“Eros is a daimon.” So simply and directly Plato informs us and his banqueting friends in The Symposium of the depth-dimension of love. This identification of Eros with the daimonic, so natural for the Greeks, is the stumbling block over which practically all modern theories of love fall. It is surely not surprising that contemporary man seeks to bypass, if not to deny and repress outright, the whole realm of the daimonic. But doing so means “castrating” Eros—robbing ourselves of the very sources of fecundity in love. For the polar opposite to the daimonic is not rational security and calm happiness, but the “return to the inanimate”—in Freud’s terms, the death instinct. The antidaimon is apathy.

DEFINING THE DAIMONIC

The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. When this power goes awry and one element usurps control over the total personality, we have “daimon possession,” the traditional name through history for psychosis.^* The daimonic is obviously not an entity but refers to a fundamental, archetypal function of human experience—an existential reality in modern man and, so far as we know, in all men.

The daimonic is the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself. The daimonic becomes evil when it usurps the total self without regard to the integration of that self, or to the unique forms and desires of others and their need for integration. It then appears as excessive aggression, hostility, cruelty—the things about ourselves which horrify us most, and which we repress whenever we can or, more likely, project on others. But these are the reverse side of the same assertion which empowers our creativity. All life is a flux between these two aspects of the daimonic. We can repress the daimonic, but we cannot avoid the toll of apathy and the tendency toward later explosion which such repression brings in its wake.

The Greek concept of “daimon”—the origin of our modern concept—included the creativity of the poet and artist as well as that of the ethical and religious leader, and is the contagious power which the lover has. Plato argued that ecstasy, a “divine madness,” seizes the creative person. This is an early form of the puzzling and never-solved problem of the intimate relationship between the genius and madman.

In The Apologia, when he was being tried for teaching false “daimonia” to the youth, Socrates describes his own “daimon”: “This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child.” After he is found guilty and a break in the court proceedings is declared so that he can decide whether to choose exile or death, he comes back and tells the court he has chosen to die. He explains his choice in these words:

Thus his “daimon,” which he believed every man possessed, acted as a kind of guardian.

The daimonic is not conscience; for conscience is largely a social product, related to the cultural mores and, in psychoanalytic terms, to the power of the superego. The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. Nor is it man’s “recall to himself,” as Heidegger and, later, Fromm have argued, for its source lies in those realms where the self is rooted in natural forces which go beyond the self and are felt as the grasp of fate upon us. The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such. It is shown particularly in creativity. We never could apply to conscience Yeats’s definition of the daimonic—that “other Will,” “that dazzling, unforeseen wing-footed wanderer…of our own being but as water with fire.”² Nor could Goethe’s words about the daimonic be applied to conscience. Speaking of the “tremendous power” emanating from daimonic persons, he states, “All united moral powers do not prevail against them…. And they cannot be overcome except by the Universe itself which they have challenged to combat.”³

Aristotle comes the closest to “taming” the daimon in his concept of “eudaimonistic” ethics. Happiness—or eudaimonism—in the Greek language was the result of “being blessed with a good genius.”⁴ Happiness is to live in harmony with one’s daimon. Nowadays, we would relate “eudaimonism” to the state of integration of potentialities and other aspects of one’s being, with behavior.

The daimon gives individual guidance in particular situations. The daimonic was translated into Latin as genii (or jinni). This is a concept in Roman religion from which our word “genius” comes and which originally meant a tutelar diety, a spirit presiding over the destiny of a person, and later became a particular mental endowment or talent. As “genius” (its root being the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, so the daimonic is the voice of the generative processes within the individual. The daimonic is the unique pattern of sensibilities and powers which constitutes the individual as a self in relation to his world. It can speak in dreams and to the sensitive person in conscious meditation and self-questioning. Aristotle believed that dreams might be called daimonic, and echoes our statement when he says, “for Nature is daimonic.” Freud quotes this remark and adds that it contains “deep meaning if it be correctly interpreted.”⁵

The deteriorated form of this concept, consisting of the belief that we are taken over by little demons flying around equipped with horns, is a projection of inner experience outward, reified into an objective reality. It was entirely right that the Enlightenment and Age of Reason, in the flush of their success in making all life reasonable, should have thrown this out, and have regarded it as a deteriorated and unproductive approach to mental illness. But only during the last couple of decades has it been clearly impressed upon us that in discarding the false “demonology,” we accepted, against our intention, a banality and a shallowness in our whole approach to mental disease. This banality was specifically damaging to our experience of love and will. For the destructive activities of the daimonic are only the reverse side of its constructive motivation. If we throw out our devils, as Rilke aptly observes, we had better be prepared to bid goodbye to our angels as well. In the daimonic lies our vitality, our capacity to open ourselves to the power of eros. We must rediscover the daimonic in a new form which will be adequate to our own predicament and fructifying for our own day. And this will not be a rediscovery alone but a recreation of the reality of the daimonic.

The daimonic needs to be directed and channeled. Here is where human consciousness becomes so important. We initially experience the daimonic as a blind push. It is impersonal in the sense that it makes us nature’s tool. It pushes us toward the blind assertion of ourselves, as in rage, or toward the triumph of the species by impregnating the female, as in sex. When I am in a rage, it coudn’t matter to me less who I am or who you are; I want only to strike out and destroy you. When a man is in a state of intense sexual excitement, he loses his personal sense and wants only to “make” or “lay” (as the verbs of forcing so clearly put it) the woman, regardless of who she is. But consciousness can integrate the daimonic, make it personal. This is the purpose of psychotherapy.

The daimonic always has its biological base. Indeed, Goethe, who knew modern man’s daimonic urges intimately, as shown so eloquently in Faust, and who was forever fascinated by the daimonic, states, echoing Aristotle, “The daimonic is the power of nature.” But the crucial question always involves the breakdown of integration: one element in the personality usurps command and drives the person into disintegrative behavior. The erotic-sexual urge, for example, pushes the person toward physical union with the partner; but it may, when it takes command of the total self, drive the person in many diverse directions and into all kinds of relationships without regard for the integration of himself, the self of his partner, or the community. The Karamazoff father, coming home one night with his drunken companions, is dared to have coitus with the idiot woman in the ditch, and in doing so he spawns his own murderer. For Dostoevsky, with the true instinct of the artist in the matter of the daimonic, has the son born of this copulation later kill the father.

