On the Spirit of Han

 

Why do Koreans and Irish love to be sad?

Read it and weep.

What Was Her Name?

 

Had a bad night awake brooding last night. Probably mostly just Monday blahs. Another week begins, and no sense of progress; just treading water. Just the same damned thing over and over. I began thinking, “What’s the point of a world in which the Holocaust happened?” And I truly believe it could happen again, is happening again. There are several holocausts ongoing: abortion, “mental illness.” We see the growing scapegoating and persecution of “whites,” males, Christians, Catholics, Asians, Jews.

I look at the present Canadian government: to my mind, obviously corrupt, incompetent, and plain evil, and yet voted in three times as if everything is fine…

When we were young, or at least when I was, we imagined we could make the world better. We haven’t. Or if we have, here and there, the incremental change does not seem to justify a life. 

So what’s it all about? Having kids, doing your best for them, and passing on the flame of life? Cockroaches do as much.

Feeling somewhat cheerier by this afternoon. Two conclusions. 

First, this word is not supposed to be a nice place. This is the valley of tears. Our principal job is to just forge on, trying to do what is right. Anybody who is cheerful in this world has no heart.

Second, for some reason I thought of a girl I went to high school with. I probably haven’t thought of her for forty years. Not my girlfriend; the girlfriend of a friend of mine. But he went off to sea for a year, joined the merchant marine, and she started to make a play for me. Then my family moved to Gananoque, and that ended that.

I never loved her then. As I said, I have barely thought of her since. I backed off, not wanting to betray my friend. And yet now she comes to mind, and thinking of her is oddly consoling.

She was not good looking. Her politics were nuts; she thought the ideal form of government would be a benevolent dictatorship. It would be, too, if there were any way to get a benevolent dictator into power, but there isn’t. Her politics were dangerously unrealistic. But she was a brilliant artist.

And thinking of her consoled me. Why? I was not sure at first. But I conclude that she was an example of a worthwhile life and a worthwhile attitude. Regardless of anything else, relentlessly, we can, do, should, and must find our meaning in the creation of beauty. In any way we can. 

Moreover, these two thoughts twine together. Beauty comes from sorrow. Beauty justifies sorrow.

ter Brugghen's Melancholy

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This early 17th century Dutch painting by Henrick ter Brugghen, found in the Art Gallery of Ontario, is titled “Melancholy”―what used to be the term for what we now call “depression.” 

According to a contemporary source, ter Brugghen himself suffered severely from depression. This painting seems to give his view of the matter.

The young woman contemplating the skull is Mary Magdalene. Tradition suggests she had been a prostitute; more definitely, that she was wealthy. Here, she is reflecting on the vanity of life. What, in the face of death, is the point of it all?

But surely the message is hopeful. Mary Magdalene discovered the point of it all. She met Jesus; he cast seven devils out of her. She became a devout disciple, and was the first to witness the empty tomb and the resurrection.

This suggests that, rather than being an illness, depression is the first step on a path to insight. The depressed recognizes the folly and wrongness of this world; she is now prepared to embrace the next.

The Moral Method

Kingston's Rockwood Asylum, 1920.

The Upper Canada Herald of July 18, 1831 reports on a visit to a mental asylum in Connecticut that claimed a high rate of cure: 

During our late visit to the United States, we had the satisfaction of examining ‘The CONNECTICUT RETREAT FOR THE INSANE,’ at Hartford. Having been politely favoured by a friend in New York with a letter of introduction to DOCTOR TODD, Physician to the institution, we were very kindly received by that philanthropic and intelligent gentleman, to whose skillful and humane treatment the inmates of the retreat owe a debt of lasting gratitude. The building, which is a neat specimen of modern architecture, is situated on a commanding eminence, overlooking the Town of Hartford, the beautiful Connecticut River, and the surrounding country to a great extent.

The ‘moral and intellectual treatment’ observed in the Retreat is thus explained in the annual report of the visiting committee: ‘The first business of the Physician, on the admission of a patient, is, to gain his entire confidence. With this view he is treated with the greatest kindness, however violent his conduct may be,—is allowed all the liberty which his cue admits of, and is made to understand, if he is still capable of reflection, that, so far from having arrived at a madhouse where he is to be confined, he has come to a peaceful residence, where all kindness and attention will be shown him, and where every means will be employed for the recovery of his health. In case coercion and confinement become necessary, it is impressed upon his mind, that this is not done for the purpose of punishment, but for his own safety, and that of his keepers. In no case is deception on the patient employed, or allowed,—on the contrary the greatest frankness, as well as kindness forms a part of the moral treatment. His case is explained to him, and he is made to understand, as far as possible, the reasons why the treatment to which he is subjected has become necessary. By this course of intellectual management, it has been found, as a matter of experience at our Institution, that patients who had always been raving when confined without being told the reason, and refractory, when commanded instead of being entreated, soon became peaceable and docile.’ The success of this treatment will appear from the fact, that of twenty-three cases admitted in one year, twenty-two recovered, affording the extraordinary proportion of 91 per cent.

This claimed cure rate is striking in comparison to what we see from the means we employ today: a cure rate of zero. Modern psychiatry holds that all mental illness is incurable, generally only gets worse over time, and can only be controlled with drugs.

Yet the claimed cure rate in Connecticut is confirmed by other sources.

“By 1837, Eli Todd at the Hartford Retreat had cured 91.3 percent of his recent cases, and Woodward at Worcester had discharged more than 82 percent as recovered.” (McGovern, C.M., The Masters of Madness: Social Origins of the American Psychiatric Profession. 1985, Hanover Press: University Press of New England).

These statistics have been challenged on the grounds that they do not account for readmissions—cures may only have been temporary. But the same accusation can be, and is, levelled against the claims for the current chemical treatments doing any good. Does the improvement in symptoms persist? This is a matter of some debate—long-term studies have rarely been done.

Why did we abandon this method for something manifestly worse?

The simple answer is that we did not abandon the method, consciously. The system required a high standard of behavior from staff, and power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the warden of a madhouse has absolute power over his charges. The system worked miracles within the first generation, so long as the founders were still in charge. Over time, it naturally degenerated into all the horrors of the “asylum” system we so recently have been trying to eliminate.

Kingston’s own Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane, the very memory of which is now largely suppressed, was probably built in imitation of the Connecticut model. Set in leafy, semi-rural grounds on the shores of Lake Ontario to produce the same pleasant, calming vistas as the Connecticut retreat.

But the essential element by then was lost. The “moral treatment,” as it was called, was based on religion; it was ultimately based on the model of Gheel, Belgium, and the shrine of St. Dymphna. The most successful early examples, in Britain and the US, were founded and run or at least inspired by the Quakers.

This is a model that could not be secularized. A first generation of administrators might still have been guided by some personal moral vision; but this was not institutionalized. Subsequent staff would have no particular moral motivations or religious training. They were in it for a living; or else for the opportunity to exercise power. The moral element of the moral treatment was gone, and all that was left was coercion and confinement. And warehouses full of growing numbers of patients without hope.

The fact that the approach has been called “the moral treatment” has led to an unfortunate misconception that patients were coerced and thought to be “immoral.” This is a kind of “black legend” that advocates of the medical model of mental illness have been able to use against it; from the beginning, the medical lobby opposed this “moral model."

The “moral treatment” means treating the patient as a moral being, competent to make their own choices—the very opposite of coercion. The core precept of the treatment, often repeated, was “Patients are normal, rational beings.” If they are suffering or acting strangely, they are reacting to some real problem they are facing. Removing them from their current environment, and putting them in a calm one, essentially solves the problem. “Patients are given structured, ordered, regular work and socialization in an attractive, family-like environment.”

It may take some time to calm down; and if they then return to the poisonous life situation they had been facing, problems may return. That was dealt with in the original Gheel model: recovered patients could choose to stay on and take up their life in the town.

It is the true madness that we do not return, as expeditiously as possible, to this moral model, the model of Gheel.

Do not suppose that this would be expensive. It would be vastly cheaper than our current approach. Psychiatric drugs for life are not free. And a recovered, fully-functioning citizen is a net financial gain to government and the taxpayer. Not to mention, the actual treatment involves productive work.

The method, to work long-term, must be religious in nature. Missing this was the mistake last time. Nevertheless, any supposed problem with the separation of church and state is easily overcome with goodwill: government funds need only be available without discrimination regardless of the particular denomination wanting to set up such a colony, as “faith-based charities” are now funded by government in the United States.

Family Values and Original Sin

We often talk about maternal instinct. But there is a far more powerful instinct that we never talk about. Filial instinct. When have you ever even heard the term?

A mother, or a father, are naturally attached to their children. But the natural instinct of attachment is far stronger in a child to their parents.

