October / November 2003

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SHADOW IN MYTHIC AMERICAN STORIES
. . . — Don Eulert

C. G. Jung studied the dynamics of the cultural psyche in literature, particularly “the problem of the shadow” (what’s in the collective unconscious). He proposed that in a national literature we might find the “helper and redeemer . . . awakened when times are out of joint and a great error deflects society from the right path.”

Over the years I have compared “classic” American stories, seeking some dominant mythic patterns. In Jung’s percept, the artist speaks for the collective, bringing to consciousness what otherwise is hidden or one-sided in the culture.
The questions below follow from a graduate seminar presentation on “The S/Hero’s Journey in U.S. Mythic Stories.” Using Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of Departure, Initiation, and Return as template for psychological development, I noted how U.S. stories are marked by a “refusal of the return” after initiation. Campbell suggests that deviations from the Cosmogonic Cycle can be examined for a kind of pathology. For example, after his ordination, Isaac McCaslin (in Faulkner’s mythic landscape) suffers an aborted marriage and “relinquishes” ownership and lineage. After all his initiatory ordeals, Huck Finn will “light out for the territory,” as if he can start again as an inno

cent.

You said that a primary theme in U.S. stories is men running away from women?
Like many others, I believe the epic in American literature is Huck Finn’s journey. Huck’s intention to flee from Aunt Sally and the Widow Douglas, who want to sivilize him, is prototypical. It’s also there at the beginning of our country’s storytelling, when Rip Van Winkle went fishing for 20 years to escape his wife’s jawing. And in the Western film (a genre of genuine mythic dimension, maybe this country’s principal cultural artifact), the hero choosing his horse over the woman is legendary.

Don Eulert

So misogyny is our theme?
No, although it’s there in the shadows. Essentially people on this new continent were running away from the patriarchal institutions of Europe. Running away from women should not be read as hatred or fear of the gender, but from Woman as (ironically) keeper of the institutions. Thus you reject the sivilizer who limits freedom. Or maybe she limits potentiality, as Campbell describes the masculine: “that which comes to know,” as contrasted to the feminine, “that which is to be known.” When you grow up American it doesn’t matter whether you are male or female when it comes to seeking freedom. You ingest the Gestalt, but the active principle will be portrayed by the male in our mythic stories and cultural history, as in most fairytales.

How is it that you compare fairytale to our historical experience?
Fairytales and our American experience are both stories of developmental psychology, but our culture’s story diverges from the classic pattern. Literally and mythologically the New World seeks self-realization. In our story, transplanted Europeans have thrown off their patriarchy. Maybe they’re looking for a golden ball (the archetypal object of search in fairytales). Or maybe they reject the father and go it alone because the fathers are despots. His father threatens to take Huck’s head off with an axe, after all. But then you also reject the tradition of order, of articulation and leadership, structure and community—which belong to the masculine archetype at its best. As a culture we’re much like the bumbling prince in the forest who goes on a journey without even knowing directions. In Jungian terms, the puer aeternus archetype is split from the senex. The “eternal youth” refuses to integrate wise old man features such as generosity and farsightedness. What happens if you judge the father as a negative figure and cast it off? You’re in for a lot of trouble being foolish or macho yourself on the masculine side. Then you act out exaggerations and compulsions.

As a culture, are we still lost in the forest?
Fairytales tell us that the prince can’t get anywhere until he picks up a “talking fox,” or often it says “a furry animal,” at the edge of the forest. Now, isn’t that interesting? A little bit on the animal side of being, but with its own intelligence. If you want directions, you’d better listen to your instinctive side, and get acquainted with your shadow.
There’s an important aside here. Whereas the European novel has an incipient theme of social class, the American undercurrent is race. James Fenimore Cooper, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, even Ken Kesey, all have principal characters who are WASPs, often naive or young. They are accompanied in their initiatory journeys by Native Americans or other people of color. These wiser characters seem to represent a yearning to incorporate intuitive, archaic, and sometimes magical ways of knowing, in contrast to the dominant white “thinking” function. Carlos Castaneda and Hunter S. Thompson also come to mind. Coming to wholeness in our culture requires that we incorporate the other, literally and symbolically.
The archetypal fairytales suggest that this prince had better incorporate the “other” in his own psyche—the instinctive and the intuitive—and confront the ugly or monstrous shadow. The prince is destined to make all manner of mistakes, to be alienated, lost, and quite unsure. Power will not save him. His monomythic quest, if it is to end happily, will require him to find and unite with his feminine counterpart. Then, after dragons and treasure, he’s supposed to come back to save the kingdom with tempered, wise rule. Does such unification happen in the Western film or the Great American Novel? Usually not. Our guys become heroic when they portray the unapologetic self. After learning what he can from sidekick Jim, Huck Finn will “light out for the territory” alone.

