ELDERS ACADEMY PRESS

So, what we call modern psychology must address these problems in its own way: Freudian, Object-relations, Humanistic, Transpersonal, as I have inferred, they sometimes draw near the center. Still, some of the boldest modern experiments, from Kafka and Finnegans Wake to post-modernist novels, are paralleled in psychology's effort to have the courage (as yet very feeble) to move toward the demanding new Daseinsanalysis rooted in Heideggerian thought and pioneered by Binswanger and Medard Boss.

Greatness

There is a difficult question that insists upon inclusion here. In view of the urgent problems of our daily lives, the world-wide destruction and confusion, what help can we really expect from literature? A fine answer comes, I think, from Donald A. Stauffer of Princeton University, who phrases it this way in his book on the development of Shakespeare's moral ideas:
In the big world, political, economic, and social pressures are so strong that there seems little time for the main question: how do the best individuals think human life should be led? Literature, of course, gives the most comprehensive answers to such a question.

Indeed, like all our other encounters, literature cannot fail to influence us - it gives us an intense experience - life, rich in time. It is broad and tolerant, yet committed to finding and nourishing lives of quality. In some way then, all phases of a study of psychology and literature must turn and return to the human capacity for joy and suffering, but especially to the conversion of that suffering into compassion (the movement, in German, from leiden to mitleiden). Nonetheless, as put forth in works by writers like Dostoevski or Rilke, this is a sequence that does not wish to avoid harsh experience, for, as Rilke asks in a very late poem, without the harshness, how shall we know tenderness.

The conversion of experience into compassion leads literature to greatness - the Mahabharata, Sophocles, Shakespeare - by which I mean the near-perfect statement of largeness, fullness of life, insight and intensity. It is just such steadiness of vision that we need to prevent our succumbing to a constant temptation in our splintered and ambiguous Twenty-first Century world: becoming so convinced of the growth of evil and degeneration that we cannot see the many real achievements of our time or, conversely, frightened by the accelerating onrush, the proliferation of points of view and moralities, we try to turn back to old-fashioned virtues, to attitudes that used to work, at least partially, in another timeframe. In Thomas Mann's last novel, Professor Kuckuck explains to Felix Krull, the learner, that all levels of human life exist simultaneously, the brilliant and the stupid, the compassionate and the vicious.

Thus hard as it is, when we have a purpose, and seek reform, we cannot randomly attack all things. And it is here that literature can help us with our psychology of anger and disgust. It says we should not have a purpose but be a purpose. Great literature seeks to show the whole picture: the deepening, urgent needs of humanity, the lack of final answers, the partial victories, the good moments, the glorious moments.

Life-in-progress

Psychology and Literature? A further distinction between these two areas of human endeavor should be stressed. Literature offers an already-lived fate, depicted, completed. No one can prevent Quentin Compson's suicide in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. but someone might be able to absorb from Shreve's experience, as the friend of the suicide, how better to understand the messages, in certain cases. When Quentin said: "I'm all right, he meant. "I'm going to be all right." The human concern of his friends was not skilled enough. And this is confusing, difficult territory; in many ways the most upsetting set of problems any of us will ever have to encounter.

The therapist working with a client is dealing with a life-in-progress, a fate not yet completed. The fundamental reason for this activity taking place is, or should be, the belief in possible changes, in altering the course of that individual's life.

Recall that Freud said letting psychologically distressed people read books about psychology would be about as helpful as passing out menus in a time of starvation. It should be clear by now that these pages will develop a line of inquiry that bypasses such contentions. The literature we shall be looking at reveals, it does not categorize a problem in the manner of a psychology textbook. Hopefully we are open, ready to receive and to learn, not threatened, as were those unfortunate starving ones alluded to by the great pioneer.