We often marvel at some animal nursing young of another species. We never think to marvel at the young accepting succor from another species. That we rightly take as spontaneous.

We honour and make much of maternal instinct, therefore, precisely because it is sometimes absent. That makes it noticeable, and worthy of celebration when seen. By contrast, we can simply assume filial instinct in all cases. So it goes unnoticed and unremarked.

Think about it. In the early, vulnerable infancy of any higher species, the parent is everything. Evolution and the imperatives of survival will imprint a deep need for closeness to the parent. Closeness, trust, obedience.

So baby ducks line up spontaneously to follow their mother wherever she goes. If the mother is absent, they will line up to follow whatever else is available. So with the young of almost any species, up to and including the higher primates. A motherless baby chimpanzee can be consoled with a hot water bottle. A baby human is soothed by a plastic nipple.

This is instinct; it has no moral dimension. Yet it is so powerful we want to hold it sacred: we talk of “family values” and “filial piety” as though these were religious duties. Indeed, much of Chinese folk religion can be summed up in the phrase “ancestor worship.”

This simply makes us feel good about ourselves, because we are going to do it anyway. There is a moral debt owed to parents for their material and emotional support in our childhood; we have a duty to similarly support them in their age. But that is all.

In fact, the vital moral issue cuts the other way. To idolize a parent, a mere human, is just that: an idolatry. The average parent is necessarily only average, not better or worse. Some parents will be very good people; some parents will be very bad people.

To adhere too closely to “family values” is just like adhering too closely to tribal values: to believing that your nation, or your race, is inherently superior to all others. We know where that leads, and we call it racism. The worst evils in history, we commonly hold, are done because of racism. “Familyism” is in principle the same thing.

Morality, therefore, requires cutting through the instinctive tie to viewing our parents objectively. Doing so is almost the essential act of morality: not doing so is leaving yourself in the state of original sin—the sin one inherits from one’s ancestors. 

The Sins of the Fathers

Orestes pursued by Erinyes.

“You shall no t make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me…”

Note this second part of the first or second commandment, depending on how you parse them. That makes it near the core of the Judeo-Christian message. It says that children and grandchildren are punished for a parent’s or grandparent’s sin.

Indeed, you get the same idea in the doctrine of original sin. Or that of redemptive suffering. One person can suffer for the sin of another.

And it is troubling: how can an all-loving God be so unjust? How can he punish Tom for Jerry’s sin?

Nevertheless, we have to accept that this is a fair description of reality. All of us either suffer or benefit from actions of our ancestors; these inform the circumstances of our birth and upbringing. Since God could intervene to prevent this, he is ultimately responsible.

But there must be more to this, too.

For this then is a case of God taking direct responsibility for human sin. Which is not theologically correct. We have free will.

And if a parent is morally depraved, it is probably not going to change their mind to hear that their children will suffer for it. That would trouble only a good person. In fact, this is what a narcissistic parent actually wants and tries to do. They inevitably choose one or more children as a scapegoat, and blame and punish them without cause. Most often, they are innocently punished for the very things of which the parent is guilty. That is what “scapegoat” means.

So it seems both false and fruitless for God to declare this commandment to the bad. And after all, if they are idolators—the specific sin which this commandment prohibits—they are not listening to God in the first place.

Nor to the already righteous parents, who care about their children. They are, after all, already righteous, and listening to God, not worshipping idols.

It has to be that he is speaking to someone else.

It has to be that he is speaking to the children. He is speaking to the grown children of the iniquities of their fathers.

Children, especially less thoughtful children, get their worldview and many of their unexamined opinions from their parents. Denominational beliefs, politics, and prejudices of all kinds run in families for generations. This is demonstrated often in demographic surveys, were it not self-evident. In our earliest years, our parents are the font of all knowledge; and this assumption never entirely fades.

Yet we all also have an innate conscience, from God, and must be conscious as well of contradictions, between this and what our parents taught us. And we all have a moral duty to actively seek the True and the Good.

It is perhaps vitally significant that this passage comes at the end of the prohibition against idolatry.

The essential and most dangerous idolatry may be this idolatry of the parent; and what Francis Bacon called “the idols of the tribe.”

The word translated here as “iniquity” is actually closest to the English “crookedness.” It is an image of a thing being bent.

That indeed makes it plausible that it refers to a distorted, dishonest world-view.

And it seems to bookend with Jesus’s condemnation in the New Testament of those who would “cause one of these little ones to stumble.” It is a condemnation of parents who fail in their children’s moral education.

One can see, then, how this commitment to sin is both passed down from the parent, and a matter of personal responsibility. We all have the moral obligation to see past such idolatries—this is what the commandment is telling us. If in an oddly oblique way, as if aware of the necessity at the same time not to upset the authority of the family—the foundation of all social order.

Happily, this conflict between God and parent is not great in most families. However, one can easily see in it the basis for original sin. Every human ancestor must, like Adam, fall somewhat short.

A similar concept of guilt running in families was known to the ancient Greeks. See, most obviously, the Oresteia trilogy: it ends in a formal trial, in which by the grace of Athena the parent is found at fault, and the child not guilty. Plato too speaks of ancestral curses for which a descendant must atone, through bouts of “divine madness” and through rituals of purification.

Plato is referring to melancholy, which is much of what we call mental illness; or at least to depression and mania (now “bipolar disorder”). In the Oresteia, the same experience is represented by pursuing Furies. This, depression, then seems to be a product of the dissonance between parental influence and eternal verities.

But those raised by a narcissistic parent who do not suffer through the ordeal remain in sin. They have broken the first commandment.

So What Is Depression?

Edvard Munch, Melancholy

So what is depression?

It is not an illness, so far as we know. All we really have is a set of symptoms. See the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to make this clear. It is a bulleted checklist. Check off five or more, and that’s your diagnosis.

And it may be an arbitrary list. What we call depression may, like fever, or a skin rash, have a variety of different underlying causes. Or it may be that one cause is behind both the symptom list we call “depression,” and another currently unassociated symptom list: “anxiety disorder,” or “narcissistic personality disorder,” or “autism,” or something else. Or all of them.

In fact, I submit that this is certainly the case. Depression can have a variety of causes, and it shares the same causes with other currently unrelated “mental illnesses.”

I think we can, however, talk about an essence of depression. It is not “sorrow.” The current label is misleading.

If you scan the official list of symptoms, it is not hard to guess. “Depressed mood.” “Diminished interest in activities.” “Loss of energy.” “Lack of movement.” “Indecisiveness.”

Bingo. The essence of depression is a lack of direction or meaning. One has lost one’s sense of purpose. One just can’t get that motor in gear. Or, one is in a kind of maze of thoughts, and cannot find the exit.

That tends to cause low spirits; not vice versa.

Cheering you up is not the issue, and is not going to work. You have to find direction.

You can actually see this happening to entire cultures. Jung observed it in Africa, and called it “loss of soul.” Back in the 19th century, when first contact with isolated cultures was still often recent, Darwin puzzled over it. He observed in The Descent of Man that when isolated cultures first encountered Europeans, they tended to stop marrying and having children. They stop working, whatever their work had been, and become deeply involved with alcohol or drugs. Their tightly integrated word view had been shattered by this intrusion of something vastly alien. They no longer understood the point of anything.

I have seen a similar reaction on a smaller scale among expatriates, on integrating with an unfamiliar culture. They retreat to their rooms, or to expat bars and alcohol. Some even begin to have fully delusional thoughts.

So the various symptoms we clump together as depression come from a feeling that nothing makes sense. We no longer know what to think.

Losing one’s sense of meaning can, in turn, have a variety of causes. It may be that some dramatic life experience, like going to war, or the arrival of aliens in some great ship, has challenged all our previous certainties, and we have found them not to be true. You can even get the effect from some sudden new idea, either something you learn or something you figure out for yourself. For a while, it can be deeply disorienting. This is one reason why, as Aristotle observed, learning is painful.

We generally derive a huge amount of our sense of meaning and purpose from our relationships: from family and social group, community and nation. We live for our lover, for our children, for our parents. We are prepared to die for our country.

So one inevitable major cause of depressive symptoms, probably the most common, is having come from a family in which one was rejected, devalued, unloved.

Psychiatry and psychology have been vaguely aware of this; but they see the critical factor as childhood abuse, usually physical or sexual. This is not the key; it is the devaluation of the person, or, conversely, the devaluation of the family or community relationship, however this is expressed.

This can explain another symptom labelled as depression in the DSM: a low sense of self-worth. You get this, most obviously, from living with others who tell you you are worthless.

But the same sorts of families or communities also tend to systematically lack or overturn more generally any sense of values. Parents with their own values in good order do not reject or abuse their children. This lack of values growing up may still be the most damaging thing.

