On What Has Gone Missing: Forebears and Zones
For Hind Rajab and her family and the Palestinian rescue workers executed while attempting to help her . . .
Call Me Ishmael
Henry Murray, like William James before him, was a physician—not technically a psychologist. Like his illustrious forebear, he had a storied career at Harvard and within the broader discipline and became an immensely important precursor to a movement. Murray was a central participant at the Old Saybrook Conference heralding an advent of expanded purview with which some of the most compelling minds in psychology at one time identified. He delivered the keynote lecture on this historic occasion, addressing the audience, imaginatively, in three personas or alter egos.
As a very young doctor on a ship bound for England, Murray was given a copy of Melville’s Moby-Dick, a serendipitous occurrence that would profoundly alter the course of his life. Long before Freud, Murray realized, Melville had penetrated the depths of the psyche and human ordeal “with more genuine comprehension than any other writer.”
Murray described himself as being typified by a “sanguine surplus” and, no less, “an affinity for the dark, blinder strata of feeling”—experiential realms effectively “evoked by art.” It was Murray’s sensitivity to suffering, others’ especially, that led him eventually to psychology. Moby-Dick was tantamount to Beethoven’s Eroica in words. Melville’s mystic narrative overwhelmed him in ways for which he was wholly unprepared. Murray’s biographer, Forrest Robinson, elaborates:
The novel came to him as an anguished appeal for freedom—of poetry from science, of heart from head, of passion from the shackles of religious convention . . . Moby-Dick pointed the way past . . . hard scientific research to explorations of the mysteries of the human psyche.
—Forrest Robinson, Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray
The study of human personality would become Murray’s abiding passion. “Call me Ishmael,” he would recall, “was the first shock.”
Eugene Taylor, also not officially a psychologist, served as Murray’s devoted assistant in Murray’s later years, a mentorship that was hugely important to him. Murray became something of a spiritual godparent for Taylor, a sentiment that Murray on his deathbed expressed, reciprocally, in turn. Taylor—like James, Murray, and also Melville himself—was drawn early on beyond the confines of quotidian consciousness toward the mind’s penumbra and what James had called the “unclassified residuum.” Encounters with such psychic frontiers might lead to states deemed psychopathic. Successfully integrated, however, they become a doorway to transpersonal transport and an intuitive art of self-realization. Ultimately, Taylor pointed to the “spiritual evolution of consciousness.” The “possibility of the transcendent” (that consciousness could be guided into “something higher, purer, better”) was the idea that was forever on his mind.
Eugene once shared with me a story that would have lasting personal resonance. Following a lecture he had given many years earlier at Harvard, Murray was approached by a young graduate student by the name of B. F. Skinner. Not without a hint of derision, Skinner asserted: “If I understand you correctly, Professor Murray, what you are suggesting is a literary psychology.” The budding behaviorist (with notably little feeling for Melville, Kafka, or Virginia Woolf) was put off, and likely intimidated, by Murray’s vast and cultured mind. Murray received Skinner’s criticism as an unintended complement. His longstanding fascinations with Shakespeare and Melville left him feeling that Skinner, in fact, had been right. Murray delighted in sharing this story with others.
Upon hearing this anecdote with its intimations of literary psychology as a sort of gnostic chord within a prevailingly tone-deaf organizational text, I remarked pensively: “That’s what I do.” “That’s exactly what you do,” Eugene rejoined pointedly. Eugene knew the Melville/Murray story better than anyone and envisioned me as a thread in a tapestry entreating vital counterposing narratives and perspectives within a broader discipline. Upon learning that he was terminally ill, Eugene inscribed a copy of his wonderful study of James, William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin (Taylor, 1996): “To Ed, who has grasped the innermost kernel.” For a contemplative on the relative perimeter of things, Eugene’s moving observation meant more than I can say.
Images of the Holy Land
In a time of warped ethical sensibilities and radical dislocation, I would like to briefly consider the work of Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai. Uneasily received in his homeland and relatively unknown in ours, Gitai is widely admired in Europe for his searching depictions of diaspora and ethnicity, a keen sensitivity in documenting the paradoxes and trajectories of peoples, histories, and place. We are returned, insistently, to terrain as frame of reference as we contemplate the aspirations, sufferings, and follies of peoples and races against the backdrops of Nature and Time—humankind’s fleeting, fitful sojourn within Eternity and Space. Uprootedness, exile, and violence (masquerading routinely as ethnic self-righteousness) are among Gitai’s recurring themes.