Oblivion

But now it may begin to seem that these literary works are somewhat naive, that they know nothing of the destructive world of "abnormal" psychology. On the contrary, some of the finest literature is notorious for seeking new hope in its most negative and destructive pages. We might even say it carries out the primal function of the Hindu deity Shiva preparing for the new forms of Brahma by dancing the older lives and structures into oblivion. This may strike us in the West as a harsh and unfeeling view of life. But, in fact, it reveals a particular strength in our writers and artists. Things we hesitate to embrace, things we tremble to abandon, chaotic newness and old sentimentalities, literature confronts these and everything with patience and frustration and fury, to prod us along our necessary path, however much we rationalize our hesitant but doomed position.

And, on this subject, criticism, it seems to me, can no longer afford to be diffident, abstruse or even sophisticated, if you will accept an old-fashioned phrase. Its ancient task: to illuminate the work of art in all of the latter's suggestive contours and in the social structure from which it emerged, can acknowledge the heart-felt concerns, the ultimately nourishing stance of a work of fiction, which the artist must conceal with his irony, his oblique attack, his symbolic references.

Lengthy acquaintance

A case in point is certainly found in the work of James Joyce. How much careful reading and responding is required by Ulysses, before we get beyond the ironic mockery and find the warmth, not only of Leopold Bloom, but of the author himself, that magician, that magical, alchemical combination of Bloom and Stephen. Only at moments do we get a chance to see through the author's pose of aesthetic distance, as the cadences of the writing, the poetry, betray the writer's true sympathies (exactly the way Mozart's music sometimes contradicts what is being said in the libretto.) For instance, when Leopold Bloom defends his belief in love against the bigotry and hate of the Citizen or, even more striking, at the end of the Brothel episode, when Bloom's integrity and sensitivity allow him to speak true poetry - Stephen, in a stupor, is only quoting Yeats - and grant him a vision of his lost son, Rudy. No one could have formed such scenes without being deeply convinced of the necessity for Bloom's existence, the need for his heart and feelings. These examples could be multiplied - passing through the difficulties to the core of the Quixote and of Moby Dick and of the Brothers Karamazov, where Dostoevski only seems to be telling the reader his final perception of life process, whereas we actually reach that perception only by our lengthy acquaintance and struggle with the novel's form.

Turning inward

As the Twentieth Century hurried toward its conclusion, both literature and psychology showed symptoms of major changes. As previously noted, the practice of psychology is having difficulty leaving the theoretical basis offered by Nineteenth Century science and positivism. But the necessary new perception of the human being, emerging steadily, inexorably, with all the global changes in our lives, can no longer be fitted into such rusty, antiquated constructs. Just as a myth, appropriate and helpful in its time, can become a danger when clung to in a new era, so too an excellent philosophy (Cartesian, Kantian, Hegeli-an) can actually impair our ability to perceive what must now be perceived.

The situation of literature is somewhat different, but in tracing its strange modern contortions, we may see it responding to similar pressures. There are now, for example, works of literature which embellish previous works of literature. Writers want to imagine what happened to certain characters in Jane Eyre or in Wuthering Heights where those novels are silent. Still baffled by Hamlet, we want to know more about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hermann Hesse anticipated this phenomenon, in a sense, in his last novel The Glass Bead Game, as he depicted an elite artistic-research school where symbols of symbols were inter-related and art had ceased to be as immediate a picture of life as possible. In all of this,there is a solipsistic turning inward for material, which coincides with Italo Calvino's assertion that the Sirens, in the Odyssey, are singing the Odyssey.

We should have been able to see this artistic phenomenon approaching. It was there as a possibility when Cézanne painted a table with various objects from several perspectives at once. He was saying, toward the end of the Nineteenth Century, that we have to acknowledge the multilayered complexities of life - the reality of this table-top is not just what one pair of eyes would see. Subsequently, much great art of our time has elaborated on this concept, frequently taking us to baffling regions where we must accept the simultaneity of so many possibilities.