“Eros is a daimon,” said Diotima, the authority on love among Plato’s banqueting friends. The daimonic is correlated with eros rather than libido or sex as such. Anthony presumably had all his sexual needs well taken care of by concubines (“regular release of sexual tension” as Masters and Johnson infelicitously put it). But the daimonic power which seized him in his meeting with Cleopatra was a very different thing. When Freud introduced eros as the opposite to and adversary of libido, i.e., as the force which stood against the death instinct and fought for life, he was using it in this way which includes the daimonic. The daimonic fights against death, fights always to assert its own vitality, accepts no “three-score and ten” or other timetable of life. It is this daimonic which is referred to when we adjure someone who is seriously ill not to give up the “fight,” or when we sadly acknowledge some indication that a friend will die as the fact that he has given up the fight. The daimonic will never take a rational “no” for an answer. In this respect the daimonic is the enemy of technology. It will accept no clock time or nine-to-five schedules or assembly lines to which we surrender ourselves as robots.

If the daimonic is shown particularly in creativity, we should find the clearest testimonies to its presence in poets and artists. Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane. Said William Blake, “Every poet is of the Devil’s party.”⁶ Ibsen gave a copy of Peer Gynt to a friend, writing in the flyleaf,

William Butler Yeats could have been writing for all poets when he proclaimed,

In his essays, Yeats goes so far as to specifically define the daimonic as the “other Will,” which he believed was both a force outside himself which was at the same time oriented to his personal being. The following is the complete quotation which has already been alluded to:

Even more obvious in the arts of paint and canvas and the carver’s stone, the daimonic is the daily companion—and if the truth were known, the inspiration—of artists of all kinds. It seems that our technological society will permit art to “invite the daimonic” and to live with it, while it looks askance at other professions when they attempt to do so. Art is the only way modern man will allow himself to be shown the unflattering, cruel, and hideous aspects of himself which are part of the daimonic. Art can, indeed, be defined from one side as a specific method of coming to terms with the depths of the daimonic. Picasso lives and paints within the daimonic and is rewarded handsomely for it; his Guernica, showing the dismembered men, women, children, and bulls in the defenseless Spanish village which the Luftwaft bombed, presents the daimonic with unforgetable vividness—and transcends it by giving it significant form. Paul Klee is quite conscious that his paintings are a dialectic between children’s play on the one hand and daimonic forces on the other, and writes in his diaries about the daimonic. Indeed, the daimonic has a special place in the conscious center of the modern art movement. One has only to look at the all-too-obvious demonstration of this in surrealism of the second and third decades of our century, with its witches, demons, and grotesque figures. But it is more subtly and more powerfully shown in contemporary nonobjective art in the broken spaces which often give the effect of an arresting nihilism, the grating tensions of color, and the desperate grasping, by dedication or tour de force, at new forms of communication.

We note, furthermore, the West’s great interest in the twentieth century in primitive art, whether the art comes from Africa or China or the peasants of Central Europe. The painters in the past who confront the daimonic directly, such as Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grünewald, are the ones by whom many people seem especially grasped these days. Though painted four centuries ago, their canvasses have a rare and penetrating relevance to our needs, and serve as mirrors for our self-interpretation even in contemporary times. Understandably, the daimonic is unleashed and comes to the fore in times of transition in a society, when the customary psychic defenses are weak or broken down entirely. Like artists in our day, Bosch and Grünewald lived and painted in such a chaotic time of psychological and spiritual upheaval when the medieval period was dying and the modern not yet born. It was a time of actual fear among people of witchcraft, sorcerers, and others who claimed to know how to consort with the demons.

OBJECTIONS TO THE TERM

Before going further into the meanings of the concept, it may be valuable to take account of the contemporary objection to the word. The concept of the daimonic seems so unacceptable not for intrinsic reasons, but because of our own struggle to deny what it stands for. It constitutes a profound blow to our narcissism. We are the “nice” people and, like the cultivated citizens of Athens in Socrates’ time, we don’t like to be publicly reminded, whether we secretly admit it to ourselves or not, that we are motivated even in our love by lust for power, anger, and revenge. While the daimonic cannot be said to be evil in itself, it confronts us with the troublesome dilemma of whether it is to be used with awareness, a sense of responsibility and the significance of life, or blindly and rashly. When the daimonic is repressed, it tends to erupt in some form—its extreme forms being assassination, the psychopathological tortures of the murders on the moors and other horrors we know only too well in this century. “Although we may recoil in horror,” writes Anthony Storr, “when we read in newspapers or history books of the atrocities committed by man upon man, we know in our hearts that each one of us harbors within himself those same savage impulses which lead to murder, to torture and to war.”¹⁰ In a repressive society, individual members, representatives of the daimonic of their times, express vicariously these atrocities for the society as a whole.

True, we try to forget the daimonic. When in the course of his State of the Union address in January, 1968, President Johnson mentioned as one of his goals getting crime and violence off the streets, there was enthusiastic applause, far and away the longest applause of any point in the hour long speech. But when the President cited such goals as new and fair housing and improvement of race relations, there was not a clap to be heard in all of Congress. Thus the destructive side of the daimonic is deplored; but we turn a deaf ear, indeed play ostrich, to the fact that the destructive side can be met only by transforming that very power into constructive activities.

For in all this passion to get gangs off the streets, what homes are they to go to? The daimonic is all about us in our cities—frightening us in the form of individual violence while we walk on the streets of New York, shocking us in the fiercer racial violence of the riots in Newark and Detroit. No matter how much citizens and congressmen alike deplore the violence of the black-power movement, we can be certain that the boxed-up and suppressed power will come out violently if it cannot come out constructively.

Violence is the daimonic gone awry. It is “demon possession” in its starkest form. Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form.

