NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

¹ Carl Oglesby, in A Prophetic Minority, by Jack Newfield (New York, New American Library, 1966), p. 19.

² Leslie Farber, The Ways of the Will (New York, Basic Books, 1965), p. 48.

³ Anthony Storr, Human Aggression (New York, Atheneum, 1968), p. 85.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid., p. 88.

⁶ Personal communication.

⁷ Kenneth Keniston observes a parallel point, namely that the problems of our day bear down most heavily not upon the stupid and the bland, but upon the intelligent. “The sense of being inescapably locked in a psycho-social vise is often most paralyzing to precisely those men and women who have the greatest understanding of the complexity of their society, and who therefore might be best able to plan intelligently for its future.” The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960).

⁸ Sir Herbert Read, Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the Development of Human Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1955).

⁹ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 21.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Aeschylus, Agamemnon, from The Complete Greek Tragedies, eds. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 71.

¹² Ibid., p. 70.

¹³ The fact that pornography and other aspects of sexuality were also present in the Victorian period, as shown by Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians (New York, Basic Books, 1964), does not invalidate my thesis. In such a compartmentalized society there would always be repression which would come out in the underground in proportion to the blocking off of vital drives.

¹⁴ Published as The Meaning of Anxiety (New York, Ronald Press, 1950).

¹⁵ See May, The Meaning of Anxiety, pp. 6–7.

¹⁶ The drama that most clearly heralded the demise of the Horatio Alger values of work and success by which most of us had gotten our sense of individual identity and significance was Death of a Salesman, published by Arthur Miller in 1949. Willy Loman’s basic trouble was, in Miller’s words, that “he never knew who he was.”

¹⁷ J. H. van den Berg, “The Changing Nature of Man,” intro. to A Historical Psychology (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1961).

¹⁸ See David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles (New York, Basic Books, 1965), p. 23.

¹⁹ P. H. Johnson, On Iniquity: Reflections Arising out of the Moors Murder Trial (New York, Scribners).

²⁰ Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1953), p. 14. The problem which seemed to me to be emerging in a new and unique form I first called the patients’ “emptiness,” not an entirely well-chosen phrase. I meant by it a state closely allied to apathy.

²¹ Ibid., p. 24.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid., pp. 24–25.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 25.

²⁵ The New York Times, March 27, 1964.

²⁶ Ibid., April 16, 1964.

²⁷ Ibid., May 6, 1964.

²⁸ Keniston, in The Uncommitted, speaking of this anomie, writes: “Our age inspires scant enthusiasm. In the industrial West, and increasingly now in the uncommitted nations, ardor is lacking; instead men talk of their growing distance from each other, from their social order, from their work and play, and from the values and heroes which in a perhaps romanticized past seem to have given order, meaning, and coherence to their lives.”

²⁹ James H. Billington, “The Humanistic Heartbeat Has Failed,” Life Magazine, p. 32.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid.

³² “Public apathy,” says Dr. Karl Menninger, “is itself a manifestation of aggression.” Karl Menninger at a conference of the Medical Correctional Association on violence, covered by The New York Times, April 12, 1964.

³³ The vast need of our society for touch and the revolt against its prohibition are shown in the growth of all the forms of touch therapy, from Esalen on down to the group therapy in the next room. These rightly reflect the need, but they are in error in their anti-intellectual bias and in the grandiose aims which they assert for what is essentially a corrective measure. They are also in error in their failure to see that this is an aspect of the whole society which must be changed, and changed on a deeper level involving the whole man.

³⁴ Harry Stack Sullivan, The Psychiatric Interview (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1954), p. 184.

³⁵ Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1960), pp. 20–21.

³⁶ Arthur J. Brodbeck, “Placing Aesthetic Developments in Social Context: A Program of Value Analysis,” Journal of Social Issues, January, 1964, p. 17.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

¹ William James, Principles of Psychology (New York, Dover Publications, 1950; originally published by Henry Holt, 1890), II, p. 439.

² Atlas, November, 1965, p. 302. Reprinted from The Times Literary Supplement, London.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Howard Taubman, “Is Sex Kaput?,” The New York Times, sect. 2, January 17, 1965.

⁵ Leon Edel, “Sex and the Novel,” The New York Times, sect. 7, pt. I, November 1, 1964.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ See Taubman.

⁸ John L. Schimel, “Ideology and Sexual Practices,” Sexual Behavior and the Law, ed. Ralph Slovenko (Springfield, Ill., Charles C. Thomas, 1965), pp. 195, 197.

⁹ Sometimes a woman patient will report to me, in the course of describing how a man tried to seduce her, that he cites as part of his seduction line how efficient a lover he is, and he promises to perform the act eminently satisfactorily for her. (Imagine Mozart’s Don Giovanni offering such an argument!) In fairness to elemental human nature, I must add that as far as I can remember, the women reported that this “advance billing” did not add to the seducers’ chances of success.