If this is right, the cure is obvious. Pills aren’t going to do it. Pills can’t give you meaning. Many early psychiatrists themselves saw it, and said it: Frankl, Maslow, Jung. The solution for depression is to somehow find new meaning and direction.

Some find their new meaning and direction in psychology and psychotherapy. When it works, this is why it works. And this is why people today, who have been psychologized, tend to cling to their particular school with a fervor you would expect for religion.

But psychology and psychiatry are not very strong vessels for this. They are not intended for it, are new and untested, and are critically limited in scope.

The classical place to find meaning is, of course, religion.

The decline in organized religion in North America and Europe, not surprisingly, tracks exactly to a rise in depression and other psychiatric diagnoses. At the same time, people have tended to stop marrying and having children, they have become more inclined to retreat to drug use.

This is not a coincidence.

Larry

I was in second year of university when Larry killed himself.

One night he had broken into his doctor's office, and swallowed all the pills he could find.

I remember hearing about it before Dan did, even though I thought Dan was his best friend. I was the one who told Dan. Dan said he was surprised. After all, Larry was a local hero. Other kids looked up to him. He was the best guitarist in town. He was lead guitarist for the local group. And some of the others went on to be professional, or at least semi-professional, musicians.

For my part, I did not understand Dan's surprise. After all, Larry had dropped out of high school, and was sleeping under the town bridge, or in motel rooms vacated when the summer tourists left in winter. For whatever reason, he was not working. Being our age, I figure his friends had left after high school, as Dan and I had, and there was probably almost nobody to hang out with.

That's the problem with small towns. Everyone leaves after high school. He had a girl friend; but she went off to study ECE, and took a job in Almonte. That had to be just before Larry killed himself, or just after.

I did not know Larry well. He was a quiet guy, not someone you got to know easily; and neither was I. But when I spoke to him, he had a strange intensity about him. He more or less looked me straight in the eye, one time, sitting in a rented room in the Colonial Motel, and asked me, “What's it all about?”

Most people don't do that kind of thing. Most people are content with not thinking, with the day to day and what's on TV tonight. Most people do not have such deep souls.

I don't remember if that was his exact question, and I don't remember what I answered. I would not have had an answer, at that age. I was working on it; on the same question.

But he was a deeply sincere and moral guy. He cared greatly about things. He was alive in a sense most people are not.

Sure, he did some drugs and drank; but nothing strange for his age and for that time and for that boring little town. He was no druggie, and no drunk.

So why had his family thrown him out? Why could he not find a job? Why did his family not reach out, even when he was sleeping under the bridge in the town park? It was a small town; they must have known. Didn't they give a damn?

And why was he seeing a doctor?

I suspect depression, or some other mental illness. And you have to see here too parental abuse. And probably the depression or other mental illness was caused by the parental abuse. Nothing else gets those dots to connect.

I have since met others like Larry. I have seen the same sincerity, the gentleness, the thirst for truth, and the interest in and talent for the arts. I have heard their stories, from time to time, and they tend to be the same story. Some of them have been found, as decayed corpses, behind the bushes.

I think a lot of suicides are murders by proxy.

M. Scott Peck tells of one family in which the eldest son shot himself.

His parents wrapped up the gun and gave it to their second son as his gift the next Christmas.

There Is a Right and Wrong

Somebody visited W.C. Fields in hospital, on his deathbed, and found him reading the Bible. They expressed surprise.

“Just looking for loopholes,” he explained.

And that is the story of much of human life, and much of human history. Everyone wants to be good, but without that difficult bit about doing good. Civilization itself may be seen as the struggle against that tendency, and civilizations have been successful to the extent that they have pulled it off: the ability to accept the difference between good and evil, and to act accordingly. Societies of any kind work to the exact extent that everyone follows the Golden Rule, to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The temptation is always very strong to simply deny that there is good and evil—that lets you completely off the hook. That is why you hear people using terms like “inappropriate” or “negative” for human deeds instead of “wrong” or “evil.” Modern psychiatry and psychology is founded on the premise. You read—as I just have—references to the “myth of pure evil,” claiming that most people who commit terrible acts, even mass murder, do so in the sincere conviction that they’re on the side of the angels. Perhaps they simply “lack empathy” because their brains are wired differently.

“I wanted to understand how ordinary people got caught up in doing these things,” the present author says. “I came to realize that those who come to do evil don’t view it as evil. Evil is in the mind of the perceiver. Most of the Nazis thought they were doing noble work.”

No. This reduces the human person to an automaton, without free will.

If there really were no such thing as evil, if it really were in the mind of the perceiver, all punishments for crime would be no more than the persecution of minority opinions. It would mean we had no right to judge the Nazis at Nuremberg, or to punish anyone at the International Court of Justice for personal peccadillos like mass murder. It never really mattered whether the Nazis won, or we did. Everyone died for nothing.

There is no way Himmler, for example, had a sincere conviction that he was on the side of the angels. Nor those below him. That was why they invented the gas chambers. They found it too troubling to see their victims shot. Better to do it all out of sight, so they could pretend to themselves it was not happening.

Everyone has a conscience. Demonstrably, when a narcissist does something morally wrong, he or she knows perfectly well they are doing something morally wrong. Because they will invariably lie about it. If they did not think it was wrong, they would not. And they have plenty of empathy as well: if they did not have a well-tuned sense of how others experience things, of how others feel, they would not be able to manipulate them so expertly, which they are famous for. Their “emotional intelligence” is through the roof.

Narcissism is like alcoholism. The alcoholic knows perfectly well that taking that next drink is bad for him, and for those around him. He does not lack a conscience. He just wants it; nothing else matters as much. Same with a narcissist.

This is also why not everyone who is raised to have maximum self-esteem, who is spoiled, will end up a narcissist. Everyone has a conscience, and in the end knows right from wrong in their heart. Becoming a narcissist requires a conscious moral choice.

The essential task for either the narcissist is to get back in touch with that natural rheostat or internal gyroscope, with conscience and with reality.

Psychology in general, sadly, takes exactly that solution, and puts it out of reach. By saying there is no reality, no morality, no right or wrong, and no free will. Trapping narcissists in their narcissism, and melancholics in their despair.

Moral Abuse in King Lear

Lear's three daughters. Pope.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Cordelia is obviously exceptionally honest. She refuses to exaggerate her love for her father. She could, after all, have lied, as her sisters did. She could almost have said “Me too”; this is about what Regan does. She could have come up with the words; if necessary, they were provided for her.

Moreover, the fact that Lear has already divided up the kingdom without allowing for her share suggests that her honesty was a well-known part of her character. He could predict that she would not flatter.

Cordelia here is faced with a moral dilemma. Granted that any answer was intended to prevent her marriage, had she flattered, she would have been single, but queen of one third of Britain. Honesty was likely to cost her both husband and livelihood.

The same pre-existent passion for honesty is characteristic of Edgar, also abused in the play. Edmund testifies to it:

“… and a brother noble,
Whose nature is so far from doing harms
That he suspects none: on whose foolish) honesty
My practises ride easy.” (Act 1, Scene 2)

Given that King Lear is a study of mental illness, this test of honesty seems important. Yet the issue of honesty seems invisible to psychiatry and psychology. Ferenczi, it is true, saw it; but Freud, by contrast, and with him the psychoanalytic establishment, essentially viewed all neurotics as liars. 

Lear's rage. Brown

Shakespeare, on the other hand, features this moral trial as his first act, from which all else follows—broadly, all mental illness. Lear has deliberately set up a test of Cordelia’s truthfulness, so that she must suffer for it.

Why is such a trial of virtue a critical element in our story?

View things from the perspective of a narcissist. Everyone seems to agree that Lear is a narcissist: that is why he wants lavish praise from his daughters. But calling people “narcissists” is really a euphemism. What that really means is that they are immoral. A narcissist wants to follow his own desires, as opposed to moral duty. Eve was a narcissist in taking the apple, on the promise that she would “become as God.” Lucifer was a narcissist in choosing himself over God. Morality is an impediment to doing whatever you want. Morality, therefore, is the great enemy. That is the essence of being a narcissist.

Such a person cannot tolerate an exceptional child, because a child with special gifts may draw attention from himself or herself. But he also cannot, above all, tolerate an exceptionally moral child. First, a moral child stands as an implicit condemnation of himself, a silent testimony to his guilt. Second, a moral child is likely sooner or later to notice and object to his behavior. Third, a moral child will never totally submit to his will. They follow, in the end, another master, and this is subversive to the narcissist’s desires. There can in the end be only one centre of the universe.

Accordingly, any narcissistic parent will probably feel impelled, before all else, to lead all their children into moral temptation. They will then bully and cajole them to choose the wrong.

The Adult Children of Alcoholics / Dysfunctional Families literature says that dysfunctional families almost always assign children to one of two groups: either “golden children” who can do no wrong, or “black sheep” (better, “scapegoats”) who can do no right.

