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Medicine's Original Psychodrama Illustrated

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Medicine's Original Psychodrama Illustrated Association for Medical Humanities 8th Annual Conference: The Drama of Medicine University of Leicester Session 4a: Once upon a time Medicine’s Original Psychodrama: the Homeric Hymn to Hermes Professor Zoë Playdon 13 July 2011 The phrase ‘Once upon a time’ powerfully and evocatively reminds us of an element fundamental to our consciousness, the relationship between the part and the whole. Philosophically, we feel this as the relationship between our life-in-time as biological beings and our life-in-eternity as a zoological species. Psychologically, we express it as the relationship between the emergent individual consciousness and the wine- dark sea of the collective unconscious. Mythologically, it is told as the interpenetration of the personal and the archetypal. However, to the Greek mind, these three intertwined meanings, which we have to reach for analytically, since we have only one term for the concept, were instantly apparent, encapsulated in their language as two distinct words for life: bios – biology, individual life in time – and zoe, zoology, archetypal life in eternity. Part Whole Time Eternity Individual Collective Conscious Unconscious Personal Archetypal Bios Zoe This relationship between bios and zoe, between time and eternity, between the individual and the archetypal, is the central concern of Greek myth, exploring for us the emergence of newness, reawakening our awareness of individual actions within eternal values, requiring us to find personal responses to collective change. The fullness of myth’s meanings, its luminous resonances, can only be explored while in its presence – as William Blake puts it: Those who bind to themselves a joy Do the winged life destroy; But those who kiss the joy as it flies Live in Eternity’s sunrise.1 1 Blake, W. (1972) ‘Poems from the Note-Book 1793, 59’ Complete Writings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London: Oxford University Press, p. 184. 1 Like all art, and indeed, like patient care, meaning is located in the immediate encounter, as the relationship between subjects. These subjects are not simply singular but, in Thomas Mann’s phrase, are always ‘opened behind’2 to admit, constellate with, become part of, other subjects. So, as the contemporary mythologist Jules Cashford points out, ‘We are all born into a story. We enter the story of our family, which changes as we enter it’.3 Our experience of myth, as the cultural theorists say, is intersubjective, co-constructed, provisional, located, inscribed, contextualised: it inspires the flight of our imagination, it touches our deepest intuitions, it requires our complex emotional and intellectual responses – all at the same time. For the Greek of the 6th - 4th century BCE, the purpose of myth was to educate through recreating a specific emotional experience, with the intention of providing auditors with an opportunity for deep insight, and thereby changing their ways of seeing and being. Originally sung as part of a lyrical tradition that comes down to us in the Homeric Hymns,4 myths provided the dramatic base for ritual that developed into theatre. Small wonder, then, that to our Greek, attendance at theatre was 'an act of worship, and from the social point of view obligatory',5 with the front seats reserved for State officials, all of whom were priests, including the priest of Asklepios, the god dedicated to medicine. Whether it be the story of a person, a profession, or a culture, no story is complete without its Founding Story. These ‘Stories of Origin, or Myths of Creation . are sacred stories which explore a vision of the whole universe and the place of human beings, and all other beings, within it.’6 For Western biomedicine and its doctors, their story ‘opens behind’ to Hippocrates, and Asklepios, and overflows into the fullness of myth: into Chiron the Centaur, the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, Perseus and the Gorgon, Demeter and Persephone, and far-shooting Apollo. But presiding over the profession, providing its founding story, lies the myth of Hermes and his numinous symbol, the Caduceus, the staff with two intertwined serpents. First, then, I should like to consider the main drama of the myth, the relationship between Hermes and Apollo; then I should like to relate Hermes’s attributes to medicine; and thereby explain why the Caduceus is the symbol both of Hermes and of Western biomedicine. The story of the Hymn to Hermes is one of how Hermes achieves a relationship with Apollo, in order to be taken seriously and to win his place in Olympus. Imagination and intuition are always seeking entry to our rational minds, which may need to be tricked or charmed into recognising them, as Hermes the Imagination has to trick Apollo the Literal-minded. At the point at which Apollo discovers that he has no choice but to accept the new reality that is Hermes – for he cannot stop him – he also discovers that Hermes brings wonderful gifts, which fill him with ‘a deep and 2 Mann, T. (1936) Joseph and His Brothers. Vol. 1. ‘The Tales of Jacob’. Translated by . New York: Alfred A. Knopfler, p. 78. 