¹⁰ That the actual Puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a different breed from those who represented the deteriorated forms in our century can be seen in a number of sources. Roland H. Bainton in the chapter “Puritanism and the Modern Period,” of his book What Christianity Says About Sex, Love and Marriage (New York, Reflection Books, Association Press, 1957), writes “The Puritan ideal for the relations of man and wife was summed up in the words, ‘a tender respectiveness.’” He quotes Thomas Hooker: “The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes, museth on her as he sits at table, walks with her when he travels and parlies with her in each place he comes.” Ronald Mushat Frye, in a thoughtful paper, “The Teachings of Classical Puritanism on Conjugal Love,” Studies from the Renaissance, II (1955), submits conclusive evidence that classical Puritanism inculcated a view of sexual life in marriage as the “Crown of all our bliss,” “Founded in Reason, Loyal, Just, and Pure” (p. 149). He believes that “the fact remains that the education of England in a more liberal view of married love in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was in large part the work of that party within English Protestantism which is called Puritan” (p. 149). The Puritans were against lust and acting on physical attraction outside of marriage, but they as strongly believed in the sexual side of marriage and believed it the duty of all people to keep this alive all their lives. It was a later confusion which associated them with the asceticism of continence in marriage. Frye states, “In the course of a wide reading of Puritan and other Protestant writers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, I have found nothing but opposition to this type of ascetic ‘perfection’” (p. 152).
One has only to look carefully at the New England churches built by the Puritans and in the Puritan heritage to see the great refinement and dignity of form which surely implies a passionate attitude toward life. They had the dignity of controlled passion, which may have made possible an actual living with passion in contrast to our present pattern of expressing and dispersing all passion. The deterioration of Puritanism into our modern secular attitudes was caused by the confluence of three trends: industrialism, Victorian emotional compartmentalization, and the secularization of all religious attitudes. The first introduced the specific mechanical model; the second introduced the emotional dishonesty which Freud analyzed so well; and the third took away the depth-dimensions of religion and made the concerns how one “behaved” in such matters as smoking, drinking, and sex in the superficial forms which we are attacking above. (For a view of the delightful love letters between husband and wife in this period, see the two-volume biography of John Adams by Page Smith. See also the writings on the Puritans by Perry Miller.)

¹¹ This formulation was originally suggested to me by Dr. Ludwig Lefebre.

¹² Atlas, November, 1965, p. 302.

¹³ Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York, Viking Press, 1959), quoted in James A. Knight’s “Calvinism and Psychoanalysis: A Comparative Study,” Pastoral Psychology, December, 1963, p. 10.

¹⁴ Knight, p. 11.

¹⁵ Cf. Marcus, The Other Victorians, pp. 146–147. Freud’s letter goes on: “Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we are protected from the direst poverty and that the possibility exists of being able to free ourselves increasingly from social ills. The poor people, the masses, could not survive without their thick skins and their easy-going ways. Why should they scorn the pleasures of the moment when no other awaits them? The poor are too helpless, too exposed, to behave like us. When I see the people indulging themselves, disregarding all sense of moderation, I invariably think that this is their compensation for being a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sickness, and evils of social institutions.”

¹⁶ Paul Tillich, in a speech, “Psychoanalysis and Existentialism,” given at the Conference of the American Association of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, February, 1962.

¹⁷ Schimel, p. 198.

¹⁸ Leopold Caligor and Rollo May, in Dreams and Symbols (New York, Basic Books, 1968), p. 108n, similarly maintain that today’s patients, as a whole, seem to be preoccupied with the head and genitals in their dreams and leave out the heart.

¹⁹ Playboy, April, 1957.

²⁰ These articles by notable people can be biased, as was Timothy Leary’s famous interview which Playboy used broadly in its advertising, holding that LSD makes possible a “hundred orgasms” for the woman, and that “an LSD session that doesn’t involve an ultimate merger isn’t really complete.” Actually, LSD seemingly temporarily “turns off” the sexual functions. This interview inspired a rejoinder from a writer who is an authority on both LSD and sex, Dr. R. E. L. Masters, who wrote, “Such claims about LSD effects are not only false, they are dangerous…. That occasional rare cases might support some of his claims, I don’t doubt; but he suggests that he is describing the rule, not the exception, and that is altogether false” (mimeographed letter privately circulated).

²¹ “Playboy’s Doctrine of the Male,” in Christianity and Crisis, XXI/6, April 17, 1961, unpaged.

²² Discussion in symposium on sex, Michigan State University, February, 1969.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Gerald Sykes, The Cool Millennium (New York, 1967).

²⁵ A survey of students on three college campuses in the New York/New Jersey area conducted by Dr. Sylvia Hertz, chairman of the Essex County Council on Drug Addiction, reported in The New York Times on November 26, 1967, that “The use of drugs has become so prominent, that it has relegated sex to second place.”
As sex began to lose its power as the arena of proving one’s individuality by rebellion and merged with the use of drugs as the new frontier, both then became related to the preoccupation with acts of violence. Efforts crop up anachronistically here and there to use sex as the vehicle for revolt against society. When I was speaking at a college in California, my student chauffeur to the campus told me that there was a society at the college dedicated, as its name indicates, to “Sex Unlimited.” I remarked that I hadn’t noticed anybody in California trying to limit sex, so what did this society do? He answered that the previous week, the total membership (which turned out to be six or seven students) got undressed at noon and, naked, jumped into the goldfish pool in the center of the campus. The city police then came and hiked them off to jail. My response was that if one wanted to get arrested, that was a good way to do it, but I couldn’t see that the experience had a thing in the world to do with sex.

²⁶ Marshall McLuhan and George G. Leonard, “The Future of Sex,” Look Magazine, July 25, 1967, p. 58. The article makes a significant point with respect to the polls about sex: “When survey-takers ‘prove’ that there is no sexual revolution among our young people by showing that the frequency of sexual intercourse has not greatly increased, they are missing the point completely. Indeed, the frequency of intercourse may decrease in the future because of a real revolution in attitudes toward, feelings about and uses of sex, especially concerning the roles of male and female” (p. 57).

