Soul: Treatment and Recovery

The selected works of Murray Stein

Murray Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138791244
• eBook ISBN: 9781317649830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Murray Stein is well-known as an insightful and pioneering author and academic. Soul: Treatment and Recovery presents a selection of papers and book chapters spanning his career from 1973 to 2012. The chapters included in this collection speak for Stein's hope that individuals and humanity as a whole can evolve toward greater consciousness and awareness of meaning in daily life.

The book is presented in four parts, each of which represents a stage in Stein's personal development as an author. Part One, Psyche and Myth, presents papers which draw on timeless documents of the soul for the benefit of our generations of humans who are no longer contained within mythic consciousness. In Part Two, Clinical Themes, Stein has selected papers and an interview that explore themes familiar to many clinicians that were raised in his own practical work as a Jungian psychoanalyst. Part Three is dedicated to the process of individuation, a key notion in analytical psychology which lies at the heart of the Jungian enterprise and is a topic that has occupied Stein throughout his career. Finally, Part Four presents several papers dealing with the theme of psychology and spirituality, a matter of increasing concern to Stein in recent years.

This unique collection of work will be of great interest to analytical psychologists and psychotherapists as well as academics and students in the field. Additionally, for anyone invested in the project of self-discovery and with the desire to relate more deeply to self and world, the papers included here will suggest important points of reference and directions to pursue further.

Part I
Psyche and myth

Introduction

When one comes belatedly into a creative and dynamic field like psychoanalysis, as I did in 1969, one inherits projects and issues that have been worked over and refined by many others in previous generations (I count myself in the fourth generation of Jungian psychoanalysis). The problems the forebears confronted, however, are perennial topics that have occupied philosophers, theologians, writers, and poets for many centuries. These are problems, moreover, with no final answers but ones that will continue to generate reflections as long as humans exist. There is always room for more debate, and some of the once new and astonishing psychological interpretations of the human condition first offered by Freud and Jung have generated questions that will occupy many generations still to come.

I began writing and publishing papers in analytical psychology and Jungian psychoanalysis some 40 years ago, in 1972–3. In the beginning, and partly as a result of the late James Hillman’s charisma and strong intellectual influence, I became fascinated by the potential for myth to throw light on depth psychological questions. As is well known, this is an area of inquiry that both Freud and Jung opened up at the very beginning of the psychoanalytic movement. What these founders saw was the possibility of reading myth for fundamental patterns of psychic functioning. Freud identified what he considered a universal human pattern of psychological development in the story of Oedipus; Jung extensively explored a myriad of world mythologems in his early work Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, to explain archaic patterns in Miss Miller’s fantasies. In the late 1930s, while Freud was writing his last work, Moses and Monotheism, in which he returned to the eternally recurring myth of the primal father and his murderous sons, Jung was collaborating with Karl Kerényi, the brilliant scholar of Greek mythology, on a volume entitled Essays on a Science of Mythology.

In the first section of these selected papers, I include four pieces from this early period in my career as a psychoanalytic author. The first essay, “Hephaistos: A Pattern of Introversion” (1973), grew out of number of early analytic cases in which I discovered a pattern of psychic functioning and orientation in introverted young men, similar to Franz Kafka, who were wounded by childhood trauma and yet became highly creative as artists in adulthood. The myth of Hephaistos struck me as a surprisingly accurate model and deepened my understanding of the personal psychodynamics in these cases as well as the potential for creativity despite, or even because of, difficult experiences in childhood involving rejection by mothers and fathers. I found a healing perspective in a myth that spoke as well of divine suffering. Relating myth to symptom or character structure helps lift the personal out of a narrow “only me” feeling of isolation to a general pattern of humanity. It is an essay on trauma in childhood and the possibilities of recovery and creativity.

In “Narcissus” (1976), I took up a theme that was at the time powerfully entering into the wider field of psychoanalysis as a consequence of Heinz Kohut’s early work on narcissism and the origins and problems of the narcissistic personality. In this essay, I attempted to extend the scope of this feature of the psyche by inspecting the myth more closely and considering the reflections of some classic commentators, and also by seeking for its significance not primarily as pathology but as a normal aspect of psychological life with some purpose. I search for what later came to be called healthy narcissism and explain its role in the movement toward wholeness that we Jungians call individuation.

