We can no longer postpone the challenging question, How does one know that among the bedlam of voices which beset us all, one is really hearing his daimon? Inner “voices”—experienced as actual or metaphorical ones—are notoriously untrustworthy; they can tell one anything. Many people hear voices, but there are few Joans of Arc. How about our schizophrenic patients who are instructed by their voices to bomb New York?

What keeps the theory of the daimonic from leading to anarchism? And how is the individual saved from self-righteous arrogance? What made that frenzied dance of the Yoruba an integrating experience rather than simply daimonic possession?

It is all very well for Socrates to proclaim that his daimon tells him to be a gadfly to the state and then to defy the court. This may indeed be integrity and honesty—for him. But for many other not unworthy citizens of Athens it must have seemed very different: the sheer arrogance of prying into everyone else’s business! The “good” citizens, experiencing him as the destroyer of their peace, are speaking out of their own daimonic tendencies, just as he is speaking out of his daimon in defying them. And this seems to result in anarchy, with no principle of union. The daimonic disrupts the homeostasis of consciousness, giving Socrates a stand and requiring a stand from the “good” citizens. The disrupted homeostasis brings down the wrath of the people upon the disrupter, be he Socrates in Athens or a contemporary psychoanalyst. “Socrates, like all heroes who cause new worlds to rise and inescapably the old one to disintegrate,” writes Hegel, “was experienced as a destroyer; what he stood for is a new form which breaks through and undermines the existing world.”¹

Observe that Hegel says it is a new form which Socrates stands for; we are not left simply with nihilism. Hegel adds with respect to the killing of Socrates by the Athenian people, “It was a force within themselves that they were punishing.” Though much of this antagonism cannot be avoided, it makes our responsibility more compelling to have criteria to judge our own daimonic.

DIALOGUE AND INTEGRATION

The most important criterion which saves the daimonic from anarchy is dialogue. Here, the method of interpersonal dialogue—brought to its glory in Greece by Socrates and handed down for twenty-four centuries to be used in different forms by almost every contemporary psychotherapist—now gains in importance and becomes much more than a mere technique. For dialogue implies that man exists in relationship. The fact that dialogue is possible at all—that it is possible, in favorable circumstances, for us to understand each other, stand where the other is standing—is, in itself, a remarkable point. Communication presupposes community which, in turn, means a communion between the consciousness of the persons in the community. This is a meaningful interchange which is not dependent upon the individual’s mere whim, but is a built-in aspect of the structure of human intercourse.

Buber has insisted that human life is life in dialogue; and although he makes of this point too extreme a theory—he says that we can know the self only in dialogue—he does present the crucial half of the truth. Sullivan’s interpersonal emphasis on consensual validation also shows the central importance of dialogue, and has the merit of emphasizing the experiential side rather than mere discourse. The word logos (meaningful structure of reality) is the anchor of this term, dia-logos. If we can talk about the daimonic meaningfully, we already are in the process of integrating it into the structure of our lives.

Socrates was convinced that we find through dialogue the structure of experience and that each man is not cast adrift on his own. He demonstrates this to the Athenians on the street corner by getting Meno’s completely uneducated slave boy to prove the Pythagorean theorem merely by asking him questions (the Meno, Dialogues of Plato). Socrates (or perhaps, more accurately, his interpreter Plato) believed that the truth of such a theorem already existed in the slave’s mind, in line with the doctrine of “ideas” and reminiscence, and had only to be “awakened” and brought out. But even if we argue that Socrates put the theorem there by the suggestive questions he asked, we still end up with the same truth in a different form. That is that it is possible for the slave to hear the questions and to put them together meaningfully. Understanding is possible, specifically by the structure of language, and more generally by the structure of human relationships.

Truth exists in the individual as well as in universal structures, for we ourselves participate in these structures. Logos speaks not only in objective laws but subjectively, through the individual person. Socrates was, therefore, no relativist. “I do believe in the gods,” he proclaims in his Apologia, “and in a sense deeper than my accusers do.”

This is what makes the support of the whole community in the dance so important for our Yoruba natives. The dance welds the individual into deeper relatedness to his neighbors and friends, while daimon possession, on the other hand, increasingly isolates him from the community. The former makes the daimonic personal and conscious, whereas the latter not only leaves the daimonic unconscious but sets in motion a whole train of new repression. The integrated daimonic pushes the person toward some universal structure of meaning, as shown in dialogue. But daimon possession, in contrast, requires that the daimonic remain impersonal. The former is transrational, the latter—daimon possession—is irrational, and succeeds by virtue of blocking off rational processes. The former makes the vitality of the daimonic available for the use of the self; the latter projects the daimonic outside one’s self on someone or something else.

Another important criterion by which the daimonic avoids anarchism is its own method of self-criticism. To be guided by your daimon requires a fundamental humility. Your own convictions will always have an element of blindness and self-distortion; the one ultimate illusion is to operate under the conceit that you are free from illusion. Indeed, some scholars believe the original Greek phrase “know thyself” means “Know that thou art only a man.” This implies that what has to be surrendered or “worked through,” as we say psychoanalytically, is the tendency arising in human infancy to play god and the omnipresent demand to be treated as though we were god.²

Freud’s concepts of resistance and repression are descriptions of the profound difficulty of “knowing thyself.” Sartre’s concept of “bad faith” and “good faith” is also an illustration—the dilemma of honesty with one’s self lying in the fact that there is always some element of self-distortion in our acts and beliefs. The man who thinks he is in “good faith” is at that point in “bad faith,” and the only way to be in “good faith” is to know that you are in bad faith, i.e., to know that there is some element of distortion and illusion in your perception. The moral problem is not simply a matter of believing in one’s convictions and acting on them, for people’s convictions can be as dominating and destructive, if not more so, than mere pragmatic positions. The moral problem is the relentless endeavor to find one’s own convictions and at the same time to admit that there will always be in them an element of self-aggrandizement and distortion. Here is where Socrates’ principle of humility is essential, for psychotherapists and for any moral citizen.

A final criterion of validity of the guidance of the daimonic is the question implied in our definition of the daimonic at the start: Does the proposed way of acting make for the integration of the individual as a totality? Does it—at least potentially—make for the expansion of interpersonal meaning in his life? And in the lives of those persons significant to him? A related criterion is one that is necessary for any value judgment, the criterion of universality: Would this way of acting, if adopted by other people (in principle, all of mankind), make for the increase of interpersonal meaning?

It may help to see what happens when the daimonic is not experienced in dialogue. Examples of this can be seen in every nation at war. Unfaced within one’s self and one’s group, the daimonic is projected on the enemy. It is no longer seen as a nation which has its own security and power needs, but as the Evil One, the personification of the devil; one’s own daimonic tendencies are placed on it. (In America, this is abetted by our tendency to see ourselves as having left a Europe which was the seat of injustice, poverty, sin, and cruelty in order to construct a society on this side of the Atlantic which embodies justice, goodness, affluence, and brotherly love.) Thus our tendency to see in every communist a devil, to identify ourselves with God, and to fight no wars but only undertake crusades. In this country, we progressively saw the Russians, Japanese, and now Viet-cong as the embodiment of evil; behind every rock, a communist or Jap. The enemy becomes the carrier of the elements we repress in ourselves. We fight our adversaries little realizing that we are fighting our own selves, denied though it be. This projection requires assertion of self-righteousness on the part of the “in” group, which is what makes it almost impossible to negotiate: to negotiate with the devil is to admit him as an equal; you have, in principle then, already given in to him.

The next step in war psychology is that imagination and vision are blocked. There comes out of the capital—of whatever nation—cliché after cliché, each one thinner than its predecessor, which people do not believe on one level but join together in a conspiracy to believe on another. They become rigid in their daimonic obsession. It is impossible for them even to conceive of any solutions. Intentions become separated by a great gap from intentionality.

This process makes the daimonic impersonal again. It removes the whole area from our having control over it; the daimonic regresses to what it originally was—a blind, unconscious push un-integrated with consciousness. We now become not only nature’s tools but her blind tools. This is abetted by the vicious-circle mechanism, present in nations as well as neurotics. We do not learn from experience; we make decisions patently against our own interest, and when they don’t work we self-destructively make them all over again. Shrunken in vision and sensitivity, we move monolithically, straight ahead, like the ancient dinosaur who could not learn, blind even to our own dinosaurian movements.

STAGES OF THE DAIMONIC

We initially experience the daimonic as a blind push, driving us toward the assertion of ourselves as, say, in rage or sex. This blind push is original in two senses: first, it is the original way the infant experiences the daimonic, but it is also the way the daimonic instantaneously strikes each of us regardless of how old we are. The first yell that the infant lets out is a rich symbol indeed: it is in answer to the initial thing which life gives him—a spank administered by the good right arm of the doctor who delivers him. I not only begin life yelling but, for the first few weeks, my reaction to stimuli is indiscriminate. I may strike out in rage, thrashing my arms, needing and demanding to be fed—behaving like a “little dictator,” as Auden puts it. But I shortly begin to experience that some demands work and some do not. My blind urges are now more and more sieved through the context of what gets me what I wish; I begin the long process of learning the gradual acculturation of daimonic urges. I am born into a social group, and I would not survive more than a few hours without this community—no longer than Oedipus would have lasted out on the hillside if he had not been found by the shepherd—though I cannot appreciate this fact for a number of months or even years. Regardless of how loud my protest is at the beginning, I need this mother and the others around me. The daimonic occurs within the context of this social group. To what extent will it be used against them, to attack them, or force them to bend to my needs and desires; and to what extent and when will it be used as a cooperative assertion?