²⁷ Not being an anthropologist, I conferred with Ashley Montague on this point. The judgment was expressed orally to me.

²⁸ McLuhan and Leonard, p. 58. The words are italicized by McLuhan and Leonard.

²⁹ Eleanor Garth, “The A-Sexual Society,” Center Diary, published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 15, November–December, 1966, p. 43.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

¹ U. S. Department of Health Statistics Medical World News, March, 1967, pp. 64–68. These reports also inform us that venereal disease is also increasing 4 per cent a year among adolescents. This increase may have different causes from those for illegitimate pregnancy, but it bears out my general thesis. The second statistic—that this is an increase from one in fifteen of ten years ago—is from a report of the Teamsters Joint Council 16, covered in The New York Times, July 1, 1968.

² Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: A Study in the Effect of Powerlessness (New York, Harper and Row, 1965). This excerpt is from sections of the book quoted in Psychology Today, 1/5, September, 1967, p. 38.

³ The same is true among the Indians of South America, where the symbol of being able to father babies is so important that it defeats all the efforts of enlightened nurses and doctors to spread birth control. The woman will readily confess that she wants not to have any more babies, but the “husband”—generally of the common-law variety—feels it a mark against his machismos if he cannot father a baby a year, and so leaves her in favor of others if he cannot prove his potency with her.

⁴ T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” Collected Poems (New York, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1934), p. 101.

⁵ The gripping thing about the movie La Dolce Vita was not its sex, but that while everyone was feeling sexy and emoting all over, no one could hear any other person. From the first scene when the noise of the helicopter blots out the shouting of the men to the women, to the last scene in which the hero strains to hear the girl across the stream but cannot because of the noise of the ocean waves, no one hears another. Just at the moment in the castle when the man and the woman are at the point of declaring authentic love for each other in a communication by echoes, she cannot hear his voice from the other room and immediately drugs herself by promiscuous sexual titillation with a chance passerby. The dehumanizing thing is the so-called emotion without any relatedness; and sex is the most ready drug to hide one’s terror at this dehumanization.

⁶ Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology, vol. III from The Masks of God (New York, Viking Press, 1964), p. 235.

⁷ Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Springfield, Mass., G. & C. Merriam Company).

⁸ Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Springfield, Mass., G. & C. Merriam Company, 1961).

⁹ To the argument that Plato was actually speaking of pederasty, the love of men for boys, and that the Greeks valued homosexuality more than heterosexuality, I reply that eros has the same characteristics regardless of the form the love about which you are speaking. I do not believe that this is any disparagement of Plato’s insights into love. Furthermore, “There is evidence that Socrates did not practice pederasty,” writes Professor Morgan, and “no convincing evidence that Plato did either. The issue seems to me to interest only scholars of Athenian cultural history. Plato’s philosophical interpretation of love stands wholly outside the problem of homosexuality and heterosexuality…. Were Plato living today, his language would presumably reflect our differing social customs, but would not require any fundamental revision on this account…. In either cultural environment, the man who is consumed with merely carnal hungers and gratified in merely carnal manners is properly and identically condemned as bestial, foolish, childish, and infrahuman; Plato’s presentation of love can stand as strong today as it ever stood.” Douglas N. Morgan, Love: Plato, the Bible and Freud (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 44–45.

¹⁰ W. H. Auden, ed., The Portable Greek Reader (New York, Viking Press, 1948), p. 487.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 493.

¹² Ibid., pp. 493–494.

¹³ Ibid., p. 495.

¹⁴ This fits the binding function of eros; the origin of the word religion (re-ligio) means binding together.

¹⁵ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p. 123.

¹⁶ Surely Freud himself had no desire to render sex and love banal. He would have been perplexed by how his emphasis on the sexual basis of life was pursued with a vengeance in our society, indeed carried to its reductio ad absurdum. And he would have been appalled by Kinsey and Masters, who define sex in a way which omits exactly what Freud wished most to preserve—the intentionality of sexual love and its wide significance in the psychological constellation of human experience. No matter how much Freud talked in such physicalistic phrases as the “filling and emptying of seminal vesicles,” there was always in his view of sex a sense of the mysterium tremendum, a sense of Schopenhauer’s proclamation, “the sexual passion is the kernel of the will to live.”

¹⁷ Morgan, p. 136.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 139.

¹⁹ Sigmund Freud, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912), Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1961), XI, pp. 187–188.

²⁰ Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Standard Edition (London, Hogarth Press, 1955), XVIII, p. 7.

²¹ Ibid., p. 35. Freud himself italicized these sentences.

²² Ibid., p. 38.

²³ It is not within our purpose here to discuss the merits of this theory of the death instinct, which has been so fervently attacked and rejected by Freudians as well as by Horney and others of the cultural school. I can only repeat what I have said elsewhere, that though the theory may not make sense biologically or with the literal definition of “instinct,” it makes very important sense as a myth expressing the tragic nature of human life. Here, Freud’s voice is in the great tradition of Ecclesiastes, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and all those thinkers through the ages who were motivated by their profound respect for the inexorable character of Ananke, or Necessity, in nature.

²⁴ Morgan, p. 144.