A theme that I inherited from my pre-analytic studies in theology and ethics at Yale Divinity School and that occupied me deeply in my final years of analytic training (and afterwards) was the problem of conscience. Where does this inner sense of right and wrong come from? Why do some people have it and others not? What about conflicts in the very heart of conscience, with one voice telling us to do one thing and another saying the very opposite? This too is a problem that was worked on by the founders of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung. Freud wrote famously about the superego as an outcome of the partial resolution of the Oedipus complex in personal history and of a traumatic event that took place long ago, namely the primal scene of patricide in the primal hoard, which continues to resonate in collective memory down through the ages to the present day. Jung also wrote about conscience and what he called “conflicts of duty.” Following upon earlier studies in theological ethics, like H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Responsible Self, I took up the question about the nature of morality and ethics from a depth psychological and Jungian perspective. I wanted to explore this question using a dialogue between psychology and myth and trying thereby to ground a human sense of right and wrong in archetypal structure, a kind of natural morality. This was, of course, before morality was discovered to be written into the human genome (if it is). The result, Solar Conscience/Lunar Conscience, was written first as a diploma thesis at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich (1973) and later revised and expanded when it was published as a book (1993). In this selection I am including the first chapter of that work. Some 35 years after the thesis was written, and after much further thinking and writing, particularly on the subject of psychological development and individuation, I returned to this topic in the essay “The Ethics of Individuation, the Individuation of Ethics” (Chapter 13). It is a subject that continues to preoccupy me. The problem of evil, which it touches upon, has haunted the human mind and fed the imagination from time immemorial.

The fourth essay in this section, “Hermes and the Creation of Space” (1995), was written on a kind of “high” after my first trip to Greece. I was impressed with the monuments to Hermes at the thresholds of sacred spaces, such as at the entrance to the temples on the island of Delos. The Greek god Hermes occupied the space betwixt and between secular and sacred space and was in a sense the guardian of that space and the guide from one realm to the other. Liminality is a theme that occupied me deeply while writing the book In MidLife, which was published in 1985, and in this essay I wanted to take the reflection on liminality as a psychological space further and apply it as well to the analytic space that opens up in psychotherapy. Of all the Greek gods and goddesses, Hermes is my favorite. I came to appreciate him through translating the classic text Hermes, Guide of Souls by Karl Kerényi, in the 1970s.

Chapter 1
Hephaistos

A pattern of introversion

The murals on the walls of the Detroit Museum of Art, commissioned by Henry Ford and executed by Diego Rivera, depict scenes in the life of the industrial worker: heavily muscled men wielding wrenches and hammers, massed together around glowing furnaces and along endless assembly lines, some of them wearing gasmasks, others struggling mightily with glowing ingots of red-hot steel. Neatly dressed managers of the industry stand off to one side plotting how further to direct this mighty force of labor to their best advantage. In some of the upper panels, heavy-breasted primitive-looking women are bearing children, the next generation of exploitable workers. The whole of this impressive painting is suffused in a noxious, greenish light that gives the scenes a distinctly underworld tone. Ford, it is rumored, was not pleased when he saw what his money had paid for.

The Marxist image of the proletarian worker masses may be largely a Hephaistian fantasy: the rejected of the earth, by whose labor and sweat civilization has grown; class-conscious and seething with pyromaniacal resentments and grudges; endlessly creative and the source of most of the world’s supply of genius; restless, volcanically explosive, and ready to take up arms against tyrannical masters, yet not lovers of war and strife but rather peacemakers and natural humanitarians; simple as fire itself and equally energetic. As the proletarian worker is seen by the Marxist to be the workhorse of industrial society, so is Hephaistos the only Olympian god who works. The workers of the world unite under the banner of Hephaistos. Bearing something of the mark of an inferior child who has to take up a trade, Hephaistos stands on the fringes of the power circles that govern the Olympian world, a servant–artisan figure who builds the palaces of the gods “by means of his craftsmanship and cunning” (Iliad, Bk. 1: 605) and sometimes plays the court buffoon to the great amusement of his fellow Olympians.