Esther recalls a scriptural tale of ancient antisemitism. Shot in an abandoned Haifa slum from which Algerian Arabs had once been forcibly removed, the film’s ironic implications are difficult to miss. During the reenactment of an ethnocentric text revolving around persecution, resistance, and revenge, the ominous roar of Israeli aircraft can be heard punctuating the biblical narrative; time and myth are conflated. The camera eye wanders episodically from the sparse, primordial setting to glimpse the modern cityscape beyond.
The festival of Purim celebrates a story and book in which Esther and her uncle Mordechai outwit the Jew-hating Hamen, prevailing in the final hour upon a distracted, ineffectual king in bringing about a villain’s demise. Gitai does not, however, stop with the Sunday school version upon which too many children are reared but continues to relate a fuller narrative. Mordechai, not satisfied with Hamen’s execution, would put to death each of his sons and innumerable potential aggressors as well. In short, the once victimized now wantonly plunder and kill. Viewers are drawn into the radical complexity of things. Gitai observes:
“In many ways, this is a film about memory—memories which are reflected through image and songs, through tales and music; memories stored in the songs of the Yemenite Jews who crossed the Arabian desert and reached Jerusalem about three generations ago; memories kept alive in Palestinian exile songs.”
—Amos Gitai
A truer narrative transpires on the far side of radicalized/weaponized governments and tendentious appeals. Anguish has never been ethnocentric, nor is outright slaughter.
As the film ends, actors deconstruct into their truer identities, each saying a few words about their personal stories and who they more “really” are. Several are European émigrés, others are natives of Israel and Palestine. The role of Mordechai is played by Mohammad Bakri, a Palestinian actor and director deeply influenced by the suffering of the Jewish people who has become increasingly frustrated in his efforts to effect reciprocal sympathies and understandings. The following link provides the briefest glimpse of an artist and voice, like Gitai, hugely worth honoring.
Speaking at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center some years ago, Gitai disclosed that his film received a single screening in Israel where he was accused of having altered the text in the interests of rhetoric. Bible in hand, Gitai demonstrated that the story was more complex and psychologically profound than the abridged adaptation children are taught in Sunday school. The filmmaker had, in fact, omitted the most lurid parts.
There are, to be sure, no easy answers, but longstanding prejudice, ethnic hegemony, and blanket oppression lead inevitably to horror and pain, rage and revenge, and infinitely more suffering and corpses. Asked about his homeland’s neglect of his work, Gitai is succinct: “I have my work to do; I will settle accounts with Israel later on.”
The art of psychotherapy
“Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being . . . What has hardened will never win.”—-Andrei Tarkovsky, The Stalker
Case Conference with Rollo May
Readers will find here a link to a case conference that took place many years ago in Rollo May’s living room in Tiburon. May’s Socratic style and attendance to myth—both personal (what Adler called “guiding fictions” often insufficiently attended even by therapists themselves) and further-reaching—is quintessential Rollo May. Existential therapy is not crisis to be deftly resolved but thoroughgoing embrace of one’s inmost daemons, fears, aspirations, and significantly subterranean codes—a haunting, beckoning Tarkovsky-like inner “zone” of inscrutability, apprehension, discomfiture conjoined with attentiveness, will, pursuance, moments of reprieve, even grace. An “intuitive psychology of character development,” in Taylor’s fine words. Even late into life, May recorded dreams pertaining to a difficult childhood, seeking out his own therapy when he felt a need and thought it might help.
Writing for May, Georgia told me, could be an agonizing affair. There is a photograph of him standing outside his writing cabin in Holderness, NH (where he would regularly retreat from the world) in Robert Abzug’s excellent biography. By means of his lifelong ordeal, May became a compelling figure upon the world stage. I, by way of considerable contrast, am an occasional essayist with an infinitesimally smaller sphere of influence and body of work. Still, I am acquainted with requisite struggle in contributing to a psychology of substance and subtlety. Georgia remarked on several occasions before she died that the two of them hoped I would carry on with this intuitive/literary tradition in an analogously imaginative way. I was startled by the pushback the biography engendered within the hallways of professional officialdom, a possible reflection of how much has been lost and how disquieting it may have been for prevailing enclaves and agendas.