It is easy to see how this comes about. Shakespeare demonstrates. Each child of the narcissist is whenever possible placed in a moral dilemma, as Cordelia, Regan, and Goneril are; or as Dymphna is in the legend of that saint. If they submit and choose the moral wrong, as their parent demands, they are rewarded and may become the “golden children.” If they insist on acting morally, they may become the scapegoat. And a moral is presented here for the benefit of the whole family: good is evil, and evil is good. 

Cordelia's trial. Gilbert

This is not sufficient to determine which child is designated as “golden” and which as scapegoat; for this almost always happens long before the children reach the age of reason, and are responsible for their own acts. Rather, the designation of some children as one or the other is itself set up to morally subvert the children. Both golden child and scapegoat are learning that rewards have nothing to do with morals or justice: the pampered child is rewarded no matter what they do, and the abused child is punished no matter what they do. Ethics are thus shown to be of no practical significance.

But then, at about adolescence, or about the age of reason, it may well be that such a trial is often set. And as a result, positions might even be reversed. We see just this with Cordelia, heretofore supposedly favoured. Hence perhaps too the motif, as in the Dymphna legend—Freudians sometimes say it is a subtext here in Lear as well—of attempting to “seduce” the child into an incestuous marriage at adolescence. This perhaps stands as an image for seduction into shared guilt generally.

Accordingly, moral abuse is perhaps the key and most important form of child abuse. Other forms of child abuse can often be its expression; and it is the one form of abuse experienced by both “golden children,” pampered favourites, and “scapegoats,” the more conventionally abused.

This arguably most important form of abuse, is almost inevitably overlooked by conventional psychiatry and psychology, because they avoid all reference to morality. How crucial is that, should the essential issue in all mental illness turn out to be a moral one?

And how important is moral abuse in the broader scheme of things? Apparently, among the worst of sins. According to Christianity, according to Jesus in the Gospels:

“If anyone causes one of these little ones--those who believe in me--to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.” (Mark 9:42, NIV).

If you believe in eternity, this stands to reason. It is leading another to hell—eternal damnation. That is a far more important consideration than mental illness. Depression might not be so much an illness as a war wound, to be worn with honour. It shows a conscience that survived this onslaught.

Shakespeare also shows, in his play, that narcissistic parents are ultimately foolish to corrupt their children in this way—even if they are thoroughgoing materialists concerned only with their own self-interest. Once a child is stripped of any morals, after all, as are Goneril and Regan, what will guide their actions? It is unlikely to be absolute obedience to the desires of their parent. It is far more likely that they will replace their conscience, just as the parent has, with their own ego and their own desires. Thieves can never rely upon honour among thieves.

It is, accordingly, in the play, Cordelia and Edgar, the moral but abused children, who stand firm in defense of their abusive parent. Cordelia cares more for her father than for herself:

“For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
Myself could else out-frown false fortune’s frown.” (Act 5, Scene 3).

She goes to war in his behalf. Edgar, put in a position where he might take any revenge he likes on the father who wanted to kill him, instead does everything he can in his father’s interest, battling Oswald to the death in his defense. 

Act 1. Scene 1. Abbey

At the same time the play makes clear with Lear and Gloucester that an honest conscience can be a consequence as much as a cause of being abused. The experience of being abused naturally makes you more sensitive and sympathetic to the sufferings of others. If love, as Jesus attests, is the root of morality, this will make you moral.

It all comes close to justifying the existence of evil in the universe.

A Path of White Pebbles

Hansel and Gretel

It would be a great thing to find a cure for depression and anxiety states. The anguish involved is immeasurable, and it is afflicting people who might be our best and brightest. And by multiple accounts, the toll is growing. It would be a bigger thing than finding a cure for cancer.

But if there is a cure, where are we likely to find the cure?

Conventional wisdom holds that this sort of thing, “mental illness,” is the preserve of psychiatry and psychology.

This is a critic mistake. We have wandered into the dark woods, and taken the wrong turning.

Psychiatry as a distinct discipline emerged in the nineteenth century, with the idea of extending medical practice into spiritual affairs.

Was this a good idea? Pretty obviously not.

After all, medical doctors are “physicians,” experts on the human body. Does that qualify them to understand or treat the mind? There seems to be a categorization error involved here, along the line of the classic “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

And not just the single error of conflating mind and body, either. Making melancholic mental states the business of physicians also involves another, separate, and dubious assumption: that it is an illness.

Merriam–Webster defines “ïllness” as “a specific condition that prevents your body or mind from working normally.”

This implies some sort of deficit. After all, we do not consider Olympic athletes’ bodies ill, although they are not working normally. Illness means something is currently not up to code. At best, you might be “high-functioning”; but you are still not capable of what a normal person might be able to do.

This assumption does not really apply to depressives, or indeed for most of the rest of what we call “mental illness.” Since Aristotle, it has been fairly generally understood, and modern studies confirm, that people of outstanding accomplishment in many fields are depressives or “mentally ill” in other ways. For any given “mental illness,” some study has been able to demonstrate an associated mental benefit: people who are inclined towards “obsessive compulsive disorder,” for example, are also likely to have exceptional memories. People with “attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder” turn out to be unusually creative. People inclined towards schizophrenia are also inclined to have exceptional math talents. Bipolar patients seem to be unusually good with words and exceptionally quick-thinking. And on and on.  On this point, the comparison with physical illness seems to fall down: are professional hockey players usually classed as disabled?

Actually, in a sense they probably are. Even high athletic achievement is apparently associated with the diagnosis of “Tourette’s syndrome.” It seems to involve heightened attention and reflexes.

Given this consistent association with high as well as low accomplishment, it seems arbitrary and misleading, not to say stigmatizing and discouraging, to class these things as “illnesses.” This is focusing only on the negative. It is as though we stumbled upon some new drug which improves brain functioning in some way, and put only its side effects on the label.

Granted that depressives and the “mentally ill” suffer terribly. Granted that most would probably prefer not to be “mentally ill.” Still, this is a more complex matter than what we think of when we use words like disease or illness. It seems, instead, to be a good example of what Catholic call “redemptive suffering”: this awful suffering has some spiritual (mental, if you prefer) value. Put plainly, suffering builds soul.

Since the idea of an “illness” is too simplistic, is it also too simplistic to speak of a “cure”? Is it desirable or even possible to return the afflicted to the status quo ante, the “normal” state? Can soul, once created, be erased? It might be like seeking a cure to growing up.

Accordingly, it might be more useful instead to speak not of a cure, but of a calling.

There is a parable told of Herakles by Xenophon: that, as a young man, he was accosted at once by two beautiful women. One promised him a good, easy, comfortable life. The other promised him a life of suffering and hard work, but of honour. Herakles chose the second bride, and the second life. Why? Because it was the good, the right.[1] 

The name of the first woman was Vice. The name of the second was Virtue.

In fact, this is the same choice St. Dymphna is faced with in her legend: either accept an immoral union, and live like a queen, or insist on virtue, and be martyred.

This is perhaps the choice the depressive, or the “mentally ill” are called to make.

And we are unlikely to get our guide to that from psychiatry.

As traditionally practiced, by Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, or Alice Miller, psychiatry collects its data and draws its conclusions from clinical case studies. By its nature, psychiatric clinical evidence is at best third hand: the doctor must rely on the veracity of the patient in describing their symptoms, their thoughts and feelings, which are not visible to him; and then we must rely on the veracity of the doctor. This is classic hearsay evidence; it could not be admitted in a court of law. There is too much subjectivity to be able to draw general conclusions.

Psychology is no better, being founded on the same categorization error. The idea behind modern psychology, simply, was to apply the techniques of empirical science, so useful for understanding the natural world, to the psyche. It is a “social science.”

The techniques of empirical science are designed to tell us more about the world apparent to our senses. Instead of consulting books and reason and appeal to first principles, one looks and listens attentively. One measures and weighs. Do the same techniques make sense if trying instead to understand the human soul? Not on the face of it: it sounds more like trying to drive nails with a screwdriver, or studying microbes through a telescope.

Two thousand five hundred years ago, give or take an autumn day, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus observed:

“One would never discover the limits of psyche, should one traverse every road--so deep a logos does it possess.” 

The psyche is both different in kind and several levels more complex than is the physical universe. The human psyche is both infinite and incomprehensible in principle. To begin with, it already includes the physical universe as a whole. For we experience the entire physical universe only as thoughts, as the impressions our senses evoke in our minds. As Bishop Berkeley showed centuries ago, there is no good reason to suppose there is any independent external physical place to which these perceptions correspond. If there is, there is no way of telling how they correspond. So each new datum apparent to our senses is in fact a psychic element. Jupiter and Alpha Centauri are parts of our mind.