²⁵ Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), Standard Edition (London, Hogarth Press, 1961), XIX, p. 47.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 46.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 47. (It is here, incidentally, that Freud refers to the fact that the drone bee and the praying mantis die after copulation, and uses this as an illustration of death after satisfaction.)

²⁸ Such as Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York, Basic Books, 1957), III, p. 276: “The aim was to establish a relationship between Fechner’s principle of stability, which Freud had identified with his Nirvana principle and ultimately with the death instinct, and the second law of thermodynamics. This sinister law, the bogey of all optimists, can strictly speaking be expressed only in mathematical language, such as a quantity of heat divided by a temperature; the law of entropy states that in a self-contained system this number increases with time. This is true, however, only of a hypothetical closed system such as is never met with in nature, least of all in living beings where, as the eminent physicist Schrödinger has insisted, by taking in energy from without they actually acquire a negative entropy.”

²⁹ Morgan, p. 173.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid., p. 165.

³² Ibid.

³³ Ibid., p. 164.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 165.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ Professor Morgan, p. 174, expresses astonishment that Freud, knowing the classics as he did, could have made such an extraordinary error. One can only remark the obvious: that so great are the pressures in any society to see reality through the eyeglasses of our own predelictions, that we tend to reinterpret the past in terms of our biases, which, in Freud’s nineteenth-century culture, was Helmoltz’s physics. “In his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud commits still another remarkable error, betraying an almost uncanny misconception of Athenian love: ‘The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid stress on the instinct itself whereas we emphasize its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.’ [Standard Edition, VII, p. 149, n. 1.] If by ‘ancients’ we are to read Plato, it is difficult to discredit Freud with so extraordinary a misreading. For Plato, the dynamism of love derives all its value from its ultimate object; ‘inferior objects’ were honored not because of love, but rather because they revealed in a limited manner the ultimately and properly beloved object. And Freud appears here to be as mistaken about psychoanalysis as he is about Plato!”

³⁷ Abraham Maslow has made this point well in his various writings.

³⁸ Paul Tillich, Love, Power and Justice (New York, Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 22.

³⁹ Helene A. Guerber, Myths of Greece and Rome (London, British Book Centre, 1907), p. 86.

⁴⁰ “Eros,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. VIII (1947), p. 695.

⁴¹ Rollo May, in a review of Vance Packard’s The Sexual Wilderness: The Contemporary Upheaval in Male-Female Relationships (New York, David McKay Company, 1968), appearing in The New York Times Book Review, October 13, 1968: “Packard here cites J. D. Unwin’s massive, if almost forgotten, ‘Sex and Culture’ (1934), a study of 80 uncivilized societies and also a number of historically advanced cultures. Unwin sought to correlate various societies’ sexual permissiveness with their energy for civilized advancement. He concluded that the ‘amount of cultural ascent of the primitive societies closely paralleled the amount of limitation they placed upon the nonmarital sexual opportunity.’ Virtually all the civilized societies Unwin examined—the Babylonians, Athenians, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and English—began their historical careers in a ‘state of absolute monogamy.’ The one exception was the Moors, where a specific religious sanction supported polygamy. ‘Any human society,’ Unwin writes, ‘is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom; the evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation.’ Packard points out that this is supported in different ways by other historians and anthropologists, such as Carl C. Zimmerman, Arnold J. Toynbee, Charles Winick and Pitirim A. Sorokin.”

⁴² From Denis de Rougement’s The Myths of Love (New York, Pantheon Books, 1963), quoted in Atlas, November, 1965, p. 306.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

¹ Campbell, III, p. 67.

² Hesiod, Theogony, lines 120–122, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1961), quoted by Joseph Campbell, III, p. 234.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Love’s effect can parallel that of the drug LSD. Both break down the walls of the customary world and crumble our defenses, leaving us naked and vulnerable. In LSD, the experience may be one of awe and discovery, or it can be one of paranoia and disintegration with no delight at all. That parallel, too, holds in love. Jealousy, envy, suspicion, rage, and even hatred can be more powerful when love is present. Many couples stay together ostensibly motivated more by hatred than by love. As in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it is sometimes very hard to tell whether hatred masks love or the reverse.

⁵ Sigmund Freud, “The Two Classes of Instincts,” in The Ego and the Id, p. 47.

⁶ Campbell, III, p. 235. Also see the treatment of Tristan and Iseult in Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York, Pantheon Books, 1956).

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Cf. Robert Lifton, “On Death and Death Symbolism,” Psychiatry, published by The William Allison White Foundation, Washington, D. C., 27, 1964, pp. 191–210. Also Geoffrey Gorer, “The Pornography of Death,” in The Berkley Book of Modern Writings, eds. W. Phillips and P. Rauh, 3rd ed. (New York, Berkley Publishing Corp., 1956), pp. 56–62.

⁹ Erich Fromm’s later writings are clear examples of this avoidance of the reality of death. “Grief is sin,” he writes, giving the psychological rationale for the repression of death. He goes on to urge that man keep himself from even thinking about death. I do not see how such an evasion can escape being destructive to the personality. Cf. The Heart of Man (New York, Harper & Row, 1964).

¹⁰ For a satire of this, see Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

¹¹ The tendency to repress death also has its history. After the loss of belief in immortality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we repressed death by our belief in progress; if we could conquer nature, conquer diseases, why should not progress be extrapolated to also include, some day far off in the glowing future, our conquering death?

¹² Tillich, p. 23.

¹³ See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 58.