Adults retain the propensity to experience the daimonic as a blind push, as sheer self-assertion. In lynch mobs and mass violence of all sorts, it is necessary to stir up the mob spirit before the act can be done. We experience security in the mob, a comfortable feeling of being completely protected. We surrender our individual consciousness to the “group mind” we feel as though we were in the ecstatic state of a trance or under hypnosis. No matter how civilized an individual may pride himself on being, or how much he may deplore violence on the part of others, he must still admit that he is capable of this—or, if he is not, something important in his character has been suffocated. The attractiveness of giving one’s self oxer to the mob lies in the excitement without individual consciousness—no more alienation, no sense of isolation, and none of that fatiguing burden of personal responsibility. All of this is taken over by the “group mind,” a fictitious phrase which stands for the lowest common denominator. This is what constitutes the attraction—indeed, at times the horrendous joy—of war and of mass riots. They assume from us our individual personal responsibility for the daimonic; and the fact that my sentence begins with “they” indicates how we must assign the action to anonymous figures. In a society like ours, which represses the daimonic, these states are welcomed for the primitive security they give.

THE DAIMONIC AND THE ANONYMOUS

This brings us to the relation between the daimon and the special problem of modern Western man, namely, the tendency to get absorbed in the herd, lost in das Mann. “The daimonic is anonymity,” states Paul Ricoeur.³ The impersonal daimonic makes us all anonymous—nature draws no distinction between me and any illiterate peasant who also is its tool in its relentless drive toward self-increase, who copulates and begets offspring to perpetuate the race, and who can experience rage to keep himself alive long enough to serve as nature’s procreator. Speaking psychoanalytically, this is the daimonic in the form of the id.

In our bourgeois, industrialized society, man’s most effective way of evading the daimonic is by losing himself in the herd. This is the particular reaction to the daimonic which disperses it. We look at the same programs of murder and violence on television at the same time millions of other Americans do; or we join the army and kill not for ourselves but for our nation and for “freedom.” This conformism and anonymity relieve us of the burden of the responsibility for our own daimonic urges while insuring their satisfaction. But they also insure that the daimonic will remain impersonal. It makes the daimonic forces unavailable for individual integration; the price the person pays is the forfeiting of his chance to develop his own capacities in his own unique way.

The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncracies; they bandy about in a “we’re-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncracies are important to nobody; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.”⁴

This anonymous man’s never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don’t really exist since I can’t affect anyone”—eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt.

Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.

There is another form of the impersonal daimonic which is society’s normal expression for at least part of this need. This is the curious phenomenon of masquerades and masked balls. Here is the cultivation of the fascination of the daimonic in anonymity—we do not know whose eyes are those of the person who seizes us or whom we seize to dance. We are freed, for the moment, from the perpetual responsibility—often wearisome indeed—of controlling our personal conduct. The masquerade, carnival, and Fasching are forms in which society permits us to temporarily go back to the freedom of the daimonic in anonymity. As I recall from my own experience while living in Mediterranean countries, the carnivals before Lent were a great and delightful relief in which one could let off steam; they performed a catharsis not unlike that which the Dionysian festivals must have provided for the ancient Athenians. This cultural form of the daimonic seems to draw off urges for violence. It is of the essence of the exciting pleasure of this abandon, however, that it is temporary, sanctioned by the community, and that everybody participates. Oases of free abandon to the daimonic, these masked balls can exist only in the larger context of community catharsis and social approval.

The next stage after the impersonal, both in the development of the infant and in each immediate experience of the adult, is to make the daimonic personal. To be human means to exist on the boundary between the anonymous and the personal. If we can channel the daimonic, we can become more individualized; if we let it disperse, we become anonymous. Man’s task, by virtue of the deepening and widening of his consciousness, is to integrate the daimonic into himself. Making the anonymous personal requires standing up against the tendency of the daimonic to drive one into anonymity. This means enlarging our ability to break the automatic chain of stimulus and response; we can then, to some extent, choose what and what not to respond to. If the family training is rigid, or if there are traumatic experiences associated with it, the whole daimonic urge may be blocked off. No sexual feeling is to be experienced, or in some homes, never is any anger to be shown; the stage is then set for later daimonic possession—and ultimate explosion. For these urges do not sleep; and, if they cannot be expressed positively, they explode or are projected on whoever is the enemy of the person or the group. The trick here is that we learn not to let our wills “be sickled o’er with the pale cast of thought and lose the name of action,” but rather that we integrate the daimonic power without destroying our spontaneity. This is possible in the new dimension of consciousness of which I speak.