Accordingly, were we to fully understand the physical universe and how it works, all its laws and all its individual objects, we would still have only entered the vestibule of the psyche. And not yet taken our coats off.

Next, the psyche includes not just these perceptions, but the perceiver who perceives them, and the act of perception. And it includes the perceiver’s reactions to these perceptions: emotions, imaginings, memories, hopes, dreams, anticipations, abstractions, logical and rational deductions; and a set of abstract principles which help form these reactions, such as number, logic, fundamental concepts like justice, truth, meaning, value, beauty, balance, good and evil; and mathematical operations. Not to mention all the perceiver’s deeds. As it includes imaginings, it also includes, potentially, an infinite number of imagined physical universes, each existing over an infinite extension of time. And it must include the perceiver who perceives the existence of the perceiver, and then the perceiver who perceives the existence of the perceiver of the perceiver, and so on to another potential infinity.

Does it not sound rather silly then to attempt, as psychology does, to pin this living butterfly to a piece of cardstock for scientific observation? And how to do so, since the cardstock and the pin and we ourselves must all be part of the butterfly?

William Labov, the sociolinguist, sketched in one slender arm of the problem of trying to “scientifically” study human beings, when he formulated the “observer paradox”: “the aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain this data by systematic observation.”[2] Psychological observations, like those of social science generally, and unlike those of physical science, are of humans, not objects. The “objects” of the study are also independent “subjects,” and in principle as conscious of what is happening and as apt to be controlling it as the supposed scientific observer. They are certain to adjust their behaviour, or their survey responses, based on what they think the person in the white smock wants. Meaning the results apply meaningfully only to this survey or experiment, not to “real life.”

Immanual Kant immediately pointed out the practical impossibility of a “scientific” psychology back in the 18th century, when it was first proposed:

The empirical doctrine of the soul can also never approach chemistry even as a systematic art of analysis or experimental doctrine, for in it the manifold of inner observation can be separated only by mere division in thought, and cannot then be held separate and recombined at will (but still less does another thinking subject suffer himself to be experimented upon to suit our purpose), and even observation by itself already changes and displaces the state of the observed object.

Nailing imaginary jelly to the wall would be, in principle, far simpler.

And this does not even touch the ethical objections to such research, to treating fellow humans as “objects.” This, as Kant could have pointed out, is the most basic violation of the categorical imperative on which all morality is based.

Empirical science also deliberately strips away the matters that are most central to the psyche. It is founded in part on the premise of being value-neutral or value-free; one is supposed to merely observe what is without making any judgments. Everything must emerge from the data. This cannot work with the soul (note that the terms “psyche,” “soul, and “mind” are cognates, and can be used interchangeably). The soul needs meaning and a sense of worth. One might say, in particular the soul of one who is depressed needs meaning and a sense of worth. Psychology or psychiatry are constitutionally incapable of offering this, and even point in the opposite direction.

Empirical science strips out any thought of moral right or wrong. They are irrelevant, after all, to the understanding of nature, which lacks consciousness and free will. Unfortunately, consciousness and free will are a vital part of the psyche; and so are moral considerations.

Now imagine if the depressive is in fact facing the life choice Xenophon gave to Herakles. Psychiatry has only one proposition on offer, and it is the wrong one for the depressive: it offers the life of easy vice. Given that there is no good or evil, why would one choose anything else?

Classically, but arbitrarily, psychology substitutes for any concept of value or ethics the ideal of “normalcy.” Which is to say, the goal and Holy Grail is simply being “average.” That is underwhelming. To see the normal as ideal is, if not a flat contradiction in terms, a logical error: mistaking an “is” for an “ought.”

And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might have said.

The mathematician Stanlislaw Ulam once challenged anyone to name a single discovery produced by the social sciences that is both true and of value. If true, the insights of social science seem to be trivial: for example, a study showing that most men prefer younger women. Didn’t we all know that? If new and interesting, like the Keynesian idea that we can spend our way to prosperity, they turn out to be wrong.

One proposed rebuttal advanced years ago was Noam Chomsky’s concept of a “universal grammar” behind all languages. That seemed exciting. For a couple of decades, that was the Big Idea in the social sciences. At last we had something to build on.

Chomsky has now been pretty definitively shown to be wrong; just like Marx, Freud, Skinner, and everyone else before him.

The other rebuttal that I have sometimes heard is the economic theory of competitive advantage. If I am especially good at making shoes, but lousy at baking bread, and you are good at baking bread, but bad at making shoes, we both do better if I make shoes for both of us, and you make bread for both of us, than if we both tried to make our own shoes and bake our own bread.

Very well; if it continues to hold up, and we can agree that this is not just common sense, we have one interesting thing we have thus far learned from social science. Not bad for only two centuries or so of strenuous intellectual work by millions of our best-educated minds.

But I don’t think we should be holding our breath for a “cure” to depression or mental illness from this quarter.

It seems a better idea to retrace our steps, to go back to where we were before we started down this forest path, of applying empirical science to the soul. Before we had Freud, or Mesmer, we might have had something better than we have now. At least we had our basic concepts right.

So what did we have for those spiritually afflicted before Dr. Freud and his associates?

Put that starkly, the question almost answers itself. And if it did not, the Dymphna legend reminds us.

We had, in the first place, and not to scare you away right at the outset, art; we had legends like that of St. Dymphna, and artists and entertainers like her supporter, the court jester. The chief role of a court jester, after all, was to salve the anxieties of the king amidst all the troubles of being king, and keep his feet firmly rooted in reality, his view of the world level-headed and non-delusional. To prevent mental illness, in other words. Dr. Punch Jester did this through various arts: comedy, acting, music, juggling, dancing, acrobatics.

Aristotle argues that the effect proper to all art is therapeutic. He called it “catharsis.” Literally, a purging: as physicians might purge a sour stomach. It emptied us of excess emotions, like the excess anxiety or sorrow of a depressive, and put our psyches back in balance.

For every feeling that affects some souls violently affects all souls more or less; the difference is only one of degree. Take pity and fear, for example, or again enthusiasm. Some people are liable to become possessed by the latter emotion, but we see that, when they have made use of the melodies which fill the soul with orgiastic feeling, they are brought back by these sacred melodies to a normal condition as if they had been medically treated and undergone a purge [catharsis]. Those who are subject to the emotions of pity and fear and the feelings generally will necessarily be affected in the same way; and so will other men in exact proportion to their susceptibility to such emotions. All experience a certain purge [catharsis] and pleasant relief. In the same manner cathartic melodies give innocent joy to men.[3]

The Bible reveals the same understanding of art:

Now the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him.
Saul’s attendants said to him, “See, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. 16 Let our lord command his servants here to search for someone who can play the lyre. He will play when the evil spirit from God comes on you, and you will feel better.”
... Whenever the spirit from God came on Saul, David would take up his lyre and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him. (1 Samuel 16: 14-23, NIV)

David here serves as court jester.

We might say that art is the product of one insightful person plumbing the depths of his or her own psyche. Shelley said poetry is “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” Leaving aside the tangled knot of what constitutes “happiness,” the best thoughts of the best minds ought to be some sort of guide to mind. Art that has attracted wide public response, and stood the test of time, has then proven to resonate with countless other psyches. Any art, therefore, that has permeated the culture, that has been passed on widely for many years, we can take to have known therapeutic value for the treatment of spiritual malaise. This is a true psychology.

And then there is Dymphna’s second, and better-remembered, companion. Not to mention her own status as a saint.

There is religion.

Brace yourself.

“Psyche” means soul. Any religion is, in its core, both a “theology” or “cosmology” and a “psychology.” It is on the one hand a repository of knowledge about ultimate things, about what is and what ought, and on the other a deposit of wisdom regarding the proper care and development of a soul.

This is more apparent in Buddhism than in Christianity. Buddhism largely leaves theology or cosmology alone, and concentrates on psychology. It works with what it calls “upaya,” “skillful means”—spiritual techniques which have been tested and shown by long experience to achieve “enlightenment.” Meditation techniques, most obviously. Leonard Cohen, a devout Jew, felt comfortable being ordained as a Buddhist monk. Jack Kerouac, a devout Catholic, translated Buddhist sutras. The one tradition provided the theology, the other provided various “skillful means” for spiritual insight, without any conflicting truth claims.

Buddhism specializes in this. But all religions, to a greater or lesser extent, use “upaya”: disciplines that foster a healthy soul. That is what “religion” means: spiritual discipline. The word is from the Latin, “to be bound.” Catholicism is full of them: sacraments, sacramentals, observations, novenas, liturgies, spiritual retreats, statues, chants, “bells and smells,” fasts and feasts, prayers, rituals, and so on. Not to mention pilgrimages to the shrines of saints.

This too is plainly, and yet more plainly, the path that Dymphna calls us to.