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But individualism is not an American invention, is it?
The discovery of the New World did indeed bring about the modern idea of individualism, as Americans know it in particular. I need to veer to history to explain.
Historian Walter Prescott Webb suggests that three modern institutions arose out of the facts and mythos of the New World, constructing our ideas about individualism. First, religious reformations. In the New Jerusalem, no priest or hierarchy mediates between the individual and God. One could homestead miles from a preacher and still be saved as long as there was a Bible. Or quite American, we had Emerson’s trans-cendental “pipeline to God.” The individual could save his own soul.
After self-determining one’s moral structure came our own 1776, the overthrow of kings, self-rule: Democracy. Already with the rush of riches from the New World we had the third institution, economic capitalism. So now you have the right to save your own soul, the right to govern yourself, and the right to make yourself rich by your own efforts. Those are the three cornerstones of American values. And they all center on individual rights, in these domains.
When people left Europe, they left behind the idea that one needed to belong to a feudal system, or aristocratic structure, or church hierarchy (in bed with the others) to be saved or fed. But Webb suggests that these institutions of individualism, particularly democracy and capitalism, may be “boom-born” aberrations. The golden gates in the West opened and sucked down the pillars of the Pope, feudalism, and monarchy—giving birth to a new kind of person, whether you moved to the New World or not. His sobering conclusion was that lights burn late in the capitols of the West, trying to determine the future of frontier mentality when there is no more frontier.

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You began by naming the New World “the New Jerusalem.” Are you talking about history or myth?
What I mean by myth is not the use of the word as something flimsy. I mean a story of human belief, universal enough to shape behavior. What our society dreams and stories become our cultural mythos. Its symbolic language interprets and guides our history. We all contribute to it and use as it as referent.
But pick your metaphor: American history or founding myths. Historically, the people who came here, the Puritans on the East coast, and certainly the Franciscans coming up from the South and West, believed that they were founding the millennium. Coming to a new Garden of Eden, they sought to map rivers named in the Bible. This was a new start of Paradise. The advertisements for colonies and the journals of Columbus (even all the way through Whitman, who was a booster for the New Adam through the 19th century) saw this as a land of Edenic perfection. And, in this scenario, some early Catholics here speculated that Indians actually were God’s angels.
But when you got here, you did freeze and starve, and things were anything but perfect. Then follows a reversal of some of these projections, and you get their shadow side. Now Indians become savages, treated as part of the landscape or as slaves. What was seen as a second chance for humanity to live in Edenic innocence led to the Fall and its shadow: genocide, power, greed, and so on.

So there never was a “second chance” . . .
Well, Americans still haven’t given up on the dream of perfectibility, just switched the means for getting there. Just because a New Eden is not handed to you by God, by God you’re not going to give up on the dream. That’s how you get from the religious preoccupation of an Edenic landscape into headlong expansion and proselytizing for technological progress. When we couldn’t get salvation by going back, Americans looked forward to Perfectibility through uncritical acceptance (again); this time it’s the inflated myth of progress and power. And that proceeds.
So in this country (the healing professions included), we act as if everyone can be rich, as if all problems can be solved, even those of suffering, old age, and death. And Jungian Guggenbeuhl-Craig warns healing professionals in particular that their altruism masks the shadow motive of power. Hmm. As a country with a military budget bigger than the next ten countries combined, does this obsession with power have altruism in the closet?
But to get back to innocence lost. Publications—including handbills seeking settlers in the 17th century compared with the 19th century—show how attitudes reversed. The metaphors and descriptions changed. The land went from being a luscious source of life to something to be possessed, subdued, and raped by rugged individualists.

