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This paper is concerned with two elements of great psychological importance in today's psychotherapy. The first is the psychology of the virginal as it is reflected in the strange relationship between the mythological figure of Endymion and the Moon, a myth which has attracted many poets and writers. Endymion is presented as being in love with the Moon, a love which indicates a complex psychology, its spectrum ranging from poetic creativity to a severe pathology. It is a love which gives Endymion a very special and sometimes peculiar relationship to virginity. The Moon is in the guise of Selene, a Titaness, personifying the titanic level of the psyche, the second element with which we shall be concerned. In the four essays of this book, I shall refer to several strange aspects of human nature, which I attribute to the psychology of the Titans. I consider Titanism to represent a very important aspect of human nature which has not yet been fully explored.
There seems to have been no cult of the Titans. Titanic times can be viewed as a sort of transitional period between primitive man and cultured, civilized man, a period during which there was neither the ritual and cult of primitive man nor the well-defined anthropomorphic imagery of the highly cultured and religious man. Now, just as we all have primitive complexes within us so well worked out by Jungian psychology, we must all have, implicitly, a Titanic level of the psyche - Titanic complexes - though these have not yet been explicitly worked out. A more differentiated psychology at this Titanic level is still waiting to be tackled. There are personalities in which the Titanic seems to predominate and odd behaviors and pathologies which, I believe, can only be evaluated in terms of Titanism, something I shall refer to in more detail later. I believe the psychology of the Titan is extremely important, particularly if we accept that the Titanic ingredient exists in all of us.
First, allow me to clarify somewhat the mythological field in which the image on which we shall be focusing resides. But in order to clear the ground for a clearer idea of the Titanic, we need first to take a look at what it is not. The Titans belong to the mythological time of Kronos, the time of the first and second generations of the Gods. This was the time before Zeus waged war on his Titanic progenitors and brought about a new order, ritual, religion, culture and civilization. Zeus' new world also brought about a differentiation of images, what Nilsson calls the Greek anthropomorphism in mythology and history. Nilsson and other modern scholars agree that it took about a millennium to realize this anthropomorphism. During those hidden centuries of the Greek Dark Ages, it was the task of bards and minstrels - the poets, in other words - to sing the same songs over and over again, to repeat the Mycenaean heroic sagas: that is, the mythologized history of the Heroes. And as the poets sang, they wove a net which, little by little, caught the images of a divine mythology. Into this net of repeated tales they wove the Gods and Goddesses as living anthropomorphic images. This was how the clarity of the well-differentiated, consistent image was created. Moreover, as Nilsson states,
during the Dark Ages between the fall of the Mycenaean culture and the Homeric period - the time when the specifically Greek anthropomorphism must have been developed - it is to be presumed that the internal anthropomorphism was the leading force. . . . For we have been educated by the Greeks to a consistent anthropomorphism and this is something specifically Greek.
Today, we can be educated once again by the Greeks - their mythology offering the constant possibility of a Renaissance in the psyche. We have been educated by the Greeks; for the sake of precision, I would add, by the Greek poets. I consider this education to be an education of the soul. It is a psychical education. And this education of the soul through poetry - poetical, mythological anthropomorphism - is the reservoir from which Western man can draw to educate and perpetually recreate his soul.
Hölderlin wrote: "Full of merit, yet poetically man dwells on earth." With this line, the poet tells us that our education today contains both what man does by merit and by poetical intervention. In order to reflect the image which I shall be elaborating, we shall need both merit and poetry.
But let us get back to the Titans. Unfortunately, we know very little about them. The Titanomachia and two-thirds of Aeschylus' trilogy on Prometheus have been lost, but for our purposes her, scholars of mythology give us an adequate image of the ancient race of Gods. Here is what Kerényi has to say of the Titans:
The stories of the Titans are about gods who belong to such a distant past that we know them only from tales of a particular kind, and only as exercising a particular function. The name of
Titan has, since the most ancient times, been deeply associated with the divinity of the Sun, and seems originally to have been the supreme title of beings who were, indeed, celestial gods, but gods of very long ago, still savage and subject to no laws.
Kerényi gives us a general picture of the psychology of the Titans: no laws, no order, no limits. In his extraordinary work on on particular Titan, Prometheus, Kerényi named him "the archetype of human existence," though he was careful to say that he wished to avoid the philosophical connotation of Existentialism in his use of the word "existence." However, it was his conception of Prometheus as the archetype of human existence, as well as what we see of Titanism under the magnifying glass in the works of some of the masters of modern literature, that sparked my insights into Titanism as it appears in our time. In my opinion, Kerényi, a great pioneer who made the connection between the excess of the Titans and human existence, was, despite what he says, undoubtedly under the twofold influence of Jung's research on archetypes and the ideas and literature inspired by Existentialism. These ideas, in a man who was a war exile, must have helped to make possible his Prometheus, a textbook study which introduces the difficult psychology of the Titans and which gave me a point of departure for my own reflections.