On what has gone missing
A book I wrote some years ago, Ethics and Lao-Tzu, is according to several voices I hold in the highest regard, a unique meditation on character, one that relates my work with a young woman suffering with an exceedingly complex instance of dissociative identity disorder in which various “worlds” or “houses” of “alters” and traumatic memory emerge over the course of therapy and years. Transcripts, art, and dreams (the latter of crucial importance in May’s conception of therapy and recalled here with spellbound observance) are integral to the fuller narrative. A final dream points to Proustian insights tending to be the province of the world’s dispossessed.
All the excursions to the island I take alone. The trips are always at sunset, which makes the forest look more hostile than it otherwise might. It is winter. Tree limbs pierce a darkening sky. I walk without fear, my hands plunged deep into my pockets and my head held low. The water slapping against the earth and the sound of my feet on the leaf floor are all that can be heard.
Then I notice a structure becoming visible. It is a peculiar place for a house. I had not noticed any roads to explain ownership. There is no noise from the house. It simply stands, looking at me. Yes, I feel it is looking at me! The colors of sunset shine through windows from the backside of the house, giving it a hollow impression. Around back there are swings. For a moment, my mind is in another time. I see children playing. It is summer, the sun is out, and the yard is warm. It is a happier time, a time before this always-setting sun. I see this only for a moment, and then I am back in the darkening woods.
I take the same trip three times. Each time the light is too dim for me to clearly see. I never see anyone. I never go inside the house. I always have the feeling that the house, or perhaps someone inside the house, is looking at me. With each visit, I see the house getting older. I can tell that no one has made repairs for a long time. I feel that there is something here, forgotten.
After my last trip to the island, I go back to the place from where I have come. I stand in front of a circle of people. Here, too, I never see faces. They all appear in silhouette, just like the house in the woods. I plead with them to hear what I’ve seen. “Please,” I beg them; “you’re forgetting something.” They do not hear me. “Please,” I begin again; “you’re forgetting all about that house.” I want them to remember. I cannot tell if they are looking at me or if, perhaps, their backs are turned. There isn’t enough light.
“Please,” I say; “you are forgetting something.”
—Kristyna’s dream
Being and time
Let us wind down on a consoling note. I’ve always found it fascinating that for all their differences, Freud and Jung shared a certain ambivalence about music, which they tended at times to relegate to a subordinate epistemological vehicle or form. I have long been drawn to the understated virtuosity of guitarist Mark Knopfler, whose work I’ve admired since Dire Straits’ debut release including the now classic Sultans of Swing—an homage to workaday jazz musicians as aesthetes in a world that doesn’t especially notice or care. Now in his middle 70’s (“Holy, moly, where did the time ago?”—is this not the vertigo underwriting the never-ending immortality projects meant to procure names for ourselves?), Knopfler, part Hungarian Jew, as am I, honors muse and craft, reconciling simplicity with sublimity, solitude with communion, on elegant and rarified aesthetic planes. Sans musique, Nietzsche once mused, “la vie serait une erreur.” The philosopher, like Rumi or Gurdjieff, was suggesting that music might inspire our better angels and selves.
References
Abzug, R. (2021). Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May. Oxford University Press.
Dire Straits (1978). Dire Straits. Warner Bros Records. [CD]
Gitai, A. Esther. (1986). UK/Austria/Netherlands/Israel: Agav Films/Channel Four, ORF, Ikon, United Studios Herzlia.
Melville, H (1995). Moby Dick, or the Whale. Könemann.
Mendelowitz, E. (2008). Ethics and Lao-Tzu: Intimations of Character. University of the Rockies Press.
Robinson, F. G. (1992). Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray. Harvard University Press.
Tarkovsky, A. (1979). Stalker. USSR: Mosfilm.
Taylor, E. (1996). William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin. Princeton University Press.
In memory of Rollo and Georgia May (1909-1994, 1929-2021) and their good friend, Eugene Taylor (1946-2013), who delighted in pointing beyond self-actualization to a zone of Maslovian self-transcendence.