Thus, the daimonic becomes the personal daimon, the particular pattern of being which constitutes my own center, in this sense, individualizes. We can now understand how, in such a highly developed individual as Socrates, the daimon can be experienced as inner guidance: it is the voice of the relationship of the being, Socrates, to the Being as a whole in which he participates.

But having taken cognizance of the fact that there are rational criteria for judging the daimonic, we must not forget the central and most perplexing issue, that it is impossible ever to make the daimonic fully rational. The daimonic will always be characterized by the paradox inhering in the fact that it is potentially creative and destructive at the same time. This is the most important question facing modern psychotherapy, and the most fateful also—for on it hinges the lasting success and the survival of therapy. If we try to avoid the dilemma of the daimonic, as many therapists wittingly or unwittingly do, by helping the patient adjust to the society, by offering him certain “habits” which we think are better for him, or by making him over to fit the culture, we are then inevitably engaged in manipulating him. Rilke is then right: if he surrenders his devils, he will lose his angels too.

The daimonic, which is part of eros and underlies both love and will, acts as a gadfly to our consciousness by throwing us into continual dilemmas. The deepening and widening of consciousness we seek in psychotherapy consists not of the solution of these dilemmas—which is impossible anyway—but the confronting of them in such a way that we rise to a higher level of personal and interpersonal integration.

THE DAIMONIC AND KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge is another expression of the daimonic. The aura of mystical emanation which, in most people’s minds, surrounds the physicist or the psychiatrist or psychologist, is composed of both veneration and suspicion. It is a contemporary form of an age-old phenomenon believed in not only by primitive men but by all people down through history; that acquiring knowledge gives one a daimonic weapon over other people. If I have some special knowledge of you or your world which you don’t have, I have power over you. This may be as simple as the fact that I know how something works and you don’t; but, basically, it is much more complex: it always skates on the edge of participation in the primitive belief that this knowledge gives me a special magical power. Some of the animosity against psychiatrists and psychologists and, specifically, against psychoanalysts (who, as Freud says, have to challenge the demons, and it would be a wonder if they did get off unscathed) arises from this deep-seated fear. Men in these professions, it is felt by many people, have a knowledge of life and death which others do not have. Thus, there is a tendency to cling to them as gods one day and fight them as hated devils the next.

Knowledge is also our source of freedom and security. “The truth shall set you free.”⁵ But in our emphasis on the gaining of knowledge, we have assumed that it was a one-way street—the more knowledge, the better; and we have forgotten this ambivalent, double characteristic of knowledge, that it is also dangerous. We hear so much these days about knowledge bringing power, security, financial success, and so on, that we overlook the fact that the very word which refers to the acquiring of knowledge, “apprehend,” is also the word which means dread, “apprehension.” Looking in Webster’s, we find the definitions of apprehend, “to perceive, to recognize the meaning of, to lay hold of with understanding” and the very next meaning is “to anticipate with anxiety, dread or fear.” And the same with “apprehension”: the first meaning, “a grasping of the mind,” is followed by the second, “a distrust or fear of future evil.”⁶

It cannot be an accident that woven into the very fabric of our language is this relationship between knowledge and the daimonic. “How dangerous it is to know,” we can say with Oedipus, “But I must know, no less.” It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.

It is the psychoanalyst who can afford to forget this least of all. Patients come for treatment ostensibly with open arms for revelations about themselves. But woe to the therapist who takes this at face value! The whole meaning of resistance and repression testifies to the anxiety and pain accompanying these disclosures about one’s self. That is one reason why it is good that the patient pay for his sessions; if he won’t take too much when he pays for it, he will take scarcely a thing given him gratis! This gives us a new approach to the concepts of resistance and repression—they reveal in a person an inescapable need to hide from the truth about himself. It is perpetually a moot question: How much self-knowledge can a human being bear?

Oedipus is the prototype of the man who gains knowledge about himself and pays the ultimate price for it. He is well aware of the threatening quality of knowledge: “Oh, I am in dread to hear,” he cries, “but I must hear no less.” Tiresias tries to persuade him not to search: “How terrible it is to know when no good comes from knowing.” The issue in the drama is, Shall Oedipus know what he has done? Shall Oedipus know who he is and what his origins are? It does not take a Freud to point out that everyone commits these acts, in fantasy if not in reality—and in reality by the vicarious means of war and organized violence which his nation gives him. In actual fact, the only difference between Oedipus and the rest of mankind is that Oedipus faced and admitted what he had done despite all attempted persuasions to the contrary. Even Oedipus’ wife, Jocasta, joins in the general consensus that it is best that he remain in darkness; to show that she means this as a general principle of life, she attacks all the soothsayers and those who deal in myths or take the daimonic seriously: “Have no part of this craft,” she adjures her husband; dreams are not to be taken seriously and it is best to “live unthinking as a man may.” When the truth finally dawns on her (and it is important to keep in mind that she did not know this when she advised Oedipus not to seek his origins), she cries out desperately to her husband, “God keep you from the knowledge of who you are!”