An outstanding example of the self-defeating effects of forgetting the daimonic can be seen in the rise of Hitler. The inability of America and the nations of western Europe to recognize the daimonic made it impossible for us to assess the significance of Hitler and the Nazi movement realistically. How well I recall those years in the early 1930’s when Hitler was coming into power. I had just graduated from college and had gone to teach in Europe. My fellow liberals and I in America, and in Europe to a lesser extent, believed so strongly in peace and world brotherhood in those days that we could not even see Hitler or the destructively daimonic reality he represented. Human beings just couldn’t be that cruel in our civilized twentieth century—the accounts in the papers must be wrong. Our error was that we let our convictions limit our perceptions. We had no place for the daimonic; we believed that the world must somehow fit our convictions, and the whole daimonic dimension was ruled out of our perception. Not to recognize the daimonic itself turns out to be daimonic; it makes us accomplices on the side of the destructive possession.

The denial of the daimonic is, in effect, a self-castration in love and a self-nullification in will. And the denial leads to the perverted forms of aggression we have seen in our day in which the repressed comes back to haunt us.

THE DAIMONIC IN PRIMITIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY

Native psychotherapy shows exceedingly interesting and revealing ways of dealing with the daimonic. Dr. Raymond Prince, a psychiatrist who lived with and studied the natives of Yorubaland for a number of years, filmed a fascinating ceremony which I present here as an illustration.¹¹

When the tribe’s mental healer is to treat some members of the community for what we would call psychological ailments, the whole village participates. After the usual rituals of the casting of bones and a ceremony which is believed to transfer the problem —be it sexual impotence or depression or what not—to a goat who then (as the “scapegoat”) is ceremonially slaughtered, everybody in the village joins together for several hours of frenzied dancing. This dance constitutes the main part of the healing. In this dance, the significant point is that the native who wants to be cured identifies with the figure he believes has demonic possession of him.

A man in Dr. Prince’s film, whose problem was sexual impotence, put on the clothes of his mother and danced around at length as though he were she. This reveals to us that the natives had enough insight to know that such a man’s impotence is connected with his relationship with his mother—ostensibly an over-dependence on her which he, in his own self-system, has denied. What is necessary for the “cure,” thus, is that he confront and come to terms with this daimonic in himself. Now needing and clinging to one’s mother are a normal part of the experience of everyone, absolutely essential for our survival when we are infants, and the source of much of our tenderness and sensitivity in later years. If this clinging is felt by the person to be too great, or if he feels that he must repress it for some other reason, he projects it outside: it is the woman he goes to bed with who is the evil one, the devil who would castrate him. So he is, therefore, impotent, castrating himself.

Assumedly, such a man has become preoccupied with women—“possessed” by them—and has found himself fighting off this obsession to no avail. Whether he visualizes his mother specifically as the demon or not, I do not know—usually we would expect some symbolic expression of the “demon.” Accurately speaking, the daimonic is his own inner morbid relationship to his mother. In the frenzied dance, he then “invites the daimonic,” welcomes it. He not only confronts the devil toe to toe, but accepts her, welcomes her, identifies with her, assimilates and hopefully integrates her as a constructive part of himself—and becomes both more gentle and sensitive as a man as well as sexually assertive and potent.

In Dr. Prince’s film of this healing dance, we also see a village girl in her late teens who had a problem with male authority and had felt herself “possessed.” In the ceremony, she danced wearing the hat and coat of the British census taker of the region, apparently the symbol of her daimonic problem with authority. We would hope and expect that, after the healing trance of the ceremony, she would be more assertive in her own right, less “mousy,” more able to deal with authorities and able to give herself with less ambivalence to a man in sexual love.

Both the man and the girl boldly identified with what they feared, with what they had been previously struggling so hard to deny. The principle this implies is identify with that which haunts you, not in order to fight it off, but to take it into your self; for it must represent some rejected element in you. The man identifies with his feminine component; he does not become homosexual but heterosexually potent. As he dances wearing the hat and dress of a woman, and the girl the officer’s hat and jacket, you would think you are seeing a film of a masquerade. But not at all: none of the villagers who are dancing smiles a bit; they are there to perform a significant ceremony for members of their community, and they partly share the trancelike quality in which the patients are caught up. The girl and man were emboldened to “invite” the daimonic by the support of their community.

Particular emphasis should be placed, indeed, on the importance of the backing of the neighbors, friends, and fellow townsmen of the individual as he faces his “demons.” It is hard to see how this man or girl would have been able to muster up the courage to encounter the daimonic if they had not had the participation and tacit encouragement of their group. The community gives a humanly trustworthy, interpersonal world in which one can struggle against the negative forces.

We note that both of these persons happen to be identifying with someone of the opposite sex. This reminds us of Jung’s idea that the shadow side of the self which is denied represents the opposite sex, the anima in the case of men and, in the case of women, the animus. Now what is especially interesting is that this term animus means both a feeling of hostility, a violent, malevolent intention (animosity), and also to animate, to give spirit to, to enliven. All of these terms have their root in the Latin anima, soul or spirit. Thus, the wisdom of the words, distilled through man’s history, is that the denied part of you is the source of hostility and aggression, but when you can, through consciousness, integrate it into your self-system, it becomes the source of energy and spirit which enlivens you.

You take in the daimonic which would possess you if you didn’t. The one way to get over daimonic possession is to possess it, by frankly confronting it, coming to terms with it, integrating it into the self-system. This process yields several benefits. It strengthens the self because it integrates what had been left out. It overcomes the “split,” the paralyzing ambivalence in the self. And it renders the person more “human” by breaking down the self-righteousness and aloof detachment which are the usual defenses of the human being who denies the daimonic.

In such therapy we notice that there is a freeing of the patient from morbid ties to the past, and specifically in the case of the man, the ties to mother. This is related to the fact that, as is the case so often in mythology, legend, and psychotherapy, the devils are conceived as female. The Furies of ancient Greece were female; the Gorgon is female. In his comprehensive studies of world mythology, Joseph Campbell gives a lengthy list of the female deities and figures in mythology in all cultures who are seen as daimonic. He believes these figures are earth goddesses and have to do with fertility; they represent “mother earth.” From a different viewpoint, I believe, the female is so often seen as daimonic because every individual, male or female, begins life with a tie to the mother. This “biological imbeddedness” to the woman who bears him is an attachment that the human being, simply by being born at the end of an umbilical cord, must fight if he is to develop his own consciousness and autonomy of action—if he is, in other words, to possess himself. But having fought the imbeddedness and declared his own autonomy, he must welcome the daimonic back again on a conscious plane. This is the healthy dependence of the mature man.

We observe, finally, that there is a remarkable parallel in the experience of these two patients with the theme of this book. One of the patients begins with the problem of sexual love—he cannot get an erection. He ends up with his will aided: he overcomes the passive dependency on mother and is able to assert himself, be potent. The other, the girl, begins ostensibly with a problem of will—she cannot assert herself in relation to authorities; and ends up, hopefully, able to love a man with greater abandon. Thus love and will are reciprocally related: to help one is to strengthen the other.

SOME HISTORICAL SOUNDINGS

We shall now explore more deeply the meaning of the daimonic. In archaic Greece, the term daimon was used interchangeably with theos and also had a meaning very similar to fate. Like fate, it was never used in the plural by Homer and the authors before Plato.¹² I have a “fate” just as I have a “daimon”—it reflects a condition of life to which we all are heir. The crucial questions are always, To what extent is this condition an external force which acts upon us (which is what the archaic writers tended to believe) and, To what extent is it a force within the individual man’s own psychology (which was the view of the later Greek rationalists)? Heraclitus, siding with the latter, proclaimed that “Man’s character is his daimon.”¹³

It was Aeschylus, that reinterpreter par excellence of the ancient myths and religion making them adequate for the emerging self-conscious Greek, who cut the Gordian knot. He formed the concept of the daimonic for the individual Greek citizen who was to achieve a remarkable pinnacle of development in responsibility for civilization and for himself. In his play, The Persians, Aeschylus has the Queen describe the delusions of Xerxes which have ruined Persia, and she ascribes these delusions to a “daimon.” This is an illustration of man as simply the passive victim of the daimon. But the ghost of Darius, hearing that Xerxes tried to put chains on the sacred Bosphorus (an act of overbearing pride), states that “a powerful daimon took away his judgment.” This is something different. Now the daimonic power does not merely take the individual over as its victim, but works through him psychologically; it clouds his judgment, makes it harder for him to see reality, but still leaves him with the responsibility for the act. This is the age-old dilemma of my own personal responsibility even though I am moved by fate. It is the ultimate statement that truth and reality can be psychologized only to a limited extent. Aeschylus is not impersonal but transpersonal, a believer in fate and moral responsibility at the same time.

The tragic hero in Aeschylus asserts himself autonomously without regard to the nature of things; and hence comes to destruction. Death, infirmity, time—these are the natural realities which encompass us and, at their appointed times, bring us low.

Already in Aeschylus, the daimonic is both subjective and objective—which is the sense in which I use it in this book. The problem is always to see both sides of the daimonic, to see phenomena of the inner experience of the individual without psychologizing away our relation to nature, to fate, and to the ground of our being. If the daimonic is purely objective, you run the danger of sliding into superstition in which man is simply the victim of external powers. If, on the other hand, you take it purely subjectively, you psychologize the daimonic; everything tends to be a projection and to become more and more superficial; you end up without the strength of nature, and you ignore the objective conditions of existence, such as infirmity and death. This latter way leads to a solipsistic oversimplification. Caught in such a solipsism, we lose even our ultimate hope. The greatness of Aeschylus is that he sees and preserves both sides so clearly. He has Athena recommend to the people near the end of the Oresteia:

But by the end of that splendid fifth century B.C., the daimonic had become the protector of man’s rational autonomy. It was man’s helper toward self-realization; it would warn him when he was about to lose his autonomy. Socrates—who is the best examplar of this viewpoint—was by no means a simple rationalist, but he could preserve his rational autonomy because he accepted its base in a realm which is transrational. This is why he triumphed over Protagoras. Socrates believed in the daimonic; he took both dreams and the oracle of Delphi seriously. He did not close his eyes or wilt before daimonic phenomena like the plague in Athens in 431 B.C. and the war with Sparta. Socrates’ philosophy had dynamic sources which saved it from the aridity of rationalism, while Protagoras’ beliefs were wanting because they omitted the dynamic, irrational forces in human nature. Protagoras’ philosophy, based on the concept that “man is the measure of all things,” became “pathetically” optimistic, writes Dodds, and he must have died an unhappy man at the beginning of the war between Athens and Sparta.¹⁵

The later men of the modern Enlightenment were to be considerably troubled by Socrates’ daimon. It is fascinating to watch Thomas Jefferson, fresh in his faith from the Age of Reason, ponder the fact that Socrates was under the “care and admonition of a guardian Daemon.” Jefferson writes regretfully, if, from our vantage point, absurdly: “How many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations, while perfectly sane in all other subjects” (!)¹⁶ And John Quincy Adams was also genuinely puzzled: “It is not easy to say whether this [Socrates’ daimon] was the effect of superstition or whether he spoke in figure…. The instances which he gives of the occasions when he heard the voice, make it hardly possible to consider him as having intended only Prudence or conscience.”¹⁷

No, Socrates did not mean Prudence or conscience, and Jefferson and Adams could not ignore the fact that he was the least superstitious man imaginable. Though he did not speak in figure in the sense of metaphor, he did speak in symbol. For the language of symbol and myth is the only way such fundamentally archetypal experiences affecting the whole man can be expressed. The daimonic belongs to that dimension of experience where discursive, rational language can never tell more than part of the story; if we stop with discursive language, we impoverish ourselves. Thus Plato, who also spoke in the language of symbol and myth in areas where only this language could express his meaning, could write that God has given every man a daimon, and that this is man’s tie with the divine. What Socrates did mean is easier to understand in our post-Enlightenment and post-Freudian age when we explore the id and know the “dark” and irrational springs not only of inspiration and creativity but of all human actions.

Now we note the union of good and evil the Greeks achieved in their concept of the daimon. It is the bridge between the divine and the human, and shares in both. To live in accord with one’s daimon (eudaimonism) is difficult but profoundly rewarding. It is natural drive in its starkest form but a drive which man, being conscious of, can to some extent assimilate and direct. The daimonic destroys purely rationalistic plans and opens the person to creative possibilities he did not know he possessed. It is illustrated by the powerful, snorting horses in Plato’s metaphor which require all of a man’s strength to control. And though man is never free from this conflict, the struggle gives him a never-failing source of forms and potentialities to awe and to delight him.