Earlier you said “frontier mentality.” Do you mean that we’re all still in a Western movie?
It’s remarkable how these films employ an “unknown” (often sublime) landscape, with some irrational figures, at the frontier of the “known.” As projective myth of the American psyche, we can read these films the same way we interpret Greek values from their myths and epics—Odysseus and the Homeric heroes. But they were obsessed with history and lineage (all the way back to the gods). Our heroes have no history.
Yes, Western movies portray and inculcate many assumptions of our culture’s “operating principles,” whether we are conscious of them or not. These include U.S. suppositions about how a man or woman should act, what freedom is about, what potential exists for perfectibility or maturity. A psychological assessment of the Western movie points to a moral structure of the American psyche that is not very mature. Our attitudes about space and time, our brand of individualism, nostalgia for a lost Eden, our god of “progress,” even more complex issues about violence and narcissism, can be teased out and examined. If one reads the artifacts of the American psyche as one might analyze an individual’s dreams, a hypothesis would be that America prizes a particular type of adolescent behavior—a pose of naivete and innocence masking a shadow of violence. In the boyish romp of Huck Finn, one critic cites 26 killings. D. H. Lawrence saw a kind of schizophrenia, declaring that behind the surface stories of American literature lurks a “deep blood lust.”
If the shadow myths and archetypes behind our cultural stories became clearer, perhaps we all could think and act more consciously. We are our stories, after all.

You say, “Bring the myths clearer.” Does the Western film reveal our dilemmas?
The Western film is only one template. We could analyze best-selling toys at Christmas and also learn about our cultural self. What could be learned? Not only what archetypes are surfacing, but also their shadow-meanings. The prevailing materialistic culture of consumerism in the U. S. might suggest that its opposite, spirituality, exists as compensatory “white shadow.” Connie Zwieg has recently written about a “holy longing” in the culture, and worldwide.
Our dilemmas are contemporary and urgent. We’re still caught up in “overwhelming rich white boy hubris, and a very real, very deep crisis of capitalism itself,” says Stan Goff, author of Hideous Dreams. He’s a former Sergeant with Special Forces and military instructor at West Point, among other posts. He says, “We suffer from a collective sociogenic learning disability based on the complete commodification of our consciousness by consumerism and electronic media. So we are not only bitterly unhappy and alienated, we are intensely stupid and attached to denial.”
This quite keen psychological analysis of the shadow in our American dream came after Goff spent “a couple of decades” in the military figuring out that we engage against poor people. “I didn’t realize it at the time . . . but this is the military role in an imperial state.” While U.S. corporations drain the value out of other countries, the military’s job “is to stand guard against all those masses of people in the host nation from whom the value was being drained in labor and resources. If you steal enough from people, they hit a point where they become rebellious, and to continue stealing, you have to use people with guns.” So we’re still enacting “Indians versus the Cavalry,” but on a worldwide scale.
But, back to the question, the Western movie is a key American “invention.” A second is jazz. A third is the gangster movie, interesting by contrast to the Western. The movie gangster’s life is, fundamentally, not serious. He plays the odds all the time. Pulp Fiction is a wonderful postmodern twist on the theme. But to the hero in a Western movie, life is deathly serious. He resembles the gangster in being an outsider, but his outlook is melancholic because he recognizes that life is unavoidably serious. Not, apparently, from any disproportion in his own temperament. Nothing unbalanced about John Wayne (in real life a draft dodger), or Gary Cooper! Being sheriff is tough. The loneliness of the Western hero is organic, and belongs to him intimately. It also testifies to his completeness. The bottom-line dilemma is that, being complete, the hero of the Western is compelled to not seek love.

Our Western hero stands against love?
No, not against. He is prepared to accept it perhaps, but never asks more than he can give. And if there is a woman, she’s unable to understand his motives. She is against killing and being killed. And he finds it impossible to explain to her that there’s no point in being against these things. They simply belong to his world. So, one key moral value in Western movie mythology is that you have to learn to harden yourself. Even if you have Grace Kelly beside you, as Gary Cooper does in High Noon, and you have the chance for a new life, the love you feel for her is irrelevant to an unbreakable code of honor. Purity of motive outweighs consequences. Then the Western movie myth allows one to be a killer and still be innocent. Basically, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” Evidently most of our populace identifies with George W. Bush in his possession by this archetypal role.
Later on, we get some movies where a woman’s got to do what a woman’s got to do. But the lesson in the myth is, again, how to be self-sufficient. This myth runs across the classic Westerns. Remember Alan Ladd in Shane, sort of drifting in? He looks in on the family, but he can’t join in. The wife falls a little in love with him, but then he kills and rides on. He has learned to do without love. That in part is what makes him heroic. The husband who stays behind to work out his community relations is less heroic.
This is a peculiar U.S. facet of individualism, which teaches people that love and community are secondary to individual purpose—learn to tough it out without relationship. This myth of self-reliance as a path to “cure” surely lives in the psychologist and in clients, too. The way to healing, however, may require a different cultural mythos: Bring love and interdependence to consciousness, out of the shadow realm. (Think what a foreign policy thus based might look like!)