¹⁴ Frobenius in Der Kopf als Schicksal (Munich, 1924), quoted by Jung-Kerenyi, Introduction to a Science of Mythology.

¹⁵ Seymour L. Halleck, “The Roots of Student Despiar,” THINK, published by IBM, XXXIII/2, March–April, 1967, p. 22.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

¹ Plato, The Apologia, from The Works of Plato, ed. Irwin Edman, trans. Jowett (New York, Tudor Publishing Co., 1928), pp. 74, 82–83.

² William Butler Yeats, Mythologies (New York, Macmillan Co., 1959), p. 332.

³ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Autobiography: Poetry and Truth from My Own Life, trans. R. O. Moon (Washington, D. C., Public Affairs Press, 1949), pp. 683–684.

⁴ Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

⁵ E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1968), p. 120.

⁶ Henry Murray, “The Personality and Career of Satan,” The Journal of Social Issues, XVIII/4, p. 51.

⁷ Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, trans. Michael Meyer (New York, Doubleday Anchor, 1963), p. xxviii.

⁸ William Butler Yeats, Selected Poems, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York, Macmillan Co., 1962), p. xx.

⁹ Yeats, Mythologies, p. 332.

¹⁰ Storr, p. 1.

¹¹ From the Presentation at the Annual Convention of the American Psychiatric Association, 1967, Atlantic City, partially published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, 124/9, March, 1968, pp. 58–64. Dr. Prince, we should add for those of us who tend to take the usual pejorative view of primitive therapy and ceremonies, had a high regard for the skill of the native mental healers. When a native could not be helped by the psychiatric facilities of the hospital, Dr. Prince would send him to a native mental healer in whom he had confidence. These healers seemed to have quite a good idea of the different types of ailments we call schizophernia, and had some idea of which types they could cure and which not. I believe that we should not judge this kind of therapy by comparing it to our contemporary techniques, or see it simply as “primitive” healing in the derogatory sense, but as an expression of archetypal ways of dealing with human problems which were, to some extent, adequate for their tribal situation as our methods are relatively adequate for us. This so-called earlier form can cast significant light on our contemporary problems.

¹² I am indebted through here to Dr. Wolfgang Zucker for ideas in his unpublished paper, “The Demonic.”

¹³ , Dodds, p. 182. This phrase is often mistranslated “Man’s character is his fate.” Dodds translates “daimon” here as “destiny.” While these give different aspects of the daimonic, it is well to keep in mind that the Greek term is.

¹⁴ Aeschylus, The Eumenides, trans. John Stuart Blackie (London, Everyman’s Library, 1906), p. 163.

¹⁵ Dodds, p. 183. “On that issue {the springs of human conduct} the first generation of Sophists, in particular Protagoras, seem to have held a view whose optimism is pathetic in retrospect, but historically intelligible. ‘Virtue or Efficiency (arête) could be taught’: by criticizing ihs traditions, by modernising the Nomos which his ancestors had created and eliminated from it the last vestiges of ‘barbarian silliness’, man could acquire a new Art of Living, and human life could be raised to new levels hitherto undreamed of. Such a hope is understandable in men who had witnessed the swift growth of material prosperity after the Persian Wars, and the unexampled flowering of the spirit that accompanied it, culminating in the unique achievements of Periclean Athens. For that generation, the Golden Age was no lost paradise of the dim past, as Hesiod had believed; for them it lay not behind but ahead, and not so very far ahead either. In a civilised community, declared Protagoras robustly, the very worst citizen was already a better man than the supposedly noble savage. Better, in fact, fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. But history has, alas, a short way with optimists. Had Tennyson experienced the latest fifty years of Europe he might, I fancy, have reconsidered his preference; and Protagoras before he died had ample ground for revising his. Faith in the inevitability of progress had an even shorter run in Athens than in England.”

¹⁶ Herbert Spiegelberg, ed., The Socratic Enigma (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964), p. 127.

¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 127–128.

¹⁸ New English Dictionary, ed. James A. H. Murray (Oxford, 1897).

¹⁹ Zucker.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Goethe, p. 682.

²² This translation is by Wolfgang Zucker. The parallel passage in Goethe’s Autobiography, cited above, is on pp. 683–684.

²³ Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” Collected Papers (New York, Basic Books, 1959), III, pp. 131–132.

²⁴ Morgan, p. 158. Let those psychologists and social scientists who, several decades ago, used to side-step these hard sayings of Freud by means of the easy shibboleth of his “pessimism” now recall what has happened since he argued this tragic state of life: Hitler and Dachau, the atom bomb and Hiroshima, and now the spectacle of the most powerful nation in the world mired in destruction in Vietnam with no possible constructive solution.
Freud gives a concrete illustration of the daimonic in the sense of partial aspects of the personality taking power over the whole, with disintegrating effects upon the total self: “It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros. But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.” Civilization and Its Discontents (1927–1931), Standard Edition (London, The Hogarth Press, 1961), XXI, p. 121.

²⁵ James, II, pp. 553–554.

²⁶ I say lungs because the anxiety in loneliness seems to affect the breathing apparatus, and the pain seems to be a sharp stab of constriction of the lungs rather than, as we say in grief or sadness, a pain “in the heart.” There is a greater basis for this usage than mere localization of felt pain, for anxiety in general has been connected with the narrow passage which the infant must go through in birth, and the difficulties in breathing that may be associated (whether “caused by” or not we don’t need to go into for this purpose) with the confined channel, the “straightened gate.” The French root for anxiety—angoisse—is connected literally with the meaning of going through a narrow channel, as is the English word “anguish” (L. angustia, narrowness, distress; Fr. angoisse, to press together). Cf. Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety.

