“PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS ON
THE MYTHIC PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR”
by
Ronald L. Boyer
A Proposal Prepared for
THE MYTHOLOGY OF VIOLENCE
The Second Annual Academic Conference of
The Foundation for Mythological Studies
Presenter’s Position Statement:
Today, after a brief historical period of relative peace following the Vietnam War, our nation and, to a large extent, our world has once again plunged into escalating mass violence on an order perhaps unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. The flashpoint of this so-called global “war on terror” currently centers in the Middle East, not perhaps insignificantly, the common ancestral home of the three great historical religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This fact alone summons inescapably “apocalyptic” prospects to mind, fueled in no small part by the controlling ideas, expressed in myths and symbols, native to these religions themselves, as well as the public statements of our leaders on different sides of the escalating chaos. Given the often explicitly religious language and logic used by fundamentalist Christians and Muslims alike, e.g., those of George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the current rhetoric and hostilities resurrect in the minds of countless millions the misguided and ultimately tragic wars of the invading Crusaders against the Muslims over Jerusalem nearly a millennia ago. But with at least one significant difference: the dramatic evolution of death-dealing technologies and emergence of modern WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), what historian Lewis Mumford called “ABC (atomic, bacteriological and chemical) warfare”. These surviving ancient hostilities - based in literalistic, fundamentalist interpretations of religion, and stemming now from a form of neo-barbarism lacking moral restraint in terms of violence aimed at innocent civilians (i.e., merely collateral damage) - now affect the entire planet and are married to destructive technologies possessing literally apocalyptic potential, being capable of rendering our planet unsustainable within our lifetime. Mumford called this problem facing our generation “the marriage of beast and machine.”
Not that our situation went unforeseen. Many of the best and brightest international leaders of the 20th century sought, generations ago, to avert what they believed were nearly inevitable and possibly catastrophic conflicts of the future. Before, during and following the last World War, many international political leaders here in the West, beginning with the League of Nations, turned to the emerging promise of depth psychology to save us from this kind of mass destruction, chiefly to the ideas of the two great founders of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, Sigmund Freud and his colleague and protégé, Carl Jung. While Freud’s conclusion expressed in his correspondence with Einstein (published as “Why War?”) and elsewhere, was typically cynical, Jung, though cautious, remained characteristically optimistic. He warned that the greatest threat to humankind in the future were outbreaks of “psychic epidemics of mass psychoses” such as those that had already resulted in two World Wars. And that these psychoses were rooