Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche

Archetypes Evolving

Virginia Beane Rutter, Thomas Singer, Virginia Beane Rutter, Thomas Singer

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317551249
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Historia
• Sous-sujet: Historia de la antigua Grecia

Between ancient Greece and modern psyche lies a divide of not only three thousand years, but two cultures that are worlds apart in art, technology, economics and the accelerating flood of historical events. This unique collection of essays from an international selection of contributors offers compelling evidence for the natural connection and relevance of ancient myth to contemporary psyche, and emerges from the second 'Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche' conference held in Santorini, Greece, in 2012.This volume is a powerful homecoming for those seeking a living connection between the psyche of the ancients and our modern psyche. This book looks at eternal themes such as love, beauty, death, suicide, dreams, ancient Greek myths, the Homeric heroes and the stories of Demeter, Persephone, Apollo and Hermes as they connect with themes of the modern psyche. The contributors propose that that the link between them lies in the underlying archetypal patterns of human behaviour, emotion, image, thought, and memory. Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche: Archetypes Evolving makes clear that an essential part of deciphering our dilemmas resides in a familiarity with Western civilization's oldest stories about our origins, our suffering, and the meaning or meaninglessness in life. It will be of great interest to Jungian psychotherapists, academics and students as well as scholars of classics and mythology.

1 The Hero Who Would Not Die

Warrior and goddess in Ancient Greek and modern men

Craig San Roque

DOI: 10.4324/9781315731193-2

My father was the hero who would not die, who during World War II flew a B-24 Liberator plane on so-called suicide missions to bomb the oil fields of Ploieşti, Romania. On 5 April 1944, ¹ his plane was shot down, and he, along with his co-pilot, spent five months as prisoners of war, along with other Allied men, in two prisons, the last a converted schoolhouse in the town of Timisul del Sus. ² As the squadron commander and the highest-ranking officer, a Major, my father was in charge of the other men in the prison. On the day he was shot down, beaten, and interrogated before being incarcerated, he wrote: ³

I kept those half-remembered lines in my mind all through my prison stay.

That night, as I lay on the bed waiting for the morrow, some half-remembered lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost ran through my mind and served to toughen my soul for the trying days ahead. After the war, I looked these lines up again to refresh my memory, and here they are:

• What though the field be lost?
• All is not lost; th’ unconquerable will,
• And study of revenge, immortal hate,
• And courage never to submit or yield.

(Paradise Lost, Book i, Lines 105–8)

Four and a half months later, King Michael of Romania ordered the German commander, Colonel Alfred Gerstenberg (who had occupied Romania for four years), to remove the German Wehrmacht from Romanian soil. This set off days of murder and terror on the part of the Germans and prepared the way for the Russians, who proved to be even more brutal. Amid this chaos, the guards abandoned the Allied prisoners. Emaciated and disoriented, the Allied men were 200 miles from the Yugoslavian border and 80 miles from the main prison at Bucharest to the south. An Army man from the camp appropriated some trucks, evacuated the prisoners, and deposited them in the village of Pietroşiţa, which was nine miles away from the main road along which the Germans were fleeing. Germans, Russians, and Romanians all shot at each other while the Germans tried to recapture the American POWs to use them as hostages during their retreat from Romania.

My father and one of his fellow prisoners who spoke German ⁴ forced a sentry at gunpoint to stop the first passing car that looked Romanian. This proved to be a limousine driven by Dr. Dimitrie Gerota. Fortuitously, Dr. Gerota was an esteemed doctor in the country, renowned for his humanitarian deeds. ⁵ Dr. Gerota, who was on his way to visit his wife and children at his summer house, took the two prisoners along, hiding them until he could get them to his Bucharest home. Then he arranged with the Minister of War to supply them with transportation to return to get the troops left at the schoolhouse. As their commanding officer, my father felt responsible for guiding them out of the bedlam. He and his buddy drove to pick up the remaining prisoners and then made their dangerous way back to the main prison in Bucharest.

All the Allied prisoners were eventually evacuated by a squadron of B-17s sent by the 15th Army Air Corps in Bari, Italy. There, after being stripped of the uniforms they had been wearing for months, deloused with DDT and debriefed, the bombing groups received a presidential citation from Franklin D. Roosevelt for their heroic bombing of the Ploieşti Oil Fields.

This was only one of the myriad stories – of harrowing flights, narrow escapes, and heroic actions – that my father told about his wartime experiences, which included “liberating” a B-17 from the US as a mercenary in the Arab–Israeli War in 1947/48 and serving in the Korean War until 1953, as I was growing up. He was proud of having been “a gold and glory boy,” along with other men of his ilk who would do anything for the honor, fame, or money. After WWII, he requested to attend Commanding General Staff School and eventually retired from the service with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Embedded in these stories was the code of honor that my father lived by as a war pilot – integrity and respect for the responsibilities and the rules in so far as they served the mission. Listening to each story over and over, I took in the subliminal awareness that war and flying had been the zenith of his life, that he had not feared dying, and that something in him regretted that he had not.

The other side of this heroic storytelling was the trauma my father exhibited in the years when he was home – the startle reflex and defensive position he assumed when hearing a loud noise, the nightmares during which he cried out, his aggressiveness toward any perceived slight from colleagues or authority figures, and periods of depression that increased as he grew older.

For years, questions floated around in the back of my mind: What had it all meant, my father’s heroism and reveling in his service experience? Why did a hero then become an embittered man? What would it have been like if the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder had existed when he finally left the service, “his nerves shot” after the Korean War? If he had gone into treatment with a good psychiatrist, instead of taking the increasing dosages of barbiturates the VA hospital doled out, could he have adjusted to civilian life and found fulfillment there?

Later, when reading Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, other questions arose. What does it mean to be a hero? Achilles died a heroic death whereas Odysseus, despite his valorous wanderings, died a decidedly unheroic one. To be a Greek hero, the warrior had to die fighting and thereby transcend his mortality. My father, although identified with the ancient archetypal ideal of the hero, did not die in combat and felt conflicted and incomplete. Some of the ancient Greek concepts of honor, glory, integrity, and duty to the polis or country resonated with my father’s experience of war. I wondered why the goddesses and the feminine were such an important part of the action in the epics. I became intrigued with the goddess Fate/Nemesis and her counterpart Shame/Aidos. What role does the feminine play in heroism? And might that be a useful question for soldiers in treatment today as they return from active duty?

This essay is a meditation on these questions in the form of addressing the ancient Greek heroes – Herakles, Achilles, and Odysseus – and three modern men – two heroes of WWII and one of WWI.

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Beginning with the Bronze Age, heroes in Ancient Greece were “great men of a past age.” ⁶ They were believed to have power over the living and, as a consequence, were worshipped alongside gods at shrines all over Greece. Each hero had a cult, and these cults developed independently of Homer and other early epic poets out of a social need. The worship of heroes allowed communities and groups to lay claim to the past. ⁷ The name of the prototypical Greek hero, Herakles, whose myths were rooted in Mycenae, means “the glory of Hera.” ⁸

The “gold and glory boys” of WWII, who volunteered for the most dangerous missions, pursued both “gold,” which can be seen as money or treasure, as well as glory. The treasures or spoils of war, the geras/γερας that reflect the warrior’s honor in wartime, lie at the heart of The Iliad and also are central to The Odyssey and its hero Odysseus, “the man of profit” who brings goods home from his 20-year journey that he wants to store as treasure. The Greek warrior’s code of ethics and the laws and rules of his culture determined the treasure that was due.

Homeric morality originated from the idea that any individual’s act only had meaning in relation to what he did to others. The Greek quality aidos/αιδως, shame or modesty, inhibited a person from violating this principle. ⁹ There were high standards of justice based on a soldier’s sense of dignity. The heroic code praised the virtues of courage, allegiance, and magnanimity, and abhorred cowardice, treachery, and stinginess. This sense of dignity and decency belonged to the aristocratic virtue of the time. ¹⁰ In The Iliad, the first turning point in the narrative happens when the girl Brisēís, Achilles’ war prize, is taken from him by Agamemnon, insulting the younger man, “the best of the Achaeans.” The commander’s action is a breach of warrior etiquette.

One of my father’s morality tales, tinged with humor, described an incident that occurred when he was evacuated from Bucharest to Italy. Before he boarded the plane, the Romanians gave him two suitcases of cash that had been taken from soldiers’ “escape kits” while they were imprisoned in Romania. He felt honor-bound to turn it in during the debriefing. But, as with all irregular happenings in the service, no one knew who to give it to or what to do with it. After much red tape, a Colonel relieved my father of the cash and officially took charge of it. My father remarked that the Colonel told him he should have just chucked it into the ocean and saved them all a lot of trouble! My father privately thought that he himself could have used the $50,000 that the suitcases contained but felt he would still be answering questions if he had appropriated it. I believe those would have been questions to himself about the fairness of his action. He had a commitment to his own integrity as it related to the honor of flying for the Army Air Corps.

************

Herakles is less concerned with morality; his excellence/αρετε is his great strength. The Homeric heroes saw Herakles as an ancestor who executed astounding deeds that utterly transcended their own lives and skills. “Herakles’ tremendous strength is even credited with the actual transformation of the landscape. He changed the course of rivers, drained swamps, and flooded plains. Some of these efforts seem to be related to Bronze Age hydraulics works.” ¹¹

Herakles’ 12 famous labors redound to the glory/κλεος of the goddess Hera, whose pre-Homeric identity was larger than that of her role as Zeus’ jealous wife. The earlier Hera was an aspect of the Aegean great goddess potnia/ποτνια. ¹² In Homer, two of Hera’s epithets are white-armed/λευκωλενος and ox-eyed/βοωπις.

Herakles, a hero god, is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman Alkmene. Motivated by jealousy and spite, Hera tricks Zeus and manipulates Herakles’ birth to change his destiny. Herakles has to serve his cousin King Eurystheus and, therefore, Hera.

Hera persecutes Herakles relentlessly from birth; she sends two huge snakes to kill him (and his twin brother, Iphikles) when he is eight months old, but Herakles wakes and squeezes the serpents to death. Through this mythic achievement, he becomes known as Alexikakos/Αλεχικακος, the averter of evil and the guardian of the household. Worshippers owned jewelry with Herakles’ image and wrote verses over their doors invoking him to protect their homes from both material and metaphysical dangers, including disease and misfortunes caused by malevolent spirits. ¹³

In addition to engineering Herakles’ 12 labors for King Eurystheus, Hera intermittently drives the hero mad. The first time that he loses his mind, he kills his wife Megara and his own children, conduct usually associated with women such as Medea in Greek myth. In the ancient Greek male view, “masculinity consists of power and self-control while submission and physical or mental loss of control are attributes of the feminine.” ¹⁴ The berserk episodes that Herakles endures, instigated by Hera, are similar to the episodes that veterans with post-traumatic stress experience when they return home with their psyches fractured.

One of Herakles’ tasks is to obtain the war belt/ζοστερ of an Amazon queen. This motif enacts male physical dominance over the female and affirms the primacy of the cultured Hellenic way of life over what were seen as primitive customs. ¹⁵ But Herakles bridges this dichotomy in Greek thought because his hypermasculinity is neutralized not only by his episodes of madness, but also by two periods of cross-dressing in which women force him to dress as a woman and to do women’s work. ¹⁶ “Herakles transcends all the conceptual boundaries in Greek thought for he is at once king and slave; beast, man, and god; lawless transgressor and vanquisher of the uncivilized.” ¹⁷

Hera’s manipulation of his birth sets a pattern, a fate/µοιρα that Herakles continues to live out in his life. Critically, he makes a moral choice to rise to the challenge of each task or punishment assigned him, ¹⁸ therefore fulfilling both his great gift of strength and his heroic fate.

In his labors, Herakles uses his bare hands, a club, or bow and arrows, and wears a lion skin, all references to the mastery of animals that confirm his origin in the Bronze Age “when the iconography and ideology of kingship was tied to the hunt.” ¹⁹ During the Bronze Age, the Greek Mistress of Animals, partially of Syrian origin, was the patroness of warriors and hunters. By the sixth century BCE, she was called Artemis, when she became the goddess of the wild and the mistress of sacrifices who patronized young males and prepared them to be warriors. ²⁰ The Mistress of Animals w...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Editors
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Invocation: Dionysos, how it all began: a ritual invocation for the 2012 Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche Conference
• 1 The hero who would not die: warrior and goddess in Ancient Greek and modern men
• 2 Beauty and the psychoanalytic enterprise: reflections on a rarely acknowledged dimension of the healing process
• 3 Introduction to the Kore Story/Persephone’s Dog
• 4 Death and necessity at the threshold of new life
• 5 How Hermes and Apollo came to love each other in the Homeric Hymn To Hermes: imagination and form in Ancient Greece and modern psyche
• 6 Penelope scapes
• 7 Dreaming in place: Santorini, Greece
• Closing: travelling Ariadne: a romance
• Index