Hope

A Shield in the Economy of Borderline States

Anna Potamianou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415121774
• eBook ISBN: 9781134807413
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

In the well known myth of Pandora, hope was the last and most need gift at the bottom of a box of myriad misfortunes let loose on an unsuspecting world. For most human beings hope is a positive benefit. Anna Potamianou shows how in the 'borderline' patient hope can become a perverted and omnipotent means of denying reality. Indeed, in such individuals any state of mind or feeling can take on the status of an object, which is then used as a barrier against their fear of change.

The psychic economy and dynamics of borderline states are not yet well understood and this book makes an important contribution to the clinical debate.

1

Hope as a binding cathexis

(Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 54–58)

As exemplified in the Pandora myth

Hesiod’s Works and Days, one of the oldest of human attempts to synthesize the history of the cosmos and of mankind, is our source for the Pandora myth, which is woven into the fabric of the conflict played out between Zeus and Prometheus. Zeus the Olympian, king of the gods, ruling from the father s throne, angrily tells Prometheus, the son of lapetos the Titan:

You are pleased at having stolen fire and outwitted me—a great calamity both for yourself and for men to come. To set against the fire I shall give them an affliction in which they will all delight as they embrace their own misfortune¹

(lines 54–58)

Affliction it may be, but they will delight in it as they embrace their misfortune, which lies concealed within their hearts. They will delight in an affliction, a misfortune. It is Pandora who will be sent to mankind through Epimetheus, as a present from Zeus, a homologue to Prometheus’s gift.

But who is Pandora? According to Hesiod (Works and Days, lines 60–64), she was fashioned from earth and water by Hephaestus, who breathed into her a human voice and strength; she was modelled in the image of immortal goddesses, who endowed her with every charm and wisdom. However, Hermes, the messenger bringing her to Epimetheus, places in her breast lies, wily pretences and a knavish nature. Her name, which means ‘all gifts’, has a twofold connotation: it refers to the gods who have contributed to this panspermia of afflictions, and also to herself as the bearer of all the spites that will befall mortals.

In the Theogony Hesiod tells how Pandora was created as an affliction for mankind to set against the fire (line 570), and that Zeus caused this beautiful bane to emerge² in the place of a blessing (

, lines 585–586).

However, Pandora is by no means solely the woman created for the misfortune of men, as Hesiod presents her. In her form as the bearer of gifts, she is heiress to Pandoteira (she who gives all), one of the epithets of the earth goddess. As Anesidora, another name for the chthonic and agricultural power, she causes gifts to be brought up from the depths. This conception of Pandora is attested by her representation on a krater dating from 450 BC (in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford): by a hammer blow, Epimetheus causes Pandora to emerge from a chasm in the earth. This is the theme of the anodos. Above, a little Eros flies towards Epimetheus. In this tradition, Pandora is a divinity of the earth and of fertility.³Furthermore, Pandora is the mother of Pyrrha, who married Deucalion, the son of Prometheus, and thereby became the mother of humankind.

Mechanisms of reversal and externalization operate in Hesiod’s version of the myth, so that we no longer see Pandora arising from the depths of the earth which she personifies, containing evil which is within her. The Pandora shown to us holds a jar, which she has unstopped ,

⁴ thus releasing the grim cares inflicted by the gods on mankind. The punitive agency is here absorbed by the gods; the need for this projection becomes evident if we consider that the myth is connected in more than one respect with notions of transgression, seduction, secrecy and voyeuristic curiosity. As for the ambivalence, it emerges in connection with the gift—both Prometheus’ gift to man and the gift of Zeus—even if the manifest text presents the two aspects as split, with Prometheus distributing bountiful gifts to man.⁵

In the Pandora myth, not only Epimetheus but also Pandora is inescapably punished: Pandora for having sought to see what was forbidden to her, and Epimetheus for having ignored the advice of his brother Prometheus, who had warned him that no gift from Zeus should ever be accepted. In this respect, the very formulation of the myth may be seen as psychoanalytic: Epimetheus gives no thought to what Prometheus has told him; he forgets, and, having accepted the gift, he had the bane before he realized

⁶ what was happenin

Epimetheus, the antithetical double of Prometheus, accepts Pandora into his space because he fails to remember; he has repressed his brother’s words. Knowledge of the evil harboured within remains the prerogative of Prometheus, linked as he is in the maternal line of descent to the chthonic goddesses, whose power of prophecy he possesses. Epimetheus, for his part, will understand later, as it were by deferred action. Epimetheus thus introduces us simultaneously to the thinking which follows the act and to the aftermath of a myth (epimithion). What will come after this myth, which I see as one of disclosure, is the making of the first human couple by Pyrrha and Deucalion, the children of Prometheus and Epimetheus, respectively.⁷ Hence we have moved from the double to the couple along the route of disclosure and of acquired knowledge; the entire course of man’s psychosexual development is to be found here.

Depths and the knowledge of what lies within them: that is the road on which Prometheus and Pandora meet. But there is another road too, that of hope, which Pandora detains in the ‘unbreakable’ prison of her jar. Hope is what remains to her, once the afflictions have been unleashed upon the world. Detained by her—or in her—hope is here connected with what lies concealed in the obscure depths. Prometheus, on the other hand, will allow it to wing its way to men. In Aeschylus’s play, he will say: ‘I placed in them blind hopes.’⁸ By an omnipotent impulse, he presents himself as the one who grants

all knowledge, and thereby ‘caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom’. This was a mistake for which he will subsequently acknowledge his guilt

⁹

He will pay dearly for his ‘fault’, being chained by Zeus to the rock.