But Oedipus is a hero precisely because he will not let Tiresias or his wife or God or anyone else stand in the way of his knowledge about himself. He is the hero because he is man facing his own reality. Not that he does not cry out with the pain of it—he does, time and again. But he repeats, “I will not stop till I have known the whole.” He also knows there are no false heroics “Curse on the man who took the cruel bonds from off my legs, as I lay in the field.” Though he curses the childhood which brought him this fate, he confronts it directly, and destroys himself in the process: a relatively happy and successful king transformed into a blind, bad-tempered, old man exiled to Colonus. But he knows. And this courage to know, be it noted, with all its destructive possibilities, is found in the same person who can answer the riddle of the sphinx, the one who knows what man is.

Down through the ages, men have tried through their myths to tell each other of this connection between knowledge and the daimonic. In Goethe’s Faust, the hero has such an all-encompassing drive to possess knowledge that he sells his soul to Mephistopheles and counts the price light—which was Goethe’s, and the myth’s, way of saying that to give in to such an infinite passion for knowledge is already to have become one of the devil’s world. Adam and Eve are thrown out of Eden because they, having eaten of the tree of good and evil, now have knowledge; and this makes them like the gods, immortal. The myth portrays the birth of human consciousness and states that consciousness carries the daimonic with it. The myth of Prometheus has a parallel meaning: the god’s disclosing of the cultural arts to men—central in which is language—amounts to the setting of himself against the other gods and incurring everlasting torment.

My point is that the more the daimonic is recognized, the more we shall be able to use the knowledge we acquire for our benefit and mankind’s.

NAMING THE DAIMONIC

We come now to the positive, curative side of the role of knowledge in relation to the daimonic. “In the beginning was the Word,” and the Word has always had a fascinating and complex relation to the daimonic. Referring to the alcoholic’s proclivity for evading his problem by calling it everything else in the world except what it is, William James, in his pithy sentences quoted at the head of this chapter, speaks about the curing effect which occurs when he or any other patient dares to use the right name for his problem. “The effort by which he succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly present to his mind proves to be his saving moral act.”⁷

Traditionally, the way man has overcome the daimonic is by naming it. In this way, the human being forms personal meaning out of what was previously a merely threatening impersonal chaos. We need only recall the crucial importance historically of knowing the particular name of the demon in order to expell him. In the New Testament, Jesus calls out “Beelzebub!” or “Legion!” or some other presumably accurate name, and the devil or devils leave the posessed unfortunate immediately. The priests who were successful at casting out devils in the Middle Ages were those who could divine the name of the demon, the pronouncing of which was sufficient to conjure the evil spirit out and away.

Names are holy. The naming gives one power over the other person or thing. In the book of Genesis, God entrusts man with the responsibility of naming the animals. In ancient Israel, the Jews were not permitted to pronounce the name of God: Yahweh, or Jehovah, means “no name” and is a device used to refer to God without pronouncing his name.

I have come to the belief in my clinical work that this special power of words, as illustrated in the prohibition of naming, has something important to do with the clinical problem of writer’s block. In all cultures, there is a basic ambivalence: words are what distinguish man from the rest of nature, and words also are dangerous to him who dares handle them. Writers in therapy may cry out, “If I write it, I’ll be killed!” In Jewish tradition, as shown in Talmudic studies, there is an emphasis on words as carriers of special significance. It may be that writer’s block tends more to threaten people who were brought up in the Jewish tradition.

One of the earliest and most fascinating accounts of the struggle with the daimonic and the importance of names, is Jacob’s wresting with the “angel” in the 32nd chapter of the book of Genesis. The occasion for this was the enmity between Jacob and his brother Esau: Jacob had heard that his brother was coming with four hundred men. Within this, we find the problem of the love-hate ambivalence between the brothers. There is also the problem of will—certain that he would be defeated on the morrow, Jacob was tempted to capitulate. This problem of will was made more severe by feelings of guilt—he had, years before, craftily cheated Esau out of his birthright. The story illustrates how guilt and anxiety—Jacob was “greatly afraid and distressed”—can bring on the conflict with the daimonic. The conflict can also be thought of in terms of the light and dark man: Esau was “dark,” hirsute, and the outlander, the hunter, the foreigner, as compared to Jacob, the farmer, the sower of seed.

So Jacob left his wives and children on one side of the river that night and went across to the other side to think, and to try to pull himself together for the crucial test which awaited him on the morrow. There, Genesis relates, he “wrestled all night with a man.” The identity of the adversary, typical of all such occasions, is unclear. Is it some subjective prejudice of his own with which he wrestles; or a fantasy? a fear? Or is it—to make it more objective—an aspect of fate or an event like imminent death, something Jacob did not cause himself but life forced upon him and with which he must come to terms? Clearly, it is both.