In the Hellenistic and Christian eras, the dualistic split between the good and evil side of the daimon became more pronounced. We now have a celestial population separated into two camps—devils and angels, the former on the side of their leader Satan, and the latter allied to God. Though such developments are never fully rationalized, there must have existed in those days the expectation that, with this split, it would be easier for man to face and conquer the devils.

But if something is gained in moral dynamism for the Hellenistic Greeks and early Christians by this splitting of the struggle of good and evil into devils and angels, much is also lost. And what is lost is important; namely, the classical organismic concept of being as combining both good and destructive possibilities. We see the beginning of Rilke’s problem—if his devils are driven away, his angels will take flight as well.

Satan, or the devil, comes from the Greek word diabolos; “diabolic” is the term in contemporary English. Diabolos, interestingly enough, literally means “to tear apart” (dia-bollein).¹⁸ Now it is fascinating to note that this diabolic is the antonym to “symbolic.” The latter comes from sym-bollein, and means “to throw together,” to unite. There lie in these words tremendous implications with respect to an ontology of good and evil. The symbolic is that which draws together, ties, integrates the individual in himself and with his group; the diabolic, in contrast, is that which disintegrates and tears apart. Both of these are present in the daimonic.

Originally an archangel, Satan is given the specific name “adversary.” He is the one who tempts Eve in the Garden and Jesus on the mountain. But when we look more closely, we see that Satan is much more than a mere adversary; Satan enlisted the aid of the snake in the garden, which is clearly a daimonic element of nature. In Eden, Satan is the embodiment of the daimonic of lust and the desire for power by means of knowledge which will make man immortal, “like god.” The Lord rebuked Adam and Eve for eating of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and was concerned lest they would now try to eat of the tree of eternal life. This drama in the Garden and Jesus’ temptations on the mountain are symbolic representations of the daimonic urges of lust and power, and Satan is the symbol who embodies these daimonic urges.

Satan, Lucifer, and the other daimonic figures who were all at one time archangels, are psychologically necessary. They had to be invented, had to be created, in order to make human action and freedom possible. Otherwise, there would be no consciousness. For every thought destroys as it creates: to think this thing, I have to cut out something else; to say “yes” to this is to say “no” to that and to have a “no” in the very ambivalence of the “yes.” To perceive this thing I have to shut out other things. For consciousness works by way of either/or: it is destructive as well as constructive. Without rebellion, no consciousness.

Thus, the hope that Satan or the other “adversaries” can be gotten rid of by gradual progress toward perfection, would not be a constructive idea even if it were possible. And it is patently not possible. The saints were not talking nonsense when they called themselves the greatest sinners. The goal of perfectibility is a bastardized concept smuggled into ethics from technology, and results from a confusion between the two.

One trouble with the devils-and-angels cosmic scheme—and it is a formidable difficulty—is that angels are such bland and uninteresting creatures. They are, by definition, sexless; they often look like Cupid, which is Eros in his most deteriorated form. They seem to have the function chiefly of flying about delivering announcements and messages—a sort of celestial Western Union. They are relatively powerless creatures, except for a few archangels like Michael. I, for one, have never been able to get much interested in angels except as decorative appurtenances to a larger drama like the Christmas epic.

Angels boring? Yes—until they fall! Then the angel takes on fascination and interest. Lucifer, an angel thrown out of heaven, becomes the dynamic hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost. When an angel assumes independent self-assertion—call it pride or refusal to knuckle under or what not—he then takes on power and the capacity to grasp our attention and even admiration. He asserts his own being, his own choice, his individual lust. If we think of symbolic representations like Lucifer as exemplifying some significant urge in the human psyche—an urge toward growth, a new form born in the individual which he then sees in the world about him—then this assertion of independent choice is surely a positive aspect of growth. The child who is the “little angel” for too long a period is the one we should worry about; the growing youngster who is a “little devil” at least at times gives us more hope of potentialities for future development.

The fallen angel is one who takes on some of the power of the daimonic again, a power relinquished in the dualism needed to face the disintegrating mythology of the ancient pagan world. Rilke is right, then, in wanting to retain his angels and his devils, for both are necessary. Both together make up the daimonic. And who is to say that Rilke’s devils do not contribute to his poetry as much as or more than his angels?

The dichotomy between devils and angels was carried on through the Middle Ages, and the word for the daimonic is now clearly “demon.” The medieval citizens were enthralled by their “demons,” even in the act of condemning them; why else all these gargoyles, beasts laughing and looking sinister, animals of every sort, scampering and climbing up the sides of their cathedrals, carved in stone by artisans who must have known the daimonic at first hand? In this passionate period, the people gloried in their “demonic” natures. But this did not stand in the way of their using this handy method of condemnation of their enemies as the devil’s party in their wars of religion and particularly in the Albigensian uprising. It seems that it is always man’s proclivity to define the outsider, the stranger, the one who differs from him, as the evil one and himself as on the side of the angels.

The rediscovery of the daimonic as a force which cannot be measured in terms of good and evil “was due to the anti-rational cult of genius at the end of the eighteenth century,” writes Prof. Wolfgang Zucker.¹⁹ This was the expression of a fundamental opposition to the Enlightenment and to the utilitarian, middle-class concepts of order and a protest against the prevailing moralistic and intellectualistic theology. Prof. Zucker writes of this with special cogency,

The elderly Goethe was continuously enthralled by the daimonic and discussed it at length. It is not merely nature, he believed, but also fate; it guides one to significant meetings—as his own friendship with Schiller—and it produces great men. To see the experiential justification for this point we have only to recall that greatness consists of being in “the right place at the right time” it is an encounter between a man of particular qualities and the particular needs of an age. Men of talent are seized by the historical situation (vide Tolstoy’s thesis in War and Peace) and hurled to greatness. They are used by a history which has the same function as nature at this point. Goethe describes himself as having discovered the daimonic very early in his career, and it was responsible for his particular destiny. The daimonic was:

The great men come crashing down to destruction when they have performed their acts. For Goethe, “poetry and music, religion and patriotic enthusiasm of the wars of liberation, Napoleon and Lord Byron, were all daimonic.” He writes also at the end of his autobiography:

Goethe, in his fascination with the daimonic, neither blindly admires it, as do the romantics, nor condemns it, as do the rationalists. He has developed a kind of aristocracy of the daimonic: some men are chosen to bear it in great degree and some are not. It is nonrational in its resembling the “Dionysian” of Nietzsche and the élan vital of Bergson. Great men who are especially characterized by the daimonic are invincible until, driven by their hubris as they inevitably must be, they attack nature itself. This proves to be their undoing. Napoleon is brought low not by the Russians as such, but by the Russians cooperating with their own winter. We see here an example of willing according to the daimonic: what the Russians cannot do by their own power they can accomplish by setting their will in accord with nature, the size of their land, and other aspects of that no-man’s realm of cooperation between men and nature and between men and their fate. This is then personified in an interesting combination of man-nature elements into “General Winter.”

Paul Tillich is the contemporary thinker who has been chiefly responsible for bringing the daimonic to our attention today. This accounts for his great attraction to psychiatrists and psychologists, who turned out by the hundreds to hear him whenever he spoke. They were not listening simply to a wise and learned man; they were listening to a man who “invited” the daimonic as they, in their work, needed to invite it. I was once consulted by a schizophrenic woman who had been on the edge of psychotic breakdown a year earlier. She had gone to Paul Tillich and had explained the “demons” as she experienced them. Unperturbed, he had remarked, “Every morning between seven and ten, I live with the demons.” This had helped her greatly, and I believe had been chiefly responsible for her survival. Tillich’s statement had said that she was not strange and “foreign” to the race of man because of what she experienced. Hers was a human problem differing only in degree from the problems of others; she was restored to some communion and communication with her world and the people around her.

But it was not always so. When Tillich came to this country in 1933 after being exiled from Hitler’s Germany, he spoke often of the wave of pseudoromanticism sweeping Germany and told how the students in his classes had found him “too rationalistic and logical.” After a trip back to Germany in the summer of 1936, he related his experiences before a group in New York. He had been so gripped by the ominousness of the future of Germany that he had gone into a woods near Berlin and experienced there the threat of the daimonic to come. (“I see ruins, ruins, ruins. Sheep will be grazing in Potsdamer Platz.”) Now these mid-1930’s were liberal times in America; hardly anyone in the audience agreed with Tillich that day. One theologian from Chicago remarked while walking out, “We’ve at last gotten rid of the demons, and now Tillich brings them back from behind every tree!” Well, the worst of Tillich’s predictions turned out to be too mild for what actually occurred in the civilized barbarism of Hitler’s Germany. Indeed, the age which began after World War I with the promise of being an age of “technological reason” is now often referred to in retrospect as the age of the daimonic.

Freud took us into the Dantean purgatory of daimonic forces and gave us plenty of empirical demonstrations of how serious the daimonic urges are, and how perversions, neurosis, psychosis, and madness are the results of this power gone awry. “No one who, like me,” as Freud wrote, “conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”²³ That word “half-tamed,” seemingly used lightly, is an accurate description of the human form of the daimonic; fully-tamed is applicable to the angels, untamed to the devils—and we are both. In psychotherapy, it is clear that it is not constructive to give in to the temptation to flee from the daimonic simply because it is dangerous; that way, the healing of psychological problems leads to the blandness of “adjustment.” Curing people is then the royal road to their boredom. No wonder patients prefer neurosis and psychosis to “normality,” for at least their deviate existence had vitality and force.

Freud’s sense of the relentlessness of life, his humility in the face of destiny side by side with his pride in his own intellect, his refusal to pander to man’s need to be reassured about himself—these characteristics stem not from pessimism, of which he is often accused, but from a sense of the portentous quality of human existence and the finality of death. They bespeak a genuine sense of the daimonic.

In Freud’s writings, we find the daimonic implicit in his emphasis on “fate” and “destiny,” and in many of his concepts such as libido, Thanatos, and Trieb. There is in each of them the implication that powers reside in us that can seize us, can render us “nature’s tool,” can whirl us up in functions greater than ourselves. Libido, or lust, is the natural drive which works in man’s imagination, can lay all kinds of traps for him, and just when he lies back assuring himself that he has withstood the temptation this time, it can seize him against his judgment and use him for the impersonal purposes of the race. Not to come to terms with such inescapable psychobiological phenomena leads to pathology. This is an emphasis of Freud’s which is realistic, sharp, and constructive, especially when it is seen against the background of the Victorian separation of the self from nature. I say the daimonic is “implicit” in these concepts; libido, for example, has its say and dies. It is eros which is then introduced as the force to stand as our ally against the death instinct and for the fight for life. It is required that eros come in in the form of the daimonic which saves the day. This is Freud’s clear calling upon eros as a daimon.

Prof. Morgan contrasts Freud’s rigorous and tough-minded view of love with those of the positive thinkers which carry illusory promises to modern man. “No Frommesque ‘art of loving,’ no calisthenic healthy-mindedness, no liberal-utilitarian technology…will bring peace on earth, good will toward men [in Freud’s view]. The reason is blunt and basic: We humans carry within us the seeds of our own destruction, and we nourish them continuously. We must hate as well as love. We will to destroy ourselves and our fellowmen, as well as to create and protect them.”²⁴

LOVE AND THE DAIMONIC

Every person, experiencing as he does his own solitariness and aloneness, longs for union with another. He yearns to participate in a relationship greater than himself. Normally, he strives to overcome his aloneness through some form of love.

The psychotherapist Otto Rank once remarked that all the women who came to him had problems because their husbands were not aggressive enough. Despite the oversimplified sound of that sentence, it contains a telling point: our effete cultivation of sex can make us so arbitrary and detached that the simple power of the sexual act evaporates and the woman loses the vital, elemental pleasure of being taken, carried away, transported. The “love bite”—that moment of hostility and aggression, usually occurring at the point of orgasm but which may be an obligato all through love-making—has a constructive psychophysical function, as pleasurable, or more so, for the woman as it is expressive for the man.