Artists, for all the wonders they offer us, are arguably often still half crazy. In all the world of man, only a saint is wholly sane.

There was always a reason for all this scary religious stuff. Even leaving aside philosophical considerations, the fact that a religious practice has survived for a great length of time, and has been widely practiced, is warrant that it is effective in sustaining the soul.

Nor should we leave aside philosophical considerations. Depression can be succinctly defined as a sense of loss of meaning in life. Insanity can be succinctly defined as a loss of truth, of a sense of what is and is not real.

What else, then, is the medicine required, but a consistent and well-established cosmology and theology?

Nor should we forget the value of religion as an ethical guide. If, as we here seem to see, depression and perhaps mental illness in general is often the product of a personal injustice, what is called for is a reference in the first place to a clear ethical standard.

It is remarkably foolish for us to ignore this vast body of knowledge; that steeple we see before us is the visible pinnacle of the greatest and most important accomplishment of humankind. It is the rock upon which everything else has been built—not just at the level of our civilization, but at the level of each individual psyche, which is to say, soul.

---

[1] Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.30-3.

[2] William Labov, Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1972, p. 209

[3] Politics VIII:7; 1341b 35-1342a 8, J. Burnet trans.

The Andromeda Strain

Rossetti, The Damsel of the Sangreal

In many cases, the reward for slaying the dragon is human, rather than or as well as an object. Our general-issue handsome prince, when he downs Sir Dragon, traditionally wins the hand of a lovely princess. Andromeda is Perseus’s reward for conquering the dragon Cetus. Gilgamesh’s conscious goal is to find the old man Utnapishtim, not at first the herb of immortality. Jason gains the Golden Fleece, and also the hand of Medea. Theseus, after conquering Herr Minotaur, makes off with Princess Ariadne. Rama’s goal and grail is his wife Sita. Ragnar Lodbrok kills his twin serpent adversaries for the hand of Princess Thora.

Given that the magical objects won by slaying dragons represent transcendental values, it seems reasonable to assume that the humans rescued in the same way also represent something transendental. In many cases, indeed, this human is portrayed as differing from your average lovely princess in being or becoming immortal—transcendental. Gilgamesh seeks Utnapishtim because he has become immortal and must then know the secret of immortality. Andromeda is granted immortality by Athena, and becomes a constellation in the starry heavens. Ariadne is taken by Dionysus to Olympus to be made a goddess. Medea is the granddaughter of Helios, the sun, and, depending on sources, semi-divine. Sita, rather than dying the way a conventional woman might, is swallowed up by the Earth, her mother, at the end of the Ramayana.

What does it mean for a human to be a transcendental? After all, in this shared word, humans are actually rather commonplace.

But there is something else, which is not commonplace at all, and yet is best illustrated by a human face. Love.

Not romantic love, not sexual love, not married love, but what is also called agape, caritas, charity. “God is love,” as Jesus or St. Paul or St. Augustine put it. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

St. Paul famously outlines its form:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7, NIV)

This is not a common sort of love. It is the stark opposite of what a narcissist calls “love”: it is unselfish love.

Tristan and Isolde

But how to portray it? How to convey the point? What is our objective correlative here?

It is natural enough to portray it by the more familiar, more common affection of male for female, female for male (eros), or friend for friend (philios). So transcendent love may sometimes be portrayed here as the beautiful princess of the legends. Just as agape is expressed as romantic love in the Bible’s Song of Songs, or in St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, or in the Krishna-Radha cycle in India, or in the Sufi poets, or indeed in Medieval romance.

As a matter of effective storytelling, too, note that simply gaining possession of some object is a far inferior motivation for a character, a far inferior climax for a story, to finding “true love.” We naturally care more about the latter. In comparison to the committed presence of a living, breathing person, any mere object, whether gold cup, fleece, apple, Maltese Falcon, or cache of coins, seems unworthy.

And this instinctive human preference perhaps tells us something important, about life, the universe, and everything. An object, after all, has only one dimension of existence, the physical. A person is both physical and spiritual. This gives humans a greater reality, a greater moral worth, a greater potential transcendence, and, I suggest, a greater potential beauty. William Blake argued that the greatest thing any person can conceive is necessarily a perfected person:

Man can have no idea of any thing greater than Man as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness. … Think of a white cloud. as being holy: you cannot love it. But think of a holy man within the cloud: love springs up in your thought. For to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections.i

Accordingly, the best image of the goal of life is a good and beautiful person. The best image of the divine is a good and beautiful person. And the greatest value, which transcends all transcendentals, is a perfect love—a living and complete relationship of love with a good and beautiful person.

However, portraying said true love by a lovely princess is also fraught with risks of misinterpretation. It is all very well to offer romantic love as an image of eternal love, but it is then too easy for literal-minded listeners to mistake the one for the other, and raise up either the possibly selfish, possessive aspect of marriage or the physical pleasure of sex as a golden calf.

St. George and the dragon

Accordingly, it seems wise for the legends to strike a note of ambiguity or deliberate contrast here.

And so Gilgamesh is probably wise to reject the goddess Ishtar. “Which of your lovers did you ever love for ever?” he asks. “What shepherd of yours has pleased you for all time?”ii Sexual or romantic love, which she represents—cognate to the Greek Aphrodite—is not the thing we seek. Nor, ultimately, is philios, the affection one feels towards a friend, represented here by the friendship with Enkidu. Such a love, although admirable, is not eternal. Enkidu dies.

Many legends seem to show the human transcendental as at once somehow the same as, and somehow different from, the transcendental object. Perseus wins Medusa’s head, his transcendental object, then battles a second opponent to win Andromeda. The two “prizes” seem to contrast: the fearsome dead Medusa, to look upon whom brings death; the lovely living Andromeda, who potentially offers children and new life. Jason’s two prizes are presented in parallel: “Proud of his prize, and taking with him a further prize, the one who had helped him gain it, the hero, and his wife Medea, returned to the harbour at Iolchos.”iii In killing the dragon Fafnir, Sigurd/Sigmund wins a horde of gold and a collection of nifty magical objects. No fair maid. But drinking Fafnir’s blood allows him to understand the language of birds, and the birds direct him to Brynhild.iv Herakles wants two immortal horses for killing his sea monster, but takes Hesione later as consolation, when he is not given his prize and sacks Troy in revenge. Gilgamesh reaches his human goal, Utnapishtim; Utnapishtim then directs him to the herb of immortality. And the Holy Grail, by its nature, points beyond itself to a human transcendent—to the perfected human, Jesus Christ.

Jason returns with Medea and the Golden Fleece

It is notable that the hero then often loses the princess in these tales. This is a sad note in many classic hero legends. They lack that fairy tale ending. They are closer to tragedy.

Jason, having pledged his life to Medea, dumps her for Glauce, leading to a terrible cycle of revenge. Theseus seems to abandon Ariadne on the next island, despite vows, and despite her having saved his life. As the epic poet Nonnus eulogizes her: “you know your thread was his saviour: for the man of Athens with his club would never have found victory in that contest without a rosy-red girl to help him.”v Ragnar Lodbrok slaughters dragons left and right to win the lovely Thora. But by the same feat, he deserts his lawful wife, Ladgerda; which seems less than honourable, and less than an advertisement for true love. Thora then, rather than living happily ever after, dies of a fever. Rama, having expended epic efforts to rescue Sita, rejects her over suspicions about her chastity. When Sigurd stifles Fafnir, and is led to the lovely Brynhild, they plight their troth, as the kids used to say. Sigurd then forgets Brynhild and marries Gudrun. Brynhild has him killed in revenge.

Herakles, mightiest of classical heroes, is also conspicuously unlucky in love. He kills his first wife, Megara, in a psychotic fit. Having won Hesione, he gives her away. He is killed by his last wife, Deianira, unintentionally, but ultimately because she suspects him of adultery.

Launcelot develops an unhealthy addiction to Guinevere, who is awkwardly already married to King Arthur. This does not go good places. Sir Tristan is passionate about Isolde, who is also married to his king. Indeed, the worthy knights of the Round Table seem to fall all over themselves for the opportunity to commit adultery.

Launcelot and Guinevere end their days not as lovers, but as priest and nun. They have, graphically, realized that their love was false love, and have embraced agape in the cloister.

Samson too, like Herakles, gives his first wife, won by killing the Timnean lion, away: “And Samson’s wife was given to one of his companions who had attended him at the feast.” (Judges 14:20, NIV)

His second marriage, you may remember, to Delilah, does not work out better.

For that matter, Hamlet had obvious difficulties coming to terms of endearment with Ophelia.

This relentlessly unromantic ending may be to pre-empt idolatry. Romantic love resembles, but is not, agape or caritas. And so the overly-simple solution must not be allowed to stand. True love itself is beyond the physical sphere; romantic love is only its physical image.