For didactic purposes, we can say that, just as the Greeks thought of the Titanic times as the reign in earlier times of more savage celestial Gods, in the ontogenesis of man, there have also been Titanic times. Our adolescence probably contains a large element of Titanism - excess, unboundedness, lawlessness, chaos, barbarism and so on. We can add this Titanic element to the Puer's celestial trip, which exhibits its own form of excess, lack of limitation and destructiveness.
My own reflections of Titanism have grown out of the recollections of my own life, from living in Titanic societies which, psychologically, could be said to be sandwiched between primitive and civilized man. They come also from observing excess everywhere in today's life, in even the most highly differentiated societies whose traditions are based on the High Religion - an excess which is most evident in the missionary zeal predominating in all facets of life. Western civilization is becoming more and more Titanic. My reflections however come, above all, from my practice, dealing with patients whose psychology makes sense only if one can detect the Titanic element - what Jung and others might call simply shadow or unconscious - and appreciate just how Titanic they are in spite of their highly articulate and cultured self-expression.
For me, to be unconscious is to be unconscious of the archetypes, either in history or in a lifetime; to equate Titanism with the unconscious, then, is quite another business. For instance, with these patients, the motto that I have adopted - "The image, what makes possible the impossible" - simply does not work. To 'make possible' is to 'make conscious' an image that has been 'impossible.' These patients, however, are unable to form an image; or just when one thinks an image is in process, something coming from nowhere destroys any such possibility. Sometimes, one can see that when they offer what could be called an image, there are no accompanying psychical feelings or creativity. What one is taking as an image which could move psyche is, for them, a stereotype, a mimetism. Titanism can also be detected in what Jungian psychology has called 'the Intellectual.' There is an intellectual approach to the image, an approach which requires a magnifying glass when a dream is intellectualized. (One wonders whether the method of amplification feeds intellectualism.) Let us push this Titanic element even further. Kerényi's view of the Titans, that they represent a particular function, is perhaps what I am trying to get at concerning this Titanic ingredient which exists in us all. However, we are faced here with a difficulty; a function suggests something specific, whereas Titanism seems so disparate and wild.
I have already mentioned the well-defined Gods and Goddesses with their consistent images; in other words, the archetypes. Nilsson again: "Anthropomorphism has, therefore, a characteristic limitation." If that is so, it is difficult to see the Titans (whose main characteristic is excess) as archetypes with their own inherent limitation, and even more difficult to see them as the images of an archetype. Furthermore, Nilsson states: "The Titans are abstractions or empty names of whose significance we cannot judge." So to call the Titans archetypes, or even representatives of a particular function, is a bit risky. Nevertheless, in poetry and iconography the Titans are personified, represented as forms, enabling us, perhaps, to broaden our view of anthropomorphism and imagine the forms of the Titans as a sort of borderline anthropomorphism. Personally, I prefer to view them as mythological figures representing mimicry and excess, for they are not archetypal configurations. In order to gain insight into this mimetism, jargon and excess, we need a strong archetypal training and point of view; it is only by having those well-defined forms as a background that we can have insight into what is, by definition, formless in human nature.
Kerényi wrote Prometheus in 1946, just after the Second World War when, it seems, man began to be aware of hitherto unknown aspects of himself, as if the war had forced him to reflect on some estranged parts of himself. We have the literature running from Camus' The Outsider, published during the war (in 1942), to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, to confirm this impression. I connect what Camus and Burgess expressed in their novels, in terms of mythology and Archetypal Psychology, with the Titanic level in man which we have been tracking: no laws, no order, no limits - in short, excess. Once again, it is literature which has opened the door to an exploration (which we in psychology are just beginning) of those levels in man where the Titan lurks. But, following Kerényi again, we have to accept that, in the history of human life, the Titanic expresses itself where we are excessive. In this sense, the Titanic could be, if not an archetype, then a particular function.
Let me return to Nilsson's statement about the Titans whom, as you recall, he terms "abstractions or empty names of whose significance we cannot judge." Careful thought about this statement offers us another point of reflection giving us a wider view of Titanism. We are all inhabited by these abstractions, these empty names; we are flooded in our daily lives by empty names - our daily "blah-blah-blah" - not to mention our psychotherapy, in which, if we are unaware of our Titanism, we can fall into empty jargon, even when using the most beautiful words. Our psychotherapy can become empty names - Titanic jargon. There are areas in our psyches, in our lives, in which we have no reflection because there are no images and so no feelings to judge. Keeping in mind these two basic elements of Titanism - its emptiness on the one hand, its excess on the other - we can begin to evaluate excess throughout our history, our life and our practice. Our challenge is to bring reflection to that which has no limits, to that which is not archetypal, to that which, paradoxically, cannot be reflected because it has no images - though it can be detected through its own Titanic rhetoric.