There is required a self-assertion, a capacity to stand on one’s own feet, an affirmation of one’s self in order to have the power to put one’s self into the relationship. One must have something to give and be able to give it. The danger, of course, is that he will overassert himself—which is the source of the experience shown in the notion of being taken over by a demon. But this negative side is not to be escaped by giving up self-assertion. For if one is unable to assert oneself, one is unable to participate in a genuine relationship. A dynamic dialectical relationship—I am tempted to call it a balance, but it is not a balance—is a continuous give-and-take in which one asserts himself, finds an answer in the other, then possibly asserts too far, senses a “no” in the other, backs up but does not give up, shifts the participation to a new form, and finds the way that is adequate for the wholeness of the other. This is the constructive use of the daimonic. It is an assertion of one’s own individuality in relation to another person. It always skates on the edge of exploitation of the partner; but without it, there is no vital relationship.

In its right proportion, the daimonic is the urge to reach out toward others, to increase life by way of sex, to create, to civilize; it is the joy and rapture, or the simple security of knowing that we matter, that we can affect others, can form them, can exert power which is demonstrably significant. It is a way of making certain that we are valued.

When the daimonic takes over completely, the unity of the self and the relationship is broken down; a fact confessed by the person when he or she says, “I had no control, I acted as if in a dream, I did not know it was I.” The daimonic is the elementary power by which one is saved from the horror of not being one’s self on one hand, and the horror, on the other hand, of feeling no connection and no vital drive toward the other person.

The woman we described in a previous chapter, who had fallen in love with the garage mechanic, reported to me that her husband had always “cringed around the house in the evening with a hang-dog expression waiting for me to come up to bed.” Though we can understand why the husband was in this scarcely proud state, we can also understand that it was a great relief to the wife and a boon to her own need for abandon that the erotic aggressiveness of the mechanic was inhibited by no such ambivalence.

Biologically, a vivid expression of the daimonic in the male is in the erection—a phenomenon which in itself has bewitching, erotic seductiveness for the woman as she realizes it is occurring, if she is already interested. (If she is not, she is repulsed, which simply proves in reverse that the phallic erection exerts emotional power.) The erection itself is such a rich daimonic symbol that the ancient Greeks were led to decorate their vases with paintings of dancing satyrs, each with a proud phallic erection, performing in a Dionysian religious festival. Men have only to remember their own fascination as little boys in experiencing the magical quality of their penis becoming erect, possibly without apparent conscious cause, and giving them such wonderful sensations. A similar daimonic assertion, though perhaps less biologically obvious than in the human male, is present and necessary in the woman in her capacity to have outright desire for her man, to want him and to let it be subtly known to him that she wants him. Both man and woman need this self-assertion to bridge their separateness and to achieve union with each other.

Not in the slightest am I arguing here for a return to primitive sexuality. Nor do I want to comfort the still infantile man or woman who interprets aggression as blunt insistence upon his or her demands of the sexual partner. I am using aggression in its healthy sense as assertion of the self rooted in strength not weakness, and inseparably allied to the capacities for sensitivity and tenderness. But I am also arguing that we have amputated significant aspects of our sexuality in overcultivation of sexual love, and so we run the risk of losing exactly what we set out to gain.

A curious thing which never fails to surprise persons in therapy is that after admitting their anger, animosity, and even hatred for a spouse and berating him or her during the hour, they end up with feelings of love toward this partner. A patient may have come in smoldering with negative feelings but resolved, partly unconsciously, to keep these, as a good gentleman does, to himself; but he finds that he represses the love for the partner at the same time as he suppresses his aggression. This is so clear that it becomes all but a rule of treatment. Dr. Ludwig Lefebre calls this the “inclusion of the negative”—which is essential if the positive is likewise to come out.

What is occurring here is more than the fact that human consciousness works in polarity: the positive cannot come out until the negative does also. This is why in analysis, the negative is analyzed, with the hope—which becomes true often enough to justify the rule—that the positive will then be able to come into its own. This is the constructive value in facing and admitting of the daimonic. For “eros is a daimon,” we recall; eros has to do not simply with love but with hate also, it has to do with an energizing, a shocking of our normal existence—it is a gadfly that keeps us forever awake; eros is the enemy of nirvana, the breathless peace. Hate and love are not polar opposites; they go together, particularly in transitional ages like ours.

The most-discussed drama on Broadway and throughout the country in recent years consisted of a three-hour long, emotional butchering of one another by two couples, entitled Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. That the audiences who saw this drama on the stage during its long run were uncomfortable was obvious in their nervous laughter or their hesitancy, not-knowing-whether-to-laugh; but that they were deeply affected was even more obvious. (We have to say, as has to be said so often, that the movie version of this drama was radically toned down. It gave the now mass audience much more assurance against the daimonic by emphasizing the love play between George and Martha at the outset of the movie story before the butchering started.)

Where did the play get its attracting power? I believe that it got this power from the fact that it uncovered the daimonic wishes, thoughts, and feelings which go on in every marriage but are almost always denied in our bourgeois society. What bewitched and gripped us, as when one of the actors in this play would coil like a cobra to strike, was the laying bare on the stage of our own daimonic tendencies, which appeared large and clear. The lead couple, George and Martha, do have some love for each other beneath the emotional savagery, but they are afraid of it and afraid of their own tenderness. In this respect, the play penetratingly portrays modern Western man. For we are afraid of both our daimonic tendencies and our feelings of tenderness, which are, of course, two aspects of the same thing. To be able to experience and live out capacities for tender love requires the confronting of the daimonic. The two seem opposites, but if one is denied, the other also is lost.

This drama, of course, transcends the daimonic by giving it significant form, as any good work of art must. This is why we can permit ourselves to accept the daimonic when it is presented in art. The play also transcends the warfare in content in the last several lines (though the subject matter is always less significant for the transcendence of art than the art form itself). At the very end, George and Martha are able to will something with each other—hence, this has been called by its director an “existentialist” play. Ostensibly, they can will because, in the process of the struggle, they have killed off the illusion of their phantasmagoric son. But whether they will really take the step, we don’t know; we do know that the disclosing of their struggles on the stage strikes a powerful chord in the psyches of bourgeois, civilized audiences.