And perhaps too there is another reason.

Tristan and Isolde

Consider again the word of the abused child. He has not known love growing up. He has been betrayed by his first and greatest natural love, his parents. Love from then on is going to be a problem for him (or her). If, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, the family is the school of love, he has grown up never having learned to read or write. He is bound to have problems in this field.

For one thing, he (or she) will feel himself ultimately unlovable. And so he will fear love. The other will sooner or later discover how awful he truly is. They cannot possibly really love him.

For another, he (or she) will have no good idea of how to express love, if he genuinely feels it. He is likely to be clumsy, naive, and awkward. He will flunk on “emotional intelligence.”

For another, having experienced abuse from those he (or she) loved most, he is liable to suppose abuse is all he deserves, or is a legitimate expression of love. Accordingly, he is vulnerable to an abusive, masochistic romantic relationship in adult life.

For another, having been taught by parental example both that all his own natural inclinations are bad, and also that hurting others is normal human behaviour and an inclination in the best of us—for we all want to believe our parents are the best of people—he is likely to develop a generally unfavourable impression of human nature. This obviously makes it hard to develop love for another.

For another, having experienced abuse and/or betrayal from those he most loved, he is likely to fear betrayal from anyone professing love ever again. One bitten, as they say, twice shy.

And last, but not least, these fears are fully justified. If the common motive for parental abuse is envy, resentment of a child who is exceptional in some way, that motive is going to apply as well with anyone else they meet in later life. Any other narcissist is likely to react in the same way as did their narcissistic parent: they will want to either destroy or possess them.

Success in some hero quest actually makes this last problem worse. With any public profile of accomplishment, this motive for malice has now grown. Narcissists in the admiring crowd will now seek them out to either kill or own them. As narcissists sought out Martin Luther King Jr., or the Kennedys, or Gandhi.

The various romantic troubles encountered by our various heroes and heroines can perhaps be seen as ringing the changes on these depressive difficulties.

Start with this last problem first.

In the case of Jason and Medea, Medea has betrayed her father, then killed and dismembered her brother, for the sake of her desire for Jason, a man she has just met. This does not bode well: that she approached Jason, rather than the reverse, reinforces the impression of willfulness. She sounds a lot like a narcissist. Creon, Jason’s father, says, “I fear thee, … lest thou devise against my child some cureless ill. Many things contribute to this fear of mine; thou art a witch by nature, expert in countless sorceries...”vi And Medea proves him right: she brings down the curtain in that play by slaughtering her own children for revenge. She was and is exactly the sort of person who caused Jason his trouble in the first place. And she has latched on to him.

Ariadne, similarly, although often portrayed as an innocent victim of Theseus’s betrayal, has shown similar disturbing character traits. She has betrayed her father Minos and helped Theseus kill her brother; again, for the sake of a man she has just met. How can she be trusted? On the evidence, she does not love anyone but herself.

Theseus suffers a terrible betrayal from his later wife, Phaedra. She develops a lust for his son Hippolytus. Hippolytus rejects her. She perjures herself to have Hippolytus killed. She, too, is obviously a narcissist. Theseus apparently attracts the type.

Ladgerda, Ragnar Lodbrok’s rejected first wife, offers a similar example. When Ragnar wooed her:

She spurned his mission in her heart, but feigned compliance. Giving false answers, she made her panting wooer confident that he would gain his desires; but ordered that a bear and a dog should be set at the porch of her dwelling, thinking to guard her own room against all the ardour of a lover by means of the beasts that blocked the way. Ragnar, comforted by the good news, embarked, crossed the sea, and, telling his men to stop in Gaulardale, as the valley is called, went to the dwelling of the maiden alone. Here the beasts met him, and he thrust one through with a spear, and caught the other by the throat, wrung its neck, and choked it. Thus he had the maiden as the prize of the peril he had overcome.

She had, in sum, feigned affection in order to kill him. For no decent reason, it seems, but only out of malice; she could have simply spurned his advances.

Ragnar’s response, in turn, perhaps illustrates a separate problem for the depressive: the tendency to suppose that abuse is normal to affection. He seems slow to grasp the significance of this assassination attempt. Only eventually, according to Saxo Grammaticus, “he thought ill of her trustworthiness, remembering that she had long ago set the most savage beasts to destroy him.”

She goes on to kill her second spouse, because she “thought it pleasanter to rule without her husband than to share the throne with him.”vii

Samson᾿s story hinges on the same problem: the abused hero (or heroine) is both prone to being latched on to by a narcissist, and constitutionally unable to understand that he is being abused. Samson is betrayed by his first wife, the unnamed woman of Timnah, as soon as she has the opportunity. She reveals to her countrymen the solution to his riddle at their wedding, costing him a large sum. His second wife, Delilah, betrays him in the same way, by revealing his secrets. Repeatedly. Nevertheless, he does not seem to learn the lesson. He does not seem able to accept that something is wrong here. To him, then, abuse is normal and what affection looks like. 

So Delilah said to Samson, “Tell me the secret of your great strength and how you can be tied up and subdued.”
Samson answered her, “If anyone ties me with seven fresh bowstrings that have not been dried, I’ll become as weak as any other man.” 

Then the rulers of the Philistines brought her seven fresh bowstrings that had not been dried, and she tied him with them. With men hidden in the room, she called to him, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” But he snapped the bowstrings as easily as a piece of string snaps when it comes close to a flame. So the secret of his strength was not discovered. 

Then Delilah said to Samson, “You have made a fool of me; you lied to me. Come now, tell me how you can be tied.” 

He said, “If anyone ties me securely with new ropes that have never been used, I’ll become as weak as any other man.” 

So Delilah took new ropes and tied him with them. Then, with men hidden in the room, she called to him, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” But he snapped the ropes off his arms as if they were threads. 

Delilah then said to Samson, “All this time you have been making a fool of me and lying to me. Tell me how you can be tied.” 

He replied, “If you weave the seven braids of my head into the fabric on the loom and tighten it with the pin, I’ll become as weak as any other man.” So while he was sleeping, Delilah took the seven braids of his head, wove them into the fabric and tightened it with the pin. 

Again she called to him, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” He awoke from his sleep and pulled up the pin and the loom, with the fabric. 

Then she said to him, “How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when you won’t confide in me? This is the third time you have made a fool of me and haven’t told me the secret of your great strength.” With such nagging she prodded him day after day until he was sick to death of it. 

So he told her everything. “No razor has ever been used on my head,” he said, “because I have been a Nazirite dedicated to God from my mother’s womb. If my head were shaved, my strength would leave me, and I would become as weak as any other man.” (Judges 16: 6-17, NIV)

The strange story of Herakles having to serve as a slave to Queen Omphale seems meant to make the same point. He is required for a year to wear women’s clothes and do women’s work, while she wears the skin of the lion and carries his club. Leaving aside what it might say about traditional sex roles, this sounds like a description of an abusive relationship. The name of Herakles᾿s last wife, Deianira, in turn, is, literally, “man destroyer” or “husband destroyer.” That sounds straightforward. And she does, indeed, destroy Herakles, by giving him the shirt of Nessus, which burns him alive. In her defense, according to the legend she thought it was a love charm. However, administering a love charm to a husband suggests a narcissistic desire to control. So does the image of a shirt: a fatally close embrace, a perfect possession.

Herakles and Hesione

The story of Herakles and Hesione seems to illustrate yet another depressive love problem: the inability of the abused to accept real love when offered. We have warrant to see Hesione as an abused child, like Herakles: she has been sacrificed to the sea monster by her father for his own sins. That ought to make them a good match. She is unlikely to be a narcissist; narcissism cannot, almost necessarily, emerge from an abused childhood or adolescence. In contrast to Medea or Ariadne, Hesione is dutiful. Rather than betray her father, she is ready to die for his sake. Rather than killing or helping to kill a brother, like Ariadne or Medea, she ransoms one of hers from death, Priam. Moreover, she seems by her situation to echo Andromeda, similarly rescued by Perseus, who was Herakles’s grandfather. One surely expects here a marriage and a “happy ever after” ending.

Instead, Herakles shows no interest. He does not seek her. When he acquires her, he gives her away.viii

Hesione, as the sister of Priam, is the aunt of another familiar figure, Paris. Later, when Priam becomes king, Paris is sent to bring Hesione back to Troy, in gratitude for her saving his life. Paris gets distracted, and brings Helen back instead.

This looks like a parable, of neglecting sincere and selfless love (Hesione) for the sake of sexual and romantic love (Helen). Paris earlier preferred physical attractiveness and sexual love in choosing Aphrodite over Athena or Artemis in the Judgment of Paris. It is his characteristic fault.