And, in a similar sense, Proust's In Search of Time Lost as well as Mann's The Magic Mountain and the work of Heidegger and of Einstein have all suggested a similar revolution in our knowledge of reality as they added a different awareness of Time as the key to reaching our own horizon of thought and activity; an awareness that has now become part of our psychology.

Images: bright and dark

The global urgency and the untold sufferings of so many of the world's peoples - especially bitter in our enlightened and technologically advanced age - are happening as the forms of literature, film, poetry and the fine arts are generally reaching rarer and more difficult areas of expression. That is, they seem more and more divorced from the immediate world of feeling and drudgery. But we, as all previous generations, have our vision. The vision is composed of theory, of intuition and a poetic quest established centuries ago.

That neighboring universe of sensitivity and thought is in a sense not very close to the daily lives of the citizens, although it has its roots there. Art was always an intensification, a symbolic representation of the events of life: what might have been, superimposed upon a realistic effort to see what is.

And, concerning the literature to be examined here, another question emerges inevitably. Are these materials socially, politically relevant? Are they responsible? Do they address today's burning issues?

Well, whatever challenge is here now or is to come - whatever we must be - all things are contained in these depth soundings of human nature. And they are generally works that set the stage for many of the changes now taking place at dizzying speeds.

Morals, ethics, obligations, responsibilities; what are they? Where are they now? Look into the brightness and darkness of the great images.

The hay-hut

Two major creators of our century, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, have pointed the way in this regard. The surface of great literature is only the paradigm, the possibility of a universal psychology.

In Mann's The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp has his own intensified life moment, an epiphany of understanding that we all hope to have, that takes him far beyond what he might have expected in the ordinary occasions of his dull routine in Hamburg. His glimpse of utopia, inner light and inner bliss, is offered to him by the sudden intrusion of vicious death in his dream beside the hay-hut in a Swiss mountain blizzard. He senses that everything depends on the way he can convert fear of death into a deep love of life.

But that evening, that very evening, back at the hotel, what he had dreamed was no longer very clear or insistent. He will be given that note, that song in the face of death, only one more time - in the author's mind and sensibilities - as he faces his probable end in World War I. This is an honest psychology.

The author does not pretend that we can sustain ultimate insights granted to us by peak experiences. It is enough that they can reveal a fundamental attitude or stance in life. This will determine our relationship to love and hate and give us, as Hans Castorp says, sweet dreaming.

Moments

And, once again, in Joyce's Ulisses, the author shows the same ceaseless flow of life, punctuated with occasional moments affording the ecstasy we all live for. It is the memorable climax of the novel when Leopold Bloom, at the conclusion of the Circe episode, is given a vision of his lost son, his lost paradise and hope, just for a moment and then the plot moves on to other things, other events of that night in Dublin. Although the "dailiest day in the world" has been revealed as quite extraordinary in many ways, this special moment cannot be sustained. It would be too powerful for any of us, its great meaning would be reduced to non-meaning, both in our lived lives and in the dramatic economy of the novel in which it occurs.

This literature instructs us, then, in a priceless psychological attitude, as does Rilke's greatest poetry and Van Gogh's Provençal paintings, namely, to be aware of the good moments that come to us in our life-times - no matter how radically these may differ from our plans, constructions and hopes. Is it not probable that literature has sensed this need as humanity, collectively and individually, is about to be required to live less ostentatiously, more frugally and without the pleasure of exploitation?

Anchoring

One significant reason, I feel, for the new wave of books which expand on previous books - even to the point of examining the "real" life of Dorothy (of the Wizard of Oz) when she was living in Kansas - is the combination of security, of anchoring in a known pattern, just as Joyce did in using Homer as a scaffolding to give pattern and cohesion to Bloomsday, and then the venturing outward into the sub-atomic, spatial-galactic moral world our scientific explorations have led us to, until finally mockery and satire must seem our only defense. How often the practitioner of psychology experiences echoes of this larger trend.

