same age as Becker, another genius’s work foreshortened by fate. As he lay on his deathbed, he moved a finger as if a baton, still directing incorporeal musicians as though through some invisible, inaudible score. Right down to the end, he mediated on the Sphinx’s riddle, on beauty and being, eternity and time. Despite metaphysical proclivity, he never forsook the earthly realms with their all-too-human circumscription. His last uttered word is said to have been Mozart. Individuation, my foot.

Have I mentioned Dylan? Our contemporary world poet, like Mahler, seems to have discerned long before the rest of us what it was all about. He left home early, admonishing himself against too much looking back. A year at college seems to have been more than enough. (“Twenty years of schoolin’,” he would sing, “and they put you on the day shift.”) Chancing upon a copy of Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, he hitched straightaway for New York and another man on his deathbed and for destiny. Listen to his rambling poem, “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” and see if you do not hear the voice of a young man who knows who he is and where he is going, what one can get out of heroes and what one cannot. Woody Guthrie would be—again, at a very early age—Dylan’s “last hero.” Consider these remarks in the liner notes for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963):

The most important thing I know I learned from Woody Guthrie. I’m my own person. I’ve got basic common rights—whether I’m here in this country or any other place. I’ll never finish

39 saying everything I feel, but I’ll be doing my part to make some sense out of the way we’re living and not living, now. All I’m doing is saying what’s on my mind the best way I know how. And whatever else you say about me, everything I do and sing and write comes out of me.

The youthful poet understood that even the hero is mere midwife to the self. He could not have been more than twenty-two when he got the message, turned on his heels, and brought forth in the world something/someone entirely new. In 11 Outlined Epitaphs (Dylan, 1965, liner notes) insight becomes poetry as the young artist speaks to Oedipus apprehended and Oedipus, momentarily, resolved:

an’ every action can be questioned leavin’ no command untouched an’ took for granted obeyed an’ bowed down to forgettin’ your own natural instincts . . . an’ I stand up an’ yawn hot with jumpin’ pulse never tired never sad never guilty for I am runnin’ in a fair race with no racetrack but the night an’ no competition but the dawn

And so Dylan seems almost to unravel the knot, getting on with himself without ghosts by his side and searching for post-Oedipal deliverance:

yes it is I who is poundin’ at your door if it is you inside

(“Life is a holiday,” says Guido to his wife at the end, “let’s live it together.”) And yet Dylan, like the rest of us, has stumbled at times and may, perhaps, even stumble again. As we have said, Oedipus is not simple. There are no easy answers, especially for geniuses, and the ending is always the same.

This, however, was supposed to be an essay on Oedipus, on fathers and mothers and, perhaps, Freud. And here he is extemporizing about music and Mahler and even Mozart, about cinema and Dylan and song. Clearly the earmark of some cognitive slippage, surely he’ll say something else about Freud. The Viennese composer once consulted the Viennese doctor. He suffered with too much personal tragedy and with too scant a cosmological defense. The two great men (the artist and theorist) strolled together for four tranquil hours through a small town on the Baltic coast, the conversation turning on matters of

40 family of origin, of course, on Mahler’s pained memories of altercations between an oftentimes explosive father and a mother felt to have been unfairly abused. During one such remembered incident, the boy Mahler ran in anguish out of the family home only to be confronted with a street musician playing on his hurdy-gurdy a common folksong, the mawkish tune seeming to mock the child’s own intimations of high personal tragedy. And it is true that Mahler’s music is marked by an eerie juxtaposition of the most resplendent passages alongside the quotidian, even the grotesque. Despite Mahler’s absolute lack of any prior experience with analysis, Freud later commented that he had never met anyone who seemed to understand his self-proclaimed science with such speed and facility. Almost twenty years later Freud (1928/1959) took up Dostoyevsky and his masterwork in a paper entitled “Dostoyevsky and Parricide.” There he praises The Brothers Karamazov as “the most magnificent novel ever written” (p. 177), citing the parable of the Grand Inquisitor as “one of the peaks in the literature of the world” hardly to “be valued too highly.” There, too, he sets artist before theorist (like Becker on Kafka!) in a concession marked by uncommon humility: “Before the problem of the creative artist,” wrote the theorist, “analysis must, alas, lay down its arms” (p. 177). Freud had his moments and certainly his brilliance; this is something else about Freud. Oh father! Oh mother! Oh certainty! Oh Freud!