Hephaistos is a quintessential fringeperson on Olympus. Included at the edge, he looks uneasily in, into the wheels within wheels that make up the Olympian social structure. But nervously and uneasily, too, he watches the power conflicts, remembering how Zeus “caught me by the foot and threw me from the magic threshold, and all day long I dropped helpless, and about sunset I landed in Lemnos, and there was not much life left in me” (Iliad, Bk.1: 591–4). Trying somehow to stay in touch with the center, maybe to be ready for the worst or to know what’s coming next, he knows all the while that it’s impossible really to belong there—there, where they tolerate the fringe people as long as the work gets done, but where they can never act and feel quite easy and neighborly with them. Hephaistos-consciousness drifts a bit toward the Frankenstein phenomenon: his brother is the monster Typhon, but that goes beyond the fringe of Olympian society.

The feet of Hephaistos tell volumes: they are turned back to front, and when he walks he goes with a rolling gait that strikes the other gods as somehow hilarious and breaks them up with mirth—“But among the blessed immortals uncontrollable laughter went up as they saw Hephaistos bustling about the palace” (Iliad, Bk. I: 599–600). On this particular occasion his buffoonery has the effect of keeping the gods from each other’s throats.

In one story the feet of Hephaistos are malformed at birth, and Hera, his mother, goes into shock (she had bred and borne him by herself to show Zeus what she could do without his help!), grabbing him up and flinging him with disgust from the portals of heaven. This boychild was supposed to be something she could hit Zeus over the head with, to show off with, to prove that she was as good as he (he had given birth, through his head, to the mighty and highly respected Athene); instead, to her acute disappointment, this malformed cripple shows up her inferiority and embarrasses her, and this (of course) is intolerable. The crippled child threatens to put her on the fringe, too.

The other version tells that Hephaistos’ feet were crippled when he hit the ground on the island of Lemnos, having been hurled from Olympus by Zeus, who had a fit because the boy was sticking up for his mother, Hera, in one of the many quarrels between the royal pair. As a rule, Hephaistos remains close to women; he’s not much in the company of men, except for the blacksmiths. Zeus sometimes passes for his father, but most stories tell that he had no father, only a mother. And since it is generally the father who shows the boy the ropes of society and leads him out into a “position,” etc., it begins to make sense why he is so much on the edge of things in the patriarchal, masculine world of the Olympians.

Rejected by his “father” in a rather no-nonsense, brutal way, Hephaistos lands on Lemnos, where he makes friends with the Sintians. Lemnos becomes his home away from home. In fact, this island may be his original home. There was on Lemnos a tradition of Hephaistos worship on the part of the native inhabitants, those “foreign-tongued people the Sintians” (Kerényi 1951: 72). This island home of Hephaistos throws much light on his background.

The islands of Rhodes, Samothrace, Delos, and Lemnos were much associated with a race of creatures variously called Daktyloi, Telchines, Kouretes, Korybantes, or Kabeiroi; on Lemnos they were called Hephaistoi, in the plural. These names refer to dwarf-like servants of the Great Mother Goddess. Invariably, they occupy themselves with metallurgy at subterranean forges, deep in the body of the Mother herself, for the islands were in earliest times identical with the Great Goddess. As the Idaean Daktyloi (“Daktyloi” meaning “fingers,” thus as the “fingers” of the Great Goddess), these smith-dwarfs learned their metallurgic arts originally from the Great Mother herself.

The dwarfish smiths are not only the servants of the Great Mother, they are also her sons and lovers, her son-husbands: “It will be remembered how she, the Great Mother, always had with her Daktyloi, Kouretes, Korybantes or Kabeiroi, whom she had bred from within herself and with whom she also bred further” (Kerényi 1951: 211). The name of this mother-wife was (sometimes) Kabeiro; she was the mother of the Kabeiroi, and her name was variously transmuted into Rhea, Demeter, Hekate, or Aphrodite. When Hephaistos mated with Kabeiro, she bore the boy Kakmilos, who in turn mated with her and bred the three Kabeiroi and three Cabirian Nymphs. Hera, the Olympian mother of Hephaistos, preserves associations from earlier, pre-Olympian times with beings of a Dactylic nature. The importance of this incestuous pattern in the Hephaistian configuration is central.