We have only to call to mind the gruesome events of ancient Greek dramas—Medea cutting up her children, Oedipus gouging his eyes out, Clytemnestra murdering her husband and being murdered by her own son—to see that the daimonic, in utterly bald-faced terms, was at the very heart of the great classical works which “cleansed the audience with pity and terror,” as Aristotle put it. But the actual hair-raising event in the Greek dramas always occurred off-stage, and was communicated by cries and appropriate music. This has several benefits: it is accurate, in the sense that the daimonic does occur in our lives generally slightly off-stage, i.e., in the subconscious and unconscious. We don’t murder the colleague with whom we are arguing in a committee meeting; we only fantasize his dropping dead of a heart attack. Also, the Greeks weren’t interested in barbarism and melodrama as such; they knew it destroyed the art of a work. The dramatist had to make his drama out of the meaning of the murder rather than out of the emotion as such.

I venture to propose that one of the central reasons the Greeks were able to rise to their unsurpassed height as a civilization was their courage and openness in facing the daimonic. They gloried in passion and eros and the daimonic which is connected unavoidably with these. They wept and made love and killed with zest. Nowadays, patients in therapy often remark at the strange spectacle in ancient Greece that it is the strong man, like Odysseus or Prometheus, who weeps. But because of their capacity to confront the daimonic directly, rather than resorting to modern man’s self-castrating defense of denying and repressing it, the Greeks were able to achieve their belief that the essence of virtue (arête) for a man is that he responsibly choose his passions rather than be chosen by them.

What does it mean to confront the daimonic? Strange to say, William James, three quarters of a century ago, had an intuitive grasp of the daimonic and how to deal with it.

I shall give an example from psychotherapy of possession by a state not commonly considered daimonic—namely, loneliness. In this patient, attacks of acute loneliness, developing into panic, were not infrequent. He could not orient himself in the panics, could not hang on to his sense of time, and became, as long as the bout of loneliness lasted, numb in his reactions to the world. The ghostlike character of this loneliness was shown in the fact that it could vanish instantaneously with a ring on the phone or his hearing the step of someone coming down the hall. He tried desperately to fight off these attacks—as we all do, which is not surprising since acute loneliness seems to be the most painful kind of anxiety which a human being can suffer. Patients often tell us that the pain is a physical gnawing in their chests, or feels like the cutting of a razor in their heart region, as well as a mental state of feeling like an infant abandoned in a world where nobody exists.

This patient would try, when the loneliness began, to wrench his mind away to thoughts about something else, to get busy doing work or go out to a movie—but no matter what escape he tried, there remained the haunting, satanic menace hovering behind him like a hated presence waiting to plunge a rapier into his lungs.²⁶ If he were working, he could practically hear the Mephistophelean laugh behind him mocking him with the reminder that his stratagem would not succeed; sooner or later he would have to stop, more fatigued than ever—and immediately would come the rapier. Or, if he were in the movies, the awareness couldn’t be suppressed every time the scene changed that his gnawing ache would come back again as soon as he stepped out on the street.

But one day, he came in reporting that he had made a surprising discovery. When an acute attack of loneliness was beginning, it occurred to him not to try to fight it off—running had never helped anyway. Why not accept it, breathe with it, turn toward it and not away? Amazingly, the loneliness did not overwhelm him when he confronted it directly. Then it seemed even to diminish. Emboldened, he began to invite it by imagining situations in the past when he was acutely lonely, the memories of which had, up to now, always been sure to cue off the panic. But strangely enough, the loneliness had lost its power. He couldn’t feel the panic even when he tried. The more he turned on it and welcomed it, the more impossible it was even to imagine how he’d ever been lonely in that unbearably painful way before.

The patient had discovered—and was teaching me that day—that he felt the acute loneliness only as he ran; when he turned on the “devil,” it vanished, to use metaphorical langauge. But it is not metaphorical to state that the very running is a response which assures the daimonic of its obsessive power. However much we agree or disagree with the James-Lange theory of emotions,²⁷ it is surely true that the anxiety (or loneliness) has the upper hand as long as we continue to run.

Anxiety (loneliness or “abandonment anxiety” being its most painful form) overcomes the person to the extent that he loses orientation in the objective world. To lose the world is to lose one’s self, and vice versa; self and world are correlates. The function of anxiety is to destroy the self-world relationship, i.e., to disorient the victim in space and time and, so long as this disorientation lasts, the person remains in the state of anxiety. Anxiety overwhelms the person precisely because of the preservation of this disorientation. Now if the person can reorient himself—as happens, one hopes, in psychotherapy—and again relate himself to the world directly, experientially, with his senses alive, he overcomes the anxiety. My slightly anthropomorphic terminology comes out of my work as a therapist and is not out of place here. Though the patient and I are entirely aware of the symbolic nature of this (anxiety doesn’t do anything, just as libido or sex drives don’t), it is often helpful for the patient to see himself as struggling against an “adversary.” For then, instead of waiting forever for the therapy to analyze away the anxiety, he can help in his own treatment by taking practical steps when he experiences anxiety such as stopping and asking just what it was that occurred in reality or in his fantasies that preceded the disorientation which cued off the anxiety. He is not only opening the doors of his closet where the ghosts hide, but he often can also then take steps to reorient himself in his practical life by making new human relationships and finding new work which interests him.

Still looking at my patient who had been obsessed with loneliness, let us ask, What was the constructive side of this daimonic which presumably had gone awry? Being a sensitive, gifted person, he had achieved notable success in practically all realms of human experience except personal intimacy. His gifts included a capacity for interpersonal empathy and a good deal of tenderness—most of which had been absorbed in his self-preoccupation. He had failed to use his capacities for relationship; he had been unable to open himself up to others, to reach out to them, to share feelings and other aspects of personal experience, to identify with and affirm them in the ways necessary to build durable relationship. In short, what he had lacked, and now needed, was the exercise of his capacities to love in an active, outgoing concern for the other’s welfare, for the sharing of pleasure and delight as an “I” with “Thou,” for a communion of consciousness with his fellows. The daimon, in the constructive sense in this case and put in the simplest terms, was his potentiality for active loving.