But in the story, the identity of the adversary is charmingly ambiguous: though he is described at first as a “man,” some commentators hold that he was Michael, the archangel. There is a passage later on in the book of Hosea which describes the same incident, and there two words are used in parallelism for this being, Malak and Elohim.⁸ The first has its primary meaning as messenger and the second as God (or gods). In Hebrew, these early “daimons” (if I may substitute my own term) refer regularly to beings of indeterminate status, who owe their identity to their connection with some particular event. Which is as it should be—assuming the daimonic consists of a particular relationship of a human being to a significant event.

But about one thing there is no question: reading through the incident, we find the identity of the “man” becoming more and more that of a god until, in the latter part of the struggle, the adversary is called God himself. This man-god is a parallel to the “half-way between” stature of the Greek demiurge Eros, which participates in both mortality and immortality.

When this daimon found that he could not overcome Jacob in wrestling, he struck him in the thigh and maimed him. But Jacob still hung on. At length, the daimon implored, “Let me go for the day is breaking.” Jacob responded, “I will not let you go unless you bless me”—Jacob, the insistent, the father of his race who does not ask whether God deigns to bless him, does not implore blessing; he demands it. And now we observe what an important role the names have! The daimon asks, “What is your name?” and on being told “Jacob,” proclaims, “Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Jacob, for whom politeness and decorum have no place when the issues are as critical as this moment, demands, “Tell me, I pray, your name.” The daimonic character of the adversary comes to the fore in the fact that he only turns the question back, leaving his identity still ambiguous: “Wherefore is it you ask my name?” He then blessed Jacob. The new character Jacob forges in his struggle with the daimonic is sealed by the new name, Israel, literally meaning one-who-strives-with-God.⁹

Before Jacob leaves the spot, he gives us another illustration of the importance of names and the daimonic. He changes the name of the spot where the encounter had taken place: “And he called the name of the place Peniel, for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved” (Gen. 32:30). This again shows the assertion which the daimonic enforces upon us; the older Hebrew belief had been that for man to see God meant to die. Jacob breaks through that convention—through his own insistence, he not only sees God but wrestles with him. And he lives.

If we think of the daimonic as man’s struggle with forces from within his own unconscious which, at the same time, are rooted in the objective world, we can understand how this conflict would be brought closer to the surface, made more demanding and available for Jacob, precisely at the moment when his struggle with Esau was imminent. The daimonic is more apt to come out when we are struggling with an inner problem; it is the conflict which brings the unconscious dimensions closer to the surface where they can be tapped. Conflict presupposes some need for a shift, some change in Gestalt, within the person; he struggles for a new life, as it were. This opens up the channels to creativity.

Jacob is the prototype of the religiously creative man; but the same is true for artists and writers. “The need to express one’s self in writing,” André Maurois tells us, “springs from a maladjustment to life, or from an inner conflict, which the…man cannot resolve in action.”¹⁰ No writer writes out of his having found the answer to the problem; he writes rather out of his having the problem and wanting a solution. The solution consists not of a resolution. It consists of the deeper and wider dimension of consciousness to which the writer is carried by virtue of his wrestling with the problem. We create out of a problem; the writer and the artist are not presenting answers but creating as an experience of something in themselves trying to work—“to seek, to find and not to yield.” The contribution which is given to the world by the painting or the book is the process of the search.

But there is a final perplexing aspect to the story—Jacob is maimed. The account says that he limped away from the scene; he is now a cripple. The parallel to sexual intercourse is clear enough; Jacob has been struck in the thigh. In the orgasm, there is a combination of pain and ecstasy; a giving of one’s self which is often experienced as something being ripped from the center of one’s loins. But this refers more broadly to the creative experience as a whole. And to that curious and troublesome aspect of the creative moment, be it in art or thought or ethics or—as in Jacob’s case—religion: that aspect of the creative experience which pulls all of the man’s self into it, calls forth an effort and level of consciousness which he did not know he could put forth, and leaves him crippled. The individual completes the creative work vastly relieved and more a person than before—but also maimed. We often hear the statement after a harrowing task which took years, “I’ll never be the same again.” It is the hurt after the struggle, the imminence of a neurotic or schizophrenic break, though the person may simultaneously be more a person after the wrestling. Van Gogh was maimed; Nietzsche was maimed; Kierkegaard was maimed. It is the danger of the razor-blade edge of heightened consciousness on which the creative person lives. No man shall see God and live; but Jacob did see God—and had to—and, though he lived, he was maimed. This is the paradox of consciousness. How much self-awareness can a man bear? Does not creativity take one to the frontiers of consciousness and push one beyond them? Does not this require an effort and courage beyond human capacities?; but doesn’t it also push back the frontiers of consciousness so that those who follow, like the explorers in early America, may erect cities and live there? This is the mystery. The clearest explanation seems to be that in the creative act, the individual moves farther away from the innocence of the child, or from the virginal state of Adam and Eve. The gap between the “essential” and the “existential” now becomes greater. The wisdom of Thomas Wolfe’s title, You Can’t Go Home Again, is written more deeply in his (the creative man’s) being.