Becker’s Kafka and Nietzsche’s metamorphoses, then: mirrored images of humanity and Oedipus, the Janus-faced puzzles of identity and time. A womb and matrix with which to contemplate our lives. Kafka’s despair at ever overcoming the family scene (though he himself traveled much further from home than most of us of us ever will) and Nietzsche’s offer of this-worldly triumph (though he lived a wretched life and died an inglorious death). Paradox and contradiction (ambiguity, the real philosopher’s stone). A juxtaposition of neurosis and genius, child and family, self and other, the implacable tension between local resistance and the courage to be. A meditation on Oedipus and human being (sphinx-like because part creaturely and part divine), on our fears of life and fears of death, on paradise lost and found and then lost and found once more. It is a numinous theme, at last, the very heart of what we ought to be calling psychology, the stuff of triumph and tragedy, limitation and legend, confinement and release. Freud was right not to let go of his mythological riddle-solver, though to ours the answers do not come so speedily nor will they seem always the same. Let us summon up our own courage and give this latter- day Oedipus the renewed respect and reverence that our discourse deserves. Let us pay homage to that winged apparition who would bid us face ourselves but in the end will take us anyway. “Know thyself,” said those ancient Greeks, and yet in moderation. We bow down before the mysteries of time and identity, looking back to see from where we have come, hoping thereby to locate where it is that we stand, the better to compass just where on earth we are going.

41 Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom? Broader and deeper we must write our annals.

ART CREDITS “Family Maps” [acrylic/pencil, original 32”x22”] is a painting completed in May ‘98 by Mele (“Melody Lee”: note, again, the inevitability of song), the child within Kristiana who is artist and whose work has matured dramatically with the progression of therapy and time. From the earliest sessions, Kristiana would pull eerie and evocative crayon pictures out of her pockets in the middle of the hour and present them to me, attempts to tell her story and help a struggling therapist along. Mele tended to be playful and childlike in those early days but has grown increasingly solemn and anxious as we have moved forward: obeisance to the seriousness of art, embrace of calling. When I asked Cara (“Cara Peale”), inner guide, for permission to include clinical material for an essay I was writing about child and parent, this picture was “sent” instantaneously to Mele’s inner eye. She painted it the following weekend. Unschooled and unimpressed by my mention of cubist influences (here, the breaking down of forms into geometric slabs of color) suddenly in evidence in her work, Mele responds: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just paint what I see.” Mele resides in Cara’s world of reaction and tears but receives “colors” from Lee, a rarely seen and younger child in a world of original trauma and blood: the wound as precursor to art. During fallow periods, Mele will complain of “losing [her] hands,” an expression of the turmoil within that results from an inability to “speak” in visual terms. Mele: Oedipal storyteller, Oedipal eye. We note, first of all, mother’s near-center position in the painting. Stern and domineering, she has her hands placed squarely on Mele’s breast, as if restricting the natural development of art and, indeed, imagination itself. Once again, it’s not simply a matter of sex. Mother seems to look beyond her daughter, whose creativity she nonetheless tries to forestall. Her gaze (it is, indeed, almost inward) is more probably, albeit unconsciously, on her own stillborn Oedipus, which expresses its abject failure as straight repetition compulsion (bad music), solely what it knew before. Wildly abusive as she has been, mother’s violence has, at is core, less to do with her children than with her past. By not looking more honestly into this, she has LIED and continues to perpetuate the sham: the lie which one lies to oneself. Mother: Oedipal rout, Oedipal backlash. To Mele’s left is Meg (“Margaret Christine Becker”), the part of Kristiana’s consciousness that was left behind to experience the original abuse. Utterly eccentric and given to solitude but with uncanny and oddball senses of perspective and humor, Meg emerged after the first year of therapy. She has become the funniest one in the bunch, a product, she says, of her environment and, secretly, Cara’s favorite. Meg and Mele hold hands, suggesting that deliverance lies, at least partly, in art. As therapy moves forward, Meg will continue to grow but only so far for, as we see, there is little headroom remaining. By therapy’s completion she will have DIED, foreknowledge of which leads her (and others as well) to all sorts of maneuvers in the interests of forestalling progress. Margaret Christine Becker: Oedipal scapegoat, Oedipal oddity. To mother’s right is father who, albeit sturdy in outward appearance, looks intently to his spouse for Oedipal direction. His eyes are wide with anxiety and his hand presses resolutely upon three-year-old Sharon’s head. Described in one of the earliest sessions as “Mr. Cardboard,” father is sometimes depicted as chained to his work or, alternatively and in Laingian terms, as “a clam on the body of his wife,” though there is much evidence that he was more than mere bystander in the patient’s tortured past. The red question mark over his head is a clue that there is more to the story than we have heard. With respect to his wife, father is willfully BLIND (it is Oedipal!). It is, as we know, often easier that way. Father: Oedipal enigma, Oedipal cowardice. Sharon (“Sharon Nicole”) is, for the moment, the last of the “alters” to emerge, the result of Kristiana’s initial act of “going away” at the age of three and protected within until the inner narrative could finally be shared and, thereby, unfold and play itself out. She is meant to be the only one who will