The gods keep what gives men life concealed. ‘Zeus concealed it,’ says Hesiod, ¹⁰ ‘angry because Prometheus s crooked cunning had tricked him.’ However, once the seed of fire has been stolen, Prometheus will place it in a fennel stalk; he is portrayed on another krater (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 420–410 BC), watching satyrs dancing with their torches and holding the narthex (fennel stalk) from which dazzling flames issue.

Whereas Prometheus sends hope among men, Pandora detains it in a box or jar. For me, Prometheus and Pandora may be regarded as each other’s doubles, so that the order of the two myths can be imagined as reversed, with that of Pandora, the chthonic power, preceding that of the demigod, whose career can be deduced from his maternal line of descent. Through pain, renunciations and the quelling of passions, Prometheus will progress to his ultimate role of bearer of the flame.¹¹

Prometheus sent hope among men, but hope is truly not always a boon to him who nurtures it. Jean-Pierre Vernant¹² treats the themes of Prometheus and Pandora as two aspects of one and the same story—that of ‘human wretchedness … the need to toil upon the earth…to be born, to die, to have each day both the fear and the hope of an uncertain morrow’. The hope detained by Pandora in the obscure depths of her bodily jar surely has to do with the representation and the fear of the maternal power, as well as with the nostalgia of waiting for it to become available.

Owing to the range of desires and prohibitions to which both men and women are heir, the two aspects of the image of woman and mother are necessarily inherent in human thought. One is that of the archaic mother who irrevocably wields omnipotent power. Because she is the potentially destructive woman of the shadows, the dangerous and perverse seductress, ¹³ hers is the domain of the dark continents and of nameless horrors. Note that Hesiod uses the word

for Pandora’s jar. Now the

, in the form of a large earthen vessel, was also used as a container for mortal remains, a place of interment. By unstopping her

, the jar that is also a tomb, Pandora unleashed affliction, disease and death upon mankind. Here the emphasis is on the dark face of the power of Mother Earth.

The other face is that of fertile womanhood, receptive to luminous warmth, the bearer of life, helpful and protective, whose gentle availability affords protection from the terror of asphyxiating and annihilating attacks and banishes devouring anxieties. For this reason, the earth goddess often takes the form of the Core

in the theme of the anodos (emergence). I believe that this is intended to represent not only renewal but also avoidance of the implications of the ‘full’ maternal form. Jane Harrison ¹⁴ notes that a kylix in the British Museum depicts Pandora both with that appellation and with her other name, Anesidora (she who causes gifts to emerge), which, as we know, denotes the earth goddess¹⁴.

In our fantasies, the two faces of woman and of mother have retained their magical or divine power. After an interval of thousands of years, in a land close to the one where the Pandora myth arose, the Akathist Hymn (the ‘standing hymn’)¹⁵ transferred the hopes of all Byzantine Orthodox Christianity on to the figure of Mary, the Christian mother of the light of the spirit. According to Toynbee,¹⁶ Mary, the human mother of Jesus, bided her time before taking the place of Isis and Cybele as the mother of a god (Theotokos).

However, in my view this Mary, the mother of the god who created everything¹⁷— father and son in the unity of the very spirit said to have come upon Mary¹⁸—has absorbed within her many attributes of the fertility goddesses. Notwithstanding all the interposed figures, a subterranean but ultimately unbroken thread links Gaia, the first divinity to have emerged from chaos, the single mother (prior to the incestuous seducing mothers), one of whose descendants is Pandora, to the Mary of Christian prayers.

Hail

Mary. But the

of the Byzantine hymns not only implies veneration, but also has the connotation of ‘rejoice’. Is this a mnemic echo of a pleasure from another time—a pleasure buried, unrecognized, preserved in the bushy shadows of the oft-denied route linking the Mediterranean basin and Ancient Greece to Byzantium? At any rate, in order for the woman to become mother, sexual pleasure must be forgone. The Virgin Mary condenses within herself all the prohibitions on the sexual life of the woman and mother. The Akathist, an anonymous hymn, is dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It is generally attributed to Romanes Melodos, who lived in the sixth century AD. Other possible authors are also mooted, dating it back to the fourth century AD, or alternatively forward to the eighth or even the ninth century AD¹⁹.

The hymn forms part of morning mass for the Saturday of the fifth week of Lent. It has been connected with specific historical events, with attacks by Byzantium’s enemies during the reigns of Heraclius I, Constantine IV or Leo III (Isaurian dynasty). The people in the churches and on the ramparts of Constantinople sang:

O Champion General, I your city now inscribe to you

triumphant anthems as the tokens of my gratitude,

being rescued from the terrors, O Theotokos.

But since you have the dominion un assailable,

from all kinds of perils free me so that unto you,

I may cry aloud: rejoice, O Bride unwedded

²⁰,

Much later, C.Paparrigopoulos could still write that, for the (Greek) nation under the (Turkish) yoke, the Akathist mas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The New Library of Psychoanalysis
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Hope as a binding cathexis
• 2 Clinical and metapsychological background
• 3 Hope
• 4 Hopeful waiting in borderline states
• 5 Even God needs a mother
• Notes
• Selected bibliography
• Index