Now, Nilsson's statement that the Titans are "abstractions or empty names" enables us to push our inquiry in another direction, that of our so-called lacunae: that which we cannot know or grasp in ourselves, those empty abstractions, the nothings, the holes - those black holes which seem to fascinate everyone just now. No archetypes, these, but holes. If we can contain both the emptiness and the excess, we are in a better position to be aware of the Titanic. The excess could even grow out of the emptiness, the lacunae.
This discussion of the Titans should, I hope, aid us in Archetypal Psychology to acquire a basic idea of the field they offer for study. It would be a pity, after all, if Archetypal Psychology became no more than the study of the archetypes, depicting merely the characteristic profiles of Artemis, Aphrodite, Mars and so on. The most important element of the Titan - the excess, which, as far as I can see, emerges from the emptiness - leads, among other things, into pathology or 'odd behavior': the excess that history and all of us are filled with.
I have leaned rather heavily on Kerényi and Nilsson, but, as far as I know, Kerényi was the first to approach Titanism in depth, and Nilsson's contribution adds tremendously to our insights. As you know, there is little mention of the Titans in Jungian psychology. What little there is is found in the old Orphic Platonic connections between the Titans and the evil in human nature. As Dodds points out, "Plato, in his Laws, referred to people 'who show off the old Titan nature,' and to impulses which are 'neither of man nor of God' ": that is to say, in Jungian terms, the evil in our shadow which we cannot integrate and so have to reject. Certainly, Jungian psychology has not allowed modern literature and imagery of our times to provide a reflection of this part of nature which is usually called 'existence,' and which I equate with Titanism.
I now return to Camus and Burgess. From the very first lines of The Outsider, we are given an extraordinary picture of emptiness (lacuna or void, if you like). The Outsider receives a telegram informing him of his mother's death; but he shows no archetypal reaction - no grief, no sense of loss, for example - to that event. The excess in him appears when he shoots an Arab. The first bullet killed the Arab, the following four were excessive. Archetypally speaking, one can be driven by panic to shoot one bullet in a primitive instinctual reaction, but with five bullets, there is an excess. The killing of the Arab helps us to distinguish an archetypally limited situation from one that is not archetypal at all. The cause of the Outsider's undoing is attributed to the Sun - one of the Titanic celestial Gods. This sort of projection of the Outsider's guilt onto something as absurd as the Sun belongs very much to Titanism. With some of my patients, I have had to listen to the most ridiculous projections of guilt, blaming everything except themselves which, for me, is part of the Titanic nature in man. At the end of the book, during a discussion with a priest, Camus shows masterfully the Outsider's inability to form an image. The priest says that prisoners before death often see the Divine on the stone wall of their cells, but the Outsider replies that he has tried to see the face of his girlfriend, Maria, and has failed.
A Clockwork Orange, extending the theme of the Titanic implicit in Camus' novels, shows total excess everywhere - beatings, killings, rapes and so forth. The whole of society is excess, "savage and subject to no laws," as Kerényi says of the Titans. Religion has become an easy mimesis which the young Titan uses to his own profit. All of society's institutions are based on this same Titanic excess. And psychiatry, with its Titanic Promethean technology, its missionary zeal, tries to resolve the Titanic riddle for the benefit of the poor Titan, society, and humanity as a whole. Psychiatry as the savior. Prometheus, a more sophisticated Titan, appears in many guises, but closest to our concern is his appearance as the savior in the guise of a technological psychiatrist trying to save the Titan.
Psyche does not learn from Titanic excess. In this connection, we need to make a clear distinction between the suffering, humiliation and pain of Psyche - from which psychological learning, knowledge and soul-making, or soul-initiation, can come - and the repetitive suffering of the Titans - that daily nauseating boredom of the existential level of life.
Certainly, the Titanic personality is the greatest challenge for the soul. So many of the modern psychotherapies try to resolve the soul's conflicts in terms of adaptation to life and 'making it' - a Titanic psychotherapy. Though for a patient in whom the Titanic element is more than just an ingredient, whose dominant personality is Titanic, perhaps the only possible psychotherapy would be to push him into success, forcing him to 'make it.' But this approach is a long way from a consciousness that would weaken and make soul. In addition to the outer aspects of what has been called external 'human existence,' Titanism can also manifest itself inwardly, when excess is inward and so falls into pathology. We may see this form of Titanism at work in the story of Endymion and his lunar lover, the Moon Goddess Selene. Hesiod's Theogony informs us (Kerényi's version):
The Titaness Theia bore, to her husband Hyperion, Helios, the sun, Selene, the moon and Eos, the dawn.
There is not much doubt, then, that the Moon, as Selene, was a Titaness. And it is within the difficult mythological and psychological fields which we have been discussing that we now come to the story of Selene and her love for the shepherd Endymion.
It was told that when Selene disappeared behind the mountaincrest of Latmos in Asia Minor, she was visiting her lover Endymion, who slept in a cave in that region. Endymion, who in all portrayals of him is shown as a beautiful youth, a herdsman or hunter, received the gift of everlasting sleep - doubtless, in the original story, from the moon-goddess herself, so that she could always find him and kiss him in his cave.
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