²⁷ That we are afraid because we run, rather than that we run because we are afraid. James believed that the experiencing of an emotion was our awareness of the inner chemical and muscular changes in the body produced by our action, such as running away.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

¹ Spiegelberg, p. 236. Hegel sees the positive side of this also. The threat in a Socrates is not only the disaster; it is “the principle which includes both the disaster and the cure,” Hegel adds.

² Socrates designated himself by the humble symbol “midwife,” since his function was not to tell the people the ultimate truth but to draw out of them, by questions, their own inner truth. How much irony there is hiding behind the humility in Socrates nobody knows. In any case, he would have described the function of the psychotherapist in general as a midwife.

³ Prof. Paul Ricoeur, in a personal conversation with me.

⁴ Ex. 32:32; Ps. 69:28; Rev. 3:5.

⁵ John 8:32.

⁶ Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

⁷ James, I, p. 565. Italics James’s.

⁸ I owe this observation to Thomas Laws of Columbia University.

⁹ The Holy Bible, rev. stand, ed. (New York, Thomas Nelson, 1952), Gen. 32:30, p. 34.

¹⁰ The New York Times, October 10, 1967, p. 42.

¹¹ When a prince is crowned king, or a pope is installed, he assumes a new being and is given a new name. When a woman gets married in our society, she takes on the name of her husband, symbolically reflecting her new being.

¹² Jan Frank, “Some Aspects of Lobotomy Under Analytic Scrutiny,” Psychiatry, vol. 13, February, 1950.

¹³ Aeschylus, The Eumenides, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, p. 161. p. 161.

¹⁴ Ibid. p. 152.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

¹ Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviera (New York, Garden City Publishing Co., 1938), p. 95.

² Alan Wheelis, “Will and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, IV/2, April, 1956, p. 256. Wheelis’ solution to the problem, in this article and in the last chapters of The Quest for Identity (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1958), falls short of the penetrating quality of his analysis.

³ Modem Man Is Obsolete is also the title of a book by Norman Cousins, written directly after the explosion of the first atomic bomb.

⁴ From the movie Seven Days in May.

⁵ Prof. L. S. Feuer, “American Philosophy Is Dead,” The New York Times Magazine, April 24, 1966.

⁶ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, N. J., Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 75.

⁷ Sylvano Arieti, “Volition and Value: A Study Based on Catatonic Schizophrenia,” delievered at the mid-winter meeting of the Academy of Psychoanalysis, December, 1960, and published in Comprehensive Psychiatry, II/2, April, 1961, p. 77.

⁸ Ibid., p. 78.

⁹ Ibid., p. 79.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 80.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 81.

¹² See Wheelis. See also Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart.

¹³ Cf. speeches of Jules Masserman and Judson Marmor at the American Psychiatric Convention, May, 1966, and the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, May, 1966.

¹⁴ It is significant, and only fitting, that the issue of power was recently brought into psychology by a Negro psychologist who speaks out of the conflicts of race relations. Here it cannot be avoided. See Clark, Dark Ghetto.

¹⁵ Robert Knight, “Determinism, Freedom, and Psychotherapy,” Psychiatry, 1946/9, pp. 251–262.

¹⁶ Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (London, The Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 72.

¹⁷ Wheelis, p. 287.

¹⁸ Vera M. Gatch and Maurice Temerlin, “The Belief in Psychic Determinism and the Behavior of the Psychotherapist,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, pp. 16–34.

¹⁹ See Knight.

²⁰ Hudson Hoagland, “Science and the New Humanism,” Science, 143, 1964, p. 114.

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

¹ William James states in his chapter on will in Principles of Psychology, that the problem of free will is insoluble on the psychological level. It is an metaphysical question; and if the psychologist takes a stand on the free-will—determinism issue as such, he should know that he is speaking metaphysics and take the appropriate safeguards.

² Wheelis, p. 289.

³ Ernest Schachtel informs me that baby seagulls will give the feeding response upon seeing a yellow mark, painted on wood or in other form, similar to the mother seagull’s mark on her throat.

⁴ From an unpublished paper by William F. Lynch, given orally at a conference on will and responsibility in New York, 1964.

⁵ From the discussion and criticism of The Waste Land, by Wright Thomas and Stuart Brown, Reading Poems: An Introduction to a Critical Study (New York, Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 716.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ William Lynch, in a speech at the Annual Convention of the American Association of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 1964. This reminds me of Spinoza’s teaching, that we should “hold in the forefront of our minds the virtue we wish to acquire,” so that we may then see how it is applied to each situation which arises, and the virtue will then gradually become imprinted on us. How literally that advice can or should be followed I do not know: but the import we want to underline of both Spinoza and Father Lynch above is the transitive, active aspects of consciousness.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Leslie Farber, from a paper given at a conference on will and responsibility in New York, 1964. Later printed in The Ways of the Will: Essays Toward a Psychology and Psychopathology of Will (New York, Basic Books, 1966), pp. 1–25.

¹¹ E. R. Hilgard, “The Unfinished Work of William James,” paper presented at the American Psychological Association Annual Convention, Washington, D. C., September, 1967. (To be published.)

¹² In Principles of Psychology, James’s masterpiece, published in 1890, ten years before Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams.