Perhaps, by extension, then, this shows the same mistake being committed by Herakles. He was unable to recognize real love when it was available. He seems to have made the same mistake with the loyal Auge. Instead, he chose or attracted abusive women.

Sir Launcelot too seems to have been approached by abusive women. At one point in his travels, the damosel Hellawes demands a kiss. When he refuses, she confesses “And, Sir Launcelot, now I tell thee, I have loved thee this seven year, but there may no woman have thy love but Queen Guenever. But sithen I may not rejoice thee to have thy body alive, I had kept no more joy in this world but to have thy body dead.”ix This is the narcissistic response: possess or destroy. At another point, Launcelot is kept for some months in prison by Morgana la Fey, who says she will kill him if he does not marry her.

Launcelot more famously had an improper relationship with Guinevere. Her character too is in question. When King Arthur explains to the all-wise Merlin that Guinevere is the woman he seeks to marry, Merlin warns: “Sir, ... as of her beauty and fairness she is one of the fairest alive, but, an ye loved her not so well as ye do, I should find you a damosel of beauty and of goodness that should like you and please you, an your heart were not set; but there as a man’s heart is set, he will be loath to return.” In other words, she is beautiful but lacks “goodness.”x

Obviously, both she and Launcelot are guilty of sin. However, of the two, her sin is the greater. Launcelot, frequently propositioned, shuns all other women for her sake; this demonstrates that his love for her, if misplaced, is not selfish. She is married, and is breaking her marriage vows; he is not. It is possible to believe here that Launcelot is emotionally naive, as an abused child is apt to be, and she is using him.

We have already seen that Guinevere drives Launcelot mad by a sudden emotional betrayal; wrongly accusing him of being unfaithful. This is triply problematic: firstly, as is explained to us, Launcelot has not really been unfaithful, but was deluded by a spell to believe he was sleeping with Guinevere herself. Secondly, as they are not married and may never marry, she has no right to demand faithfulness from Launcelot. Thirdly, she is herself being unfaithful to her husband King Arthur, and so is guilty of hypocrisy.

Dame Elaine, daughter of King Pelles, seems to stand in contrast to Guinevere here. Elaine is a figure more like Andromeda, Ophelia, or Hesione. To begin with, like them, she too has been abused. Launcelot himself rescues her from imprisonment in a tower, where she has been tortured for five years—since adolescence—for her great beauty. When she is rescued, her first thought—demonstrating her good character—is to go with Launcelot to a chapel for prayers of thanksgiving. She is associated with the Grail—it is in her father᾿s possession, and she might therefore actually be the otherwise unidentified maiden who regularly appears in the legends holding the Grail. She does, it is true, seduce Launcelot by sorcery, which is not a righteous act. However, she does this firstly, out of dutifulness, out of obedience, like Ophelia, to her father. And secondly, not out of lust but to conceive Galahad, another human transcendental. 

“My lord Sir Launcelot, I beseech you see me as soon as ye may, for I have obeyed me unto the prophecy that my father told me. And by his commandment to fulfil this prophecy I have given the greatest riches and the fairest flower that ever I had, and that is my maidenhood that I shall never have again; and therefore, gentle knight, owe me your good will.”xi

Then, like Launcelot and unlike Guinevere, like Auge when seduced by Herakles, she is strictly faithful to Launcelot from then on, despite the approaches of others; even though he rejects her for Guinevere. At one point she confesses to him, “I will live and die with you, and only for your sake; and if my life might not avail you and my death might avail you, wit you well I would die for your sake.”xii

She seems, in sum, an image of faithful, selfless love, in contrast to Guinevere. Despite this, Launcelot repeatedly prefers Guinevere. Even though Guinevere is at times cruel to him, enough so that it drives him mad. Even though, at the very time Elaine is testifying to her love, Guinevere is “wroth, and gave many rebukes to Sir Launcelot, and called him false knight.”xiii Perhaps, an abused child, he cannot recognize or accept the healthier, more sincere love of an Elaine.

There is a second Lady Elaine in the Launcelot cycle, Elaine of Astolat, and she seems a similar figure. Like Elaine the daughter of Pelles, she nurses Launcelot in illness. “Ever this maiden Elaine did ever her diligent labour night and day unto Sir Launcelot, that there was never child nor wife more meeker to her father and husband than was that Fair Maiden of Astolat.”xiv Unlike Guinevere, her character is not in question: “she is a full fair maiden, good and gentle, and well taught.”xv She asks him to marry her; he refuses. So she dies of grief:

I take God to my record I loved never none but Sir Launcelot du Lake, nor never shall, and a clean maiden I am for him and for all other; and sithen it is the sufferance of God that I shall die for the love of so noble a knight, I beseech the High Father of Heaven to have mercy upon my soul, and upon mine innumerable pains that I suffered may be allegeance of part of my sins. For sweet Lord Jesu, said the fair maiden, I take Thee to record, on Thee I was never great offencer against thy laws; but that I loved this noble knight, Sir Launcelot, out of measure, and of myself, good Lord, I might not withstand the fervent love wherefore I have my death.xvi

Launcelot allows her to die rather than forsake Guinevere. Who, in the meantime, is rejecting him: “Queen Guenever was wood wroth with Sir Launcelot, and would by no means speak with him, but estranged herself from him.”xvii

His attachment to Guinevere seems, in essence, a co-dependency, an addiction like alcoholism.

It is because of this adultery, and this choice of false love over agape, that Launcelot, despite his other fine qualities, is judged unworthy to win the Grail. And it is for their other various adulteries that all the other knights, bold and chivalrous as they are, are also found unworthy. The task is left to Launcelot’s son by Elaine, Galahad, because he is pure of heart. It is explained to Sir Gawain in these words: “Sir Galahad is a maid and sinned never, and that is the cause he shall enchieve where he goeth that ye nor none such shall not attain, nor none in your fellowship.”xviii

Hamlet seems to have a comparable problem with Ophelia, preventing him from accepting and returning her affection. He seems to have very little good to say about humanity in general.

To be honest, as this world goes, is to be
one man picked out of ten thousand. (Act 2, Scene 7) 

Man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so. (Act 2, Scene 7) 

Use every man
after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping? (Act 2, Scene 7) 

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Act 3, Scene 4) 

We are arrant knaves,
all; believe none of us. (Act 3, Scene 1)

Accordingly, he must doubt her motives, all mortals being scoundrels, and the very possibility of love, although her own reaction to his rejection seems to demonstrate that her motives were pure.

Ophelia, for her part, seems to illustrate an alternate symptom of being abused. She seems unable to judge Hamlet’s intentions, and unaware of how to respond; she is socially awkward. Low EQ. Leaving herself to be manipulated by her father Polonius. “I do not know, my lord,” she tells her father, referring to Hamlet’s approaches, “what I should think.” (Act 1, Scene 3). To which he responds, seizing the opportunity, “Think yourself a baby.”

It is hard here to miss certain lessons for the treatment of depression. First, the depressive can find initial relief in “art therapy”—our first helper figure. Which is also to say, in the hero legends—they are themselves this art therapy. This is the first line of treatment.

Second, the depressed should seek in fear and trembling a firm religious faith. This is the hero quest.

Third, they must take care to avoid the danger of new abusive relationships.

Fourth … it seems they must work their way towards agape, a true and selfless and fully reciprocal love. Besides being the final perfect transcendental, agape is the obvious remedy for a lack of love growing up. It directly addresses the problem. It answers the prophecy given to Telephus: to heal his existential wound, he must resort to the thing that caused it. True love is the cure to false love.

However, the hero legends do not clearly show us how to get there. They tend to end with the hero still in a state of suffering, or perhaps released from suffering only by death. Granted, the hero legends show that the abused child can have a meaningful, productive, life, but can he or she not also find happiness? This is a bit disappointing, if what we came for is a “cure” to depression, as opposed to a guide for living with it.

For this final solution, it seems, if there is one, we must still look elsewhere.


i William Blake, “Annotations to Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Divine Wisdom,” London, 1788.

ii Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 6, N.K. Sanders trans.

iii Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 7, ll. 100-158, Kline trans.

iv Völsunga Saga, Chapter 19.

v Nonnus, Dionysiaca 47. 434 ff. Rouse trans.

vi Euripides, Medea.

viiSaxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, Book 9.

viiiOvid, Metamorphoses Book 11, ll, 194-220, Kline trans.

ixMorte d’Arthur, Book 6, Ch. 15.

xMorte d’Arthur, Book 3, Ch. 1.

xiBook 11, Ch. 3.

xii Morte d’Arthur, Book 12, Ch. 5.

xiii Ibid., Book 4, Ch. 6.

xiv Ibid., Book 18, Ch. 17.

xvIbid., Book 18, Ch. 19.

xvi Ibid, Book 18, Ch. 19.

xvii Ibid.

xviii Ibid., Book 13, Ch. 16.