Many young college students, not to mention the general youthful population, are not aware that their major preoccupation is with satire and mockery. It gets new names like 'camp' and 'cheese', but it is a basic refusal nonetheless. Only the finest creators of our culture, the genuine seers, can point from that mocking stance to the eternal flow of human spirit. If we move only from Kafka onward, through Slaughterhouse 5 and Brazil and Cities of the Red Night, where are we? And these are works of great quality compared to the jejune, forgettable offerings of film and television that constitute the only artistic experience for so many, many citizens. How different the messages of Dante, of Dostoevski, of Virginia Woolf and the others who seek quality, who demand more from us than we feel we can give. How shall we recruit them into our psychology?

Where there is danger...

We are reminded by the above how much the dynamic of our literature, including films and television, has to do with our psychology. What "appeals", what is popular, often bounces along the surface. But that is exactly the material with which the therapist must try to work. The daily misery is frequently ignored or mishandled as it increases because there is no depthline sounding our dangers and telling us what to do. And the great mirror of art seems often to have turned its attention to other and rather frivolous things.

Still, I am asserting in these pages the subtle commentary provided by fine literature concerning everything we do. That includes our mistakes, individual and collective, and those things we know we should do. The nearness of psychology and education to contemporary tasks cannot be overlooked. Their echo will be found everywhere. And the great poet Hölderlin gave us our deepest psychological portrait when he said:

Where there is danger
the saving presence
is also
growing

In summary, before we begin to link specific works of art with present-day schools of psychology, we can ask: Is the best of the newest art still committed to an illumination of life problems - but doing it in its own way? Are deception, nihilism, the Absurd, actually seeking the new ground? Is the poetic imagination seeing things we are missing?
We must not fall into the old trap of requiring a direct usefulness of each artistic production. Our sense of acceleration and urgency give us a whole new rule-book concerning such things.

A paradigm

My main hope in writing these pages is that we can become aware how personal, even intimate, are nearly all the works discussed here. I say one more time, the outer shell, the story, the poem, the fictional characters, constitute only a paradigm. If we can see beneath the surface, we see all the potentials of a human life - regional and universal - a glimpse of ourselves.

The therapies of literature are inevitably larger than what we traditionally mean by psychology for in literature we find all our entanglements, solved or unsolved, our bodies and souls, our shame and embarrassment, but also the better insights, the poetry and music, and the assurance that in our single lives, there will come moments when we know we have offered a brief model of existence that will not be lost.

Our boldest new psychology calls that 'bringing truth to a stand'. It can be simply the acceptance of responsibility when others are shirking, or knowing why you do not want to cheat whether you are being watched or not. It could be called believing in Being, thus in your being as the revelation of that final, earliest, utmost gift.

Evocation: Body Mythologies

Body Mythologies pays tribute to the riddle and challenge of life as embodiment, to a fact so basic we almost always fail to consider it. Even when we observe a beautiful horse rushing up and down in a meadow or a film of antelope leaping or we see a salmon undulating upstream in shallow water - the movement allowed by body and environment is both our joy and the possibility of meaning.

Beyond this, the human being, knowing the body subjectively and objectively, can reach far-off worlds in sureness, through somatic grounding. In these pages great human beings take us into just such remote places, but always through evocation of the miracle of embodiment. For the greatest mystery is closest of all. "The god is near but difficult to reach" as Hölderlin revealed in Patmos, one of his final poems.

Many of my explorations here are related to the studies in somatic reality and biological process. Grossly oversimplified, just to begin to talk about the world understood in this manner, the work of the Center emphasizes life's selection of bodily form and function as the means to understanding its origins and goals. Thus, here too the most intimate of experiences is the most powerful teleological tool. Human beings who have a deep knowledge of their own form, structuring, and process will draw much closer to their reason for being. There could not be a more dramatic and primary way of trying to reach and satisfy the question of all human questions.

Clearly, the richest literature dealing with these matters will also have a profound connection with phenomenology and ontology and the philosophical question of Being newly propounded by Martin Heidegger.