¹³ James believed that the pleasure-pain system of motivation—i.e., we will certain things because they give us pleasure and decide against other things because they give us pain—has two grave flaws. One is that, though pleasure and pain are motivations on the superficial level, they are only two among many different motives. Second, on the more basic level, pleasure and pain are accompaniments rather than causes: I act to achieve some self-fulfillment, and if my action contributes to this, it brings me pleasure. As James says, I do not keep writing because I get pleasure out of it, but I find myself writing and filled with mental excitement and I continue this project or task for its own reasons; though I may, indeed, get pleasure of several different sorts out of the fact that I have continued.

¹⁴ James, II, p. 546.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 321.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 322.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 524. Italics mine.

NOTES TO CHAPTER NINE

¹ This was read and translated for me from a German dictionary of philosophy by Paul Tillich.

² See n. 1 above.

³ Here, the word “con-form” is exceedingly interesting, meaning to “form with.”

⁴ As quoted by Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York, Macmillan Co., 1964), p. 251.

⁵ As quoted by Quentin Lauer, The Triumph of Subjectivity (New York, Fordham University Press, 1958), p. 29.

⁶ Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Quoted by Prof. Paul Ricoeur in a seminar.

⁹ Personal communication.

¹⁰ Speech at the Annual Convention of the New York Psychological Association, February, 1953.

¹¹ See Prof. Robert Rosenthal’s many papers on experimental bias, Harvard Social Relations Department.

¹² Quoted by Paul Ricoeur in personal communication.

¹³ Eugene Genlin, “Therapeutic Procedures in Dealing with Schizophrenics,” Ch. 16 in The Therapeutic Relationship with Schizophrenics, by Rogers, Genlin, and Kiesler (Madison, Wis., University of Wisconson Press., 1967).

¹⁴ From Sonnet 27. Italics mine.

¹⁵ The studies and seminars of Paul Ricoeur, Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne, are an exceedingly important contemporary contribution to the understanding of will. Some of Ricoeur’s thinking will be available in English with the publication of his Terry Lectures at Yale. I am grateful for a number of ideas from Prof. Ricoeur in seminars and personal discussion.

¹⁶ This fits Dr. Robert Lifton’s concept that psychic illness is due to an “impaired sense of symbolic immortality.” Also, Dr. Eugene Minkowski has sion, not as the result of the depression, but as the cause. (See Chapter 4 in Existence: A New Dimension of Psychiatry and Psychology, eds. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri Ellenberger, New York, Basic Books, 1958.) Our being concerned with the patient’s hopes, as one side of his wants, is one sound and constructive aspect of psychotherapy. These hopes and wants may of course be romantic, unreal or may be filled with dog-in-the-manger resentfulness; but this is all the more reason for bringing them into the open. Or his condition may approach a genuine, sheer lack of hope, in which case he is apt to show pronounced symptoms of apathy, n any case, his intentionality, with respect to his future, will largely condition what he remembers of, and how he deals with, his past, as I have indicated in Chapter 4 of Existence, mentioned above.

¹⁷ May (The Meaning of Anxiety).

¹⁸ Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 81–82.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 83.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TEN

¹ Ernest Keen, formerly my graduate assistant in my course at Harvard during the summer of 1964, now professor at Bucknell. To be published.

² Dr. Robert Knight is in error when he cites the determinism of Spinoza as a determinism which destroys human freedom. This is a misunderstanding that identifies all determinism with scientific, cause-and-effect processes. These can, indeed, be inimical to human freedom if they are made, unjustifiably, into ultimate principles. But as Spinoza’s determinism is a deepening of human experience, an added dignity if you will, it makes freedom dearly bought but all the more real for that. “Necessity,” for Spinoza, is the fact of living and dying, not the necessity of a technical process such as Dr. Knight proposes.

³ James, II pp. 578–579.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ELEVEN

¹ David Riesman, Reuel Denney, and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1950).

² I am aware that I describe this type mythically, and that there are many exceptions—like William James and his parents—to this rule. Making all allowances for the fate of each of us to hate the age just before ours, I believe that my point is still generally sound.

³ This is why if there is psychological malignancy on the part of the mother at this time—serious depression or some other upset—the consequences can be paranoid tendencies or some other serious disorder for the infant.

⁴ Anaximander wrote in one fragment: “Every individual does penance for [his] separation from the boundless.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWELVE

¹ Kant, states that “‘only a rational being has the power to act in accordance with his idea of laws—that is, in accordance with principles—and only so has he a will.’ He [Heidegger] immediately adds that, ‘since reason is required in order to deduce actions from laws, the will is nothing but practical reason.’ Yet his use of the word ‘power’ indicates that will is also understood as energy.” John Macquarrie, “Will and Existence,” The Concept of Willing, ed. James N. Lapsley (New York, Abingdon Press, 1967), p. 76.

² Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, Harper & Row, 1962), p. 370.

³ Macquarrie, p. 78.

⁴ Heidegger, p. 227.

⁵ Macquarrie, p. 82.

⁶ Heidegger, p. 319.

⁷ Ibid., p. 242

⁸ Macquarrie, p. 82.

⁹ Ronald Latham’s introduction to Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe (London, Penguin Books, 1951), p. 7.