42 grow up without hearing voices and who will one day become the part of the patient that will function with relative equanimity in what will remain “a very turbulent world.” Sharon is said to be the child of Alpha and Omega, abusive parental introjects who are two of six “Tall People” (a system of Fury-like sadists depicted structurally as being separated from the “house” which constitutes the two primary worlds of Kristiana’s experience, this in keeping with its vestibular presence in the psyche), from whom she was taken in infancy (it is Oedipal!) and hidden. She has blue eyes, as do all the Tall People, something which marks them as different from the others in Kristiana’s inner world and which helped her in childhood to explain her abuse by predators she had taken as family. (Blue eyes and brown eyes, Jews and Nazis: wars generally start at home.) Sharon is, at the moment, closest to Meg, who is, however, less than enthusiastic about her arrival: sibling rivalry of sorts. (Meg is, nonetheless, not insensible to the problems that inhere in growing up with the wrong kinds of parents. “I don’t have any parents,” she proudly proclaims, “and look how I turned out”: an insufficient argument against parenthood!) For the moment, Sharon remains a child who likes to hear children’s stories and views her therapists as adoptive parents and, as we see, is not beyond placing her thumb in her mouth for “self- soothing”: Oedipal elixir. She is Kristiana’s DESTINY. Sharon: Oedipal innocence, Oedipal hope. Behind the parents is a distorted clock, its numbers reversed and its hands (all four of them) pointing almost magnetically toward mother. Family time is set by mother, but parents jointly (because father will not think or act for himself) block the patient’s emergence into the world beyond. (“I will never become what I was meant to now,” Cara had written in our session.) It as if the clock itself begins to take on face-like qualities, fitting its own contours with those of the parents and becoming a mere epiphenomenon of that baseline reality. The clock seems to denote family time and orientation as opposed to the time that disappears when Kristiana retreats into her own world and the time that might be hers if she could cross the river and inhabit her own time and place. (“I must swim across the Danube. A challenge of strength and perseverance. I must swim across the Danube.”) Such journeying would, constitute real time for the patient (no longer siphoned, preempted, or reversed). If she is not yet there, she nonetheless sees more clearly than most the distortions that inhere in the proximal world. The “Five” are introjected representations of Kristiana and her siblings, all deeply troubled in real life, albeit in strikingly divergent ways. One, Two, Three and Four all point, yet again, to mother, once BELIEVED and now more often blamed but still the benchmark of familial reality. They are red and bloodstained and emerge out of a background of black or night or “willessness” occasionally personified as a sinister figure known as Stephen (father’s name): Oedipal void and nothingness. High above (like a good “overpatient,” Kristiana’s reservations about Nietzsche notwithstanding), we see a representation of Kristiana’s introjected counterpart, Five, the youngest of the siblings and the only one who, inwardly, is not wholly defined by mother and “family.” Like Kristiana at her core, Five is secretly but steadfastly ALIGNED with the “circle of light” sometimes personified as Aisha (“Aureus Albus”): an expression of the celestial life force, the solar yellow which (like the black) is rarely encountered directly, the being that is life and opposes the nonbeing of death. The patient in her radical inwardness has, precociously, already glimpsed the “thousand suns” we find mentioned in ancient Indian scripture. Unlike parents and siblings, she will have no need to thrash about in search of external proof: Oedipal renunciation of systems. This is the “inner light” which has been there from the start, a beacon which once led the way in and now leads the way out yet which is not to be found in our texts or our lectures or those APA-sanctioned manuals of treatment and “care.” Five: Oedipal lodestar, even soul. We are as fortunate as the patient that we have arrived in time and, thank God, with our own souls at least marginally intact: Oedipal sympathy and encounter. There are, no doubt, more technical ways to describe a person’s inner landscape and narrative, ways better fitted to those prepackaged programs we are obliged to endure. These days, however, I prefer this more phenomenological, indeed pictorial, rendering. (“I just paint what I see.”) I can imagine no better proof for the urgency of our work, for the necessity of

43 becoming who one is: Oedipal challenge, Oedipal imperative. We are all stories in the end, Oedipal stragglers and now and then adepts, parents and children who lean. We are poised here precariously, and ever so briefly, tugged to and fro between sun and the night. Who talks of victory? Who talks of certainty? Objectivity, my foot. Shall we then, as children, enter the Kingdom? It is there in each one of us, too. This would make, perhaps, a pretty good ending but for the fact that I have neglected to mention John Urbain’s “Beach Hut” [collage/acrylic, original 8”x10”], and Urbain is my friend. The collage, here inadequately rendered, is a beautiful example of the artist’s work. Sufficiently analyzed and now in his eighties, Urbain looks back to a home and childhood (ones that seems to lack fixed boundaries and fold in on themselves: protected, cryptic, almost complete) in which he sees his mother or father and sometimes himself. And, yet, for the “artist type,” past can turn at once into present or future, and, so, Urbain sees sometimes his daughter and granddaughter as well. It is all—as Kristiana also reminds us—a matter of perspective. Note the joy in form and nature, the sand and the sky and the sea; note also the shifting light. (“Brings some shadow/that is good enough for us, Doctor/thanks for the shadows.”) Observe, too, the serene acceptance, the lack of fixity or nails. Alienated in youth by orthodox interpolations of Jesus’ message, the artist nonetheless has gained gnostic awareness of temporality and place. He lives with all the simplicity and grace of a Zen monk (no ripples) and “speaks” wisely, though quietly, about life and time and collage. We are all passersby, pieces of pieces, striving to discern the design. Urbain: Oedipal perspective, Oedipal aesthetics. Urbain, the fisherman and friend.

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