If the prevailing myth of the Western isn’t appeal to relationship, then to what?
To an existential landscape in which elements of how to live and die are played out—that’s akin to classic tragedy. But the surface appeal of Westerns is action and tactics; how you set your strategy and skill, how you bring force to bear, and how you get your power. That’s where we give our attention in this culture.
The romance of violence in movies extends far beyond the Western. The violent man as hero includes James Bond and Clint Eastwood, Mad Max, Batman, the Terminator, and the woman in Tomb Raider. Many of these stories take place in a moral wilderness, if not places of actual emptiness and despair that resemble the frontier or the ruins of Beirut. Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham suggests that such brutalization of the nation’s imagination over the last 40 years has reduced the media to retelling this destructive tale, with better special effects. Whether cast as a gunfighter, detective, gangster, superhero, rogue cop, or invincible robot, the wandering hero of American film and American myth finds solace in violence, and his story always ends with a killing. It’s the only plot he knows.
Meanwhile, philosophy, psychology, modern physics, and common sense suggest that social reality is what one conceives and perceives, not what one finds. That 1/3 of the black men in this country are in prison or the justice system is a fact, but perceptions brought about this reality, and determine its meaning. Another example is the social reality created by White House spin on intelligence reports, in support of a new world order. In the images we choose to represent ourselves, we create ourselves. Perceptions and symbolic structures have physical results.

But these are symbolic patterns, you can’t choose them like TV channels.
Alan Ginsberg suggested years ago that the way to positive social change was to “seize the key images,” which was fun when he tried to levitate the Pentagon through group meditation. Physically that didn’t work, but, yes, we can choose. If we withdraw our attention from any institution (marriage, a political party, violent films), then it no longer exists. On the other hand, giving our attention to bad dreams, bringing them into consciousness, interrupts their power. The same process applies to shining light into the dark places of the culture and of politics. And dark places for psychology need light, such as bringing the extent of child abuse—including ritual abuse—into conscious discourse in this country. Or the correlation between poverty and mental illness or violence. Shadow discourse begins only with reluctance, and after lots of naysaying. Jung says that no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort, which encounters (in understatement) “considerable resistance.”
As to “choosing” symbolic representations, transformative images entered our minds in the last half century, such as Earth as a blue spaceship of life. We begin to enlarge our vision, perhaps to resolve opposites and to go beyond differences. Diversity—and interdependence—is the rule of life in planetary systems. These are archaic wisdoms reprinted for our age through photos from a satellite. Absorbed globally, such images can help us reconnect to our shared destinies, women and men, and “all our relations.”

This sounds like a modern version Jung’s “transcendent” image, which resolves opposites. Do our culture’s stories serve a similar function?
If examined thoroughly and honestly, our tales and myths are all therapeutic. Joseph Campbell suggests that myths encompass the three goals of therapy. The mythic cycle requires killing the infantile ego, reconciling opposites, and enduring. Enduring what? Another timeless three: temptation, sacrifice, suffering. Maybe “reconciling opposites” encompasses all these goals.
But to circle back to story. Some of our society’s dreams that are now stuck in the shadow, if brought to consciousness, can allow us to be more joyful participants. If some of our stories don’t serve the goal of life, we can liberate ourselves from them. We can choose to be informed by the image of spaceship earth, or the politics of the New World Order, or Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade with Garfield bobbing just ahead of fiscal and moral bankruptcy.
Jung says the shadow is 90% gold. Within the culture’s artifacts, from literature and film, to commercial and political gesturing, we can find ways to discern—and then act for—the health of the organism we live within. Its health determines our own.

DON EULERT, Ph.D., Professor of Cultural Psychology at Alliant International University’s California School of Professional Psychology, may be contacted at deulert@alliant.edu, or at fax (760) 788-2541