In the heightened consciousness which is necessary for the fully creative act—as in the case of Blake, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Tillich, and the few other men who have challenged the position of God—schizophrenia and the creative act go hand in hand. And the individual may move back and forth from one to the other. One can see the whole story in the eyes of the person who has “struggled with God and with man and prevailed.” Assertion and dedication are necessary even to go to that frontier, and although a genuine self-realization may be achieved, he is also maimed in the process.

NAMING THE DAIMONIC IN THERAPY

In the naming of the daimonic, there is an obvious and interesting parallel to the power of naming in contemporary medical and psychological therapy. At some time, everyone must have been aware of how relieved he was when he went to the doctor with a troublesome illness and the doctor pronounced a name for it. A name for the virus or germ, a name for the disease process, and the doctor could then make a statement or two about the disease on the basis of this name.

Now something deeper is going on in this phenomenon than our relief at whether or not the doctor can predict a quick cure. Or any cure, for that matter. Some years ago, after weeks of undetermined illness, I heard from a specialist that my sickness was tuberculosis. I was, I recall, distinctly relieved, even though I was fully aware that this meant, in those days, that medicine could do nothing to cure the disease. A number of explanations will leap to the reader’s mind. He will accuse me of being glad to be relieved from responsibility; that any patient is reassured when he has the authority of the doctor to which he can give himself up; and the naming of the disorder takes away the mystery of it. But these explanations are surely too simple. Even the last one—that the naming reduces the mystery—will be seen, on further thought, as an illusion: to me the bacillus or the virus or the germ is still as much a mystery as ever, and the tubular bacillus was then still a mystery to the doctor.

The relief, rather, comes from the act of confronting the daimonic world of illness by means of the names. The doctor and I stand together, he knowing more names in this purgatory than I and therefore technically my guide into hell. Diagnosis (from dia-gignoskein, literally “knowing through”) may be thought of, on one side, as our modern form of calling the name of the offending demon. Not that the rational information about the disease is unimportant; but the rational data given to me add up to something more significant than the information itself. It becomes, for me, a symbol of a change to a new way of life. The names are symbols of a certain attitude I must take toward this daimonic situation of illness; the disorder expresses a myth (a total pattern of life) which communicates to me a way in which I must now orient and order my life. This is so whether it is for two weeks with a cold or twelve years with tuberculosis; the quantity of time is not the point. It is a quality of life. In short, the image by which I identify myself changes by its contact with the myth portraying the daimonic in the natural processes of disease. If I overcome the disease, I shall partly be a new being, and I could rightly be initiated into a new community and be given a new name.¹¹

The parallel of this phenomenon to psychotherapy is even closer than it is to medicine. Many therapists, like Allen Wheelis, speak of their task as “naming the unconscious.” Every therapist must be impressed almost every hour with the strange power which the names of psychological “complexes” or patterns have for the patient. If the therapist proposes that the patient is afraid of his memories of the “primal scene,” or that he has an “inverted Oedipus,” or that he is an “introvert” or “extrovert” or has an “inferiority complex,” or that he is angry at his boss because of “transference,” or that the reason he cannot talk this morning is “resistance”—if the therapist proposes any of these shibboleths, it is amazing how the words themselves seem to help the patient. He relaxes and acts as though he has already gotten something of great value. Indeed, one could burlesque psychoanalysis or therapy of any sort with the statement that the patient pays money to hear certain seemingly magic words; and he feels that he has received his money’s worth if he hears a few esoteric terms. This relief does seem to have the characteristics of the “magic” of words. But this—such an easy straw man to be set up by the enemies of psychoanalysis—is a burlesque of therapy and not genuine therapy at all.

It has been argued that the relief the patient receives is due to the fact that the “naming” gets him off the hook; it relieves him of responsibility by making a technical process to blame; he is not doing it, but his “unconscious” is. There is some objective truth in this. Most patients take too much responsibility for the wrong things, and not enough responsibility for those things about which they can do something. Furthermore, on the positive side, the naming helps the patient feel allied with a vast movement which is “science” and, also, he is not isolated any more since all kinds of other people have the same problem that he has. The naming assures him that the therapist has an interest in him and is willing to act as his guide through purgatory. Naming the problem is tantamount to the therapist’s saying, “Your problem can be known, it has causes; you can stand outside and look at it.”