Invariably the mythical smiths were set apart by some physical defect or oddity. Often, also, these dwarfish, crippled, or otherwise mutilated craftsmen were, according to Eliade, associated with “strangers” and “mountain folk” (Eliade 1962: 105)—that is, with primitive populations of “unfamiliar character who were surrounded by mystery” (Malamud 1973: 84). Undoubtedly this cripple motif, as well as the mysteriousness of these populations, hangs together with their incestuous bond to the Great Mother. Here we can perhaps see what lies behind the outcast character of Hephaistos: he is a fringe person and slightly monstrous because of his connections with the historically and psychologically regressive servant-son-lovers of the Great Mother.

This Daktylic background places Hephaistos, also, in proximity to the magical arts of the underworld. The left-handed Daktyloi, those who originated from the fingers of the goddess’s left hand, were magicians. And the cousins of the Kabeiroi of Lemnos, the Rhodian Telchines, were famed as evil magicians.

Hephaistos cannot be separated from his fires. In fact, his name is said to mean “fire;” sometimes, too, he is called ephoros tou puros (“ruler of the fire”), or, again, his “breath” is fire, and his “glance” is a “blaze” (Roscher 1916–24: 2037–8). But the fire of Hephaistos is fundamentally not an Olympian heavenly fire but a subterranean fire (Kerényi 1951: 156) and here he connects with the Roman god Vulcan, who ruled over and in the volcanic Mount Etna on Sicily. The Hephaistian fire per se sprang from a hole in the earth on Lemnos, “on the small mountain of Moschylos, where his companions were certain Kabeiroi called the Karkinoi, ‘the Crabs’” (Kerényi 1951: 156), alluding perhaps to their strong fingers and masterful hands.

Another association connects Hephaistos to a pre-Olympian background: in one story, Hera brings the baby Hephaistos to the island of Naxos and hands him over to Kedalion, who is supposed to act as his tutor. The name Kedalion “was as much as to say ‘the phallic one’” (Kerényi 1951: 156). Kedalion belongs to the ancient order of the Cyclops who, besides the Titans and Giants, were the original children of Gaia and Ouranos. The race of Cyclops is intimately related to the Great Goddess of pre-historic Greek religion, both as her sons and lovers.

His association to the Daktyloi and to the Great Mother helps in explaining the surprising connection between Hephaistos and women’s mysteries. In one set of stories, Hephaistos is the son of Prometheus, and the two of them are visited by Demeter who brings them her mysteries, “just as she brought these… to the King of Eleusis” (Kerényi 1951: 212). His relation to the feminine mysteries of childbirth and fertility has its reason in the Daktylic background. The Idaean Daktyloi, those “Idaean Fingers” to whom all the dwarfish smiths are related, came into being in the midst of the childbirth event: Rhea, worshipped in Asia Minor as Meter oreia, “MountainMother,” had fled to Ida to await the birth of Zeus, and there, when the time came due and labor pains set in, “she supported herself with both hands on the soil. The mountain at once brought forth as many spirits, or gods, as the goddess had fingers” (Kerényi 1951: 84). These spirits are the Daktyloi and proceed to busy themselves in her service.

These numerous connections between Hephaistos and the Daktylic-Great Mother-pre-Olympian background would place the subterranean fire of the smithgod in touch with the dark, internal energies of the Mother’s creativity; the Hephaistian fire would take its light and energy from the central fires that are at the heart of nature’s creativity. Hephaistos is, then, a split-off animus of the Great Mother who “mimics” the creative processes in the depths of the Mother and brings to birth through this transforming mimicry his works of art.

Indirectly, Hephaistos has quite a lot to do with the origins of mankind. Out of his relations with the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Copyright acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I Psyche and myth
• Part II Clinical themes in Jungian psychoanalysis
• Part III The process of individuation
• Part IV Psychology and spirituality
• Index