3 Cashford, J. (2010) Gaia. London: Kingfisher Art Productions, p. 2. 4 Cashford, J. (2003) The Homeric Hymns. London: Penguin. 5 Harrison, J. E. (1913) Ancient Art and Ritual. London: Oxford University Press, p. 10. 6 Cashford, J. (2010) Gaia. London: Kingfisher Art Productions, p.2. 2 Apollo, Maia, the infant Hermes & Zeus Caeretan black figure hydria Sixth century BCE, Louvre, Paris irresistible longing’ to make them his own. What is more, when Hermes gifts the lyre to Apollo, it awakens Apollo’s own generosity and he, too, invests Hermes with unique gifts and attributes. The point is, that it is a relationship that transforms both of them. Let us look a little more closely at the qualities that belong to each initially. Hermes with Lyre and Caduceus Apollo with Lyre and Raven Red-figure vase. 495-490 BC White kylix. 490 BC British Museum Delphi Museum Apollo in the Hymn to Hermes is ‘Apollo the Archer’, ‘Phoebus Apollo’, ‘Far-Worker’, ‘Lord of the Silver Bow’. The wealth of his ‘great house’ with its ‘beautiful tripods/ and cauldrons and gold/ and piles of gleaming iron’ is described by Hermes to Leto, while Hermes describes Apollo to his face as ‘most violent of all the gods’, a reputation that Apollo seeks to live up to, ignoring Zeus’s direct instructions by trying to bind Hermes with ropes of willow, just as Maia had said he would. ‘Phoebus Apollo’, literally ‘Bright Apollo’ is, of course, the single, focused point of consciousness which is so poised on the threshold of good and bad that it becomes dangerous, like the sun, a mercilessly brilliant radiance that leaves no shade, that burns all that try to oppose it. In this negative aspect, he symbolises the remorseless 3 intellect’s desire for absolute fact, and the ruthless elimination of anything that stands in its way. When he directs it on you it is not possible to get out of the way of his deathly radiance, for he is the ‘Far-Worker’, ‘Apollo the Archer’ whose deadly arrows come from afar and never miss their target. As ‘Lord of the Silver Bow’, therefore, to Apollo belongs those qualities of absolute concentration and complete focus, to the exclusion of all other feeling, that we find, for example, in the statue of the Charioteer dedicated at his shrine at Delphi. It is, of course, typical of the so-called ‘medical model’, the focus on a literal target of diseased flesh, using an intellect that rigorously examines and excludes all possibilities until it has found its single target and achieved its aim. Apollo Belvedere c. 120-140. Copy of bronze original 350-325 BC Vatican Museum Hermes, however, presents us with a quite different kind of consciousness. Specifically, he is the ‘Slayer of Argos’, the hundred-eyed giant, Argos Panoptes, the All-Seeing, an image of the over-literal, hypervigilant mind. Just as Hermes charms Apollo with his lyre, so he charms to sleep Argos with the pipes he made after he had given the lyre to Apollo – and slays him. As Kerenyi puts it, Hermes ‘sees through’7 the ‘gleaming shell’ of the tortoise to its potential for music, just as he sees through shining Apollo to his potential as a musician. Hermes is the power of the Imagination, that not only sees newness everywhere but brings it into being, demonstrated by his invention both of fire and of the lyre, both literal fire and the imaginative fire of creativity, both the literal music of the lyre and the intuitive ‘joy and love and sweet sleep’ that it evokes. Just as he transforms the tortoise, so he transforms Apollo, with a winking intimation that the two may have more in common than either realise, since while Hermes can pick up the tortoise/ Apollo and transform them, Apollo drops Hermes as soon as he picks him up, and when he tries ‘to bind Hermes with strong ropes’: 7 Kerenyi, K. (1976) Hermes: Guide of Souls. Translated by Murray Stein. Zurich: Spring Publications, p. 26. 4 . the ropes would not hold him and the thongs of willow fell far away from him and at once took root in the earth, there, beneath their feet, and, intertwining with one another, they easily tangled up all the wild-roving cattle . Apollo watched in wonder. Hermes Slaying Argos Red-figure vase, c. 500 BC Kunst Historisches Museum, Vienna Throughout the Hymn, Hermes is called ‘Prince of Thieves’, a title which he confers upon himself and that Apollo confirms, and the Hymn’s opening comedy is the deliberately ridiculous way in which Hermes first steals Apollo’s cattle, then openly lies about the theft, while making clear by various whistles and glances that he is lying.
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