But the greatest danger in the therapeutic process lies right here: that the naming for the patient will be used not as an aid for change, but as a substitute for it. He may stand off and get a temporary security by diagnoses, labels, talking about symptoms, and then be relieved of the necessity of using will in action and in loving. This plays into the hands of modern man’s central defense, namely intellectualization—using words as substitutes for feelings and experience. The word skates always on the edge of the danger of covering up the daimonic as well as disclosing it.

Other forms of therapy, including lobotomy, may also “remove” the daimonic. Dr. Jan Frank, in his study of 300 patients before and after they underwent lobotomies, gives a poignant example. “One of my patients,” he writes, “a schizophrenic doctor, complained before the operation about a recurring nightmare in which he was surrounded by wild animals in the arena. After the lobotomy the dream lions did not roar and were not frightening any longer but walked silently away.”¹² When I read this, I was aware of a vague discomfort which I soon realized was the feeling that walking silently away was a potentiality precious to this man’s life, and he was the poorer thereby.

It is the failure of therapy, rather than its success, when it drugs the daimonic, tranquillizes it, or in other ways fails to confront it head on. The Furies, or daimons, are called in Aeschylus’ Oresteia the “disturbers of sleep.” In the drama they drove Orestes into temporary insanity after he killed his mother. But when one stops to think about it, if Orestes had slept soundly that month after the killing, something tremendously important would have been lost. Sleep is possible only after the pattern of fate-guilt-personal-responsibility is worked through to new integration, as it is in the last drama of the trilogy, The Eumenides.

When Orestes is acquitted by the jury, Apollo demands the expurgation of the Furies—these daimons who are the symbolic spirits of anger, revenge, retaliation. Apollo speaks as the representative of highly respected rationality; he lives by logical balance, accepted forms, and civilized control. He argues that these primitive, archaic Furies—spokesmen for the irrational id if ever such existed—who torment men at night letting them neither sleep nor rest, be banished forever from the land.

But what Apollo does not see, and what Athena has to drive home to him, is that he can be as cruel and implacable in his intellectual detachment as the Furies can be in their primitive rage. Athena, who reconciles opposing poles in her own self (symbolized by the fact that “no mother…gave [her] birth”),¹³ argues a greater wisdom as she refuses Apollo:

She is enunciating a psychotherapeutic insight demonstrated by Freud in the Victorian age, a lesson, alas, not yet learned in our time: if we repress the daimonic, we shall find these powers returning to “sicken” us; whereas, if we let them stay, we shall have to struggle to a new level of consciousness in order to integrate them and not be overwhelmed by impersonal power. And (what a refreshingly honest motto to put up in a psychotherapist’s office!) either way will hurt.

But in this drama, the act of accepting the daimonic also opens the way for the development of human understanding and compassion, and even raises the level of ethical sensibility. Athena proceeds to persuade the Furies to remain in Athens and accept their role as respected guardians of the city. By accepting the daimonic Furies, welcoming them into Athens, the community is enriched.

Then our time-honored symbol comes home to us again, as at the birth of every new form of being—the Furies have their name changed. They are henceforth to be called Eumenides, literally meaning workers of grace. What a profound and eloquent way of proclaiming that the hated daimonic can be a guardian and a channel of grace!

We now arrive at the ultimate meaning of the daimonic in dialogue. What did the ancients mean by this “Word” which has power over the daimonic? They were referring to the logos, the meaningful structure of reality, which is man’s capacity to construct form, and underlies his capacity for language as well as for dialogue. “In the beginning was the Word” is true experientially as well as theologically. For the beginning of man as man, in contrast to apes or the pre-self-conscious infant, is the potentiality for language. We find that some of the important functions of therapy rest on fundamental aspects of the structure of language; the Word discloses the daimonic, forces it out into the open where we can confront it directly. The Word gives man a power over the daimonic.

This Word is communicated, in its original, powerful forms, by symbols and myths. It is important not to forget that any healing process—even the question of what each of us with a common cold is to do about his virus—is a myth, a way of viewing and evaluating one’s self and one’s body in relation to the world. Unless my illness changes my image of myself, my myth of myself, I shall not have distilled from the trauma of illness the opportunity for new insight into myself and my possibilities of self-realization in life. And I shall not attain anything that can be rightly called “cure.”

We have seen that the daimonic begins as impersonal. I am pushed by the clamor of gonads and temper. The second stage consists of a deepening and widening of consciousness by which I make my daimonic urges personal. I transform this sexual appetite into the motivation to make love to, and be loved by, the woman I desire and choose. But we do not stop there. The third stage consists of the more sensitive understanding of bodies as body (to use a physical analogy) and of the meaning of love in human life (to use a psychological and ethical analogy). The daimonic thus pushes us toward the logos. The more I come to terms with my daimonic tendencies, the more I will find myself conceiving and living by a universal structure of reality. This movement toward the logos is transpersonal. Thus we move from an impersonal through a personal to a transpersonal dimension of consciousness.