¹⁰ Some of the writers we shall be referring to lived a century or two later—Plutarch, second century A.D.; Epictetus, a Greek living in Rome in the second century A.D.; Lucretius, first century B.C. But these men were writing to the best of their knowledge about the earlier period—Lucretius explicating Epicurus of the third century B.C., and Epictetus interpreting Zeno’s Stoicism. We are dependent, at least for quoted references, on the literature which survived and was handed down. Dodds and other scholars believe that these men do faithfully represent the mood and tone of their sources in the Hellenistic period.

¹¹ Epictetus, in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York, Random House, 1940), p. 306.

¹² Lucretius, p. 208.

¹³ C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé (New York, Vintage Books, 1965), pp. 212, 334. The point is not the anxiety about satellites and space ships and trips to the moon in themselves, but what they symbolically represent in the change of our relationship to heavenly bodies. The same kind of anxiety came out at the transitional point between the Middle Ages and modern times, when new interpretations of heavenly space were made. The citizen of Copernicus’ or Galileo’s time experienced no less warmth and light from the sun and the earth was no less earthy after the new theory was proved that the earth goes round the sun. But there was a profound impact on man’s image of himself, his relation to his church, and other cultural forms through which he had made sense out of his life. I agree with Lewis Mumford when he writes, in reviewing Jung’s autobiography, that Jung “made perhaps a more realistic appraisal of these unidentified objects (flying saucers) than those who had expected them to contain visitors from another planet.” Mumford goes on: Jung “saw them as unconscious projections of modern man’s need for the intervention of higher powers in a world menaced by its own scientific-mechanical ingenuities—typical hallucinations of an age that could conceive of Heaven only in the forces that threatened it.” Lewis Mumford, The New Yorker, May 23, 1964.

¹⁴ Lucretius, p. 217.

¹⁵ Italics mine.

¹⁶ Dodds, p. 240.

¹⁷ Lucretius, p. 218.

¹⁸ Dodds, p. 248.

¹⁹ Lucretius, p. 61.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 128.

²¹ Ibid., p. 128.

²² Ibid., p. 98.

²³ Ibid., p. 79.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 126.

²⁵ Ibid., pp. 126–127.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 204.

²⁷ It is especially difficult for us, as modern men, to come to terms with the myth of Sisyphus because of our strong faith in the myth of perpetual progress. We have rejected the myth of God’s providence only to come up in its place with the myth of progress—“every day in every way we become better and better.”

²⁸ The term “mythoclasm” is used by Jerome Bruner, “Myth and Identity,” The Making of Myth (New York, Putnam, 1962), and is referred to in Chapter V of this book. I find mythoclasm to be a very interesting word. I think that what happens is that the person turns against the failing myths, as against a parent, with the violence and sense of hurt of one betrayed. The myths ought to have stood me in good stead and they have let me down! This expresses itself in a defiant iconoclasm (e.g., “God is dead”) and in a turning of one’s energy toward the destruction of the very myths on which one longed to depend. This, in turn, goes with the defiant vow, “I’ll live without myths!” This process in itself is a most vivid and meaningful, if self-defeating, form of mythologizing. We also see this mythoclasm in those psychoanalysts who have turned against their old faith.

²⁹ The absurdity to which Lucretius’ passionate faith in the therapeutic effects of naturalistic explanations leads him is shown in the following: “The Nile, for instance, unlike any other river on earth, rises on the threshold of summer and floods the fields of all Egypt. The reason why it normally irrigates Egypt at the height of the heat may be because in summer there are north winds blowing against its mouths—the winds that are said to be Etesian or ‘seasonal’ at that time. These winds, blowing against the stream, arrest its flow. By piling up the water they raise its level and hold up its advance. There is no doubt that these breezes do run counter to the river. They blow from the cold stars of the Pole.” Lucretius, p. 239.

³⁰ Lucretius, p. 146. This assignment of fictitious causes reminds us of the argument of some analysts which maintains that the patient should be helped to believe in the “illusion of freedom” in order to get the necessary commitment to change. (This is discussed in Chapter VII.) Also, we are reminded of the contention of a number of psychotherapists that whether or not an interpretation that is given to the patient is true is not relevant to its curative value. The effect depends upon the patient’s faith, hope, and other things rather than its accuracy. This is a partial truth which needs to be placed in a larger context, namely, that of the “intentionality” present in the theraputic relationship at the moment as determinative of the curative value of the interpretation.

³¹ Latham, p. 9.

³² Lucretius, pp. 254, 256.

³³ I use the term mythos to distinguish the myth which still has viability, is partly unconscious, and is now in a process of being formed. Mythopeic is the name of this process of forming myths.

³⁴ Alfred North Whitehead, in Alfred North Whitehead: His Reflections on Man and Nature, ed. Ruth Narda Anshen, (New York, Harper & Row, 1961), p. 28.

³⁵ T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1943), p. 15.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THIRTEEN

¹ James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.

² Quoted by Dan Sullivan in “Sex and the Person,” Commonweal, 22, July, 1966, p. 461.

³ W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems (New York, Random House, 1967).

⁴ Tillich, The Courage to Be, Chapt. 6.

⁵ The Buried Life, lines 77–89.

⁶ Harry Harlow, “Affection in Primates,” Discovery, London, January, 1966, unpaged.

⁷ John Donne, “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World,” The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York, Doubleday & Co., Anchor Books, 1967), p.278, lines 209–217.

⁸ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. G. B. Rawlings, (Mount Vernon, N.Y., The Peter Pauper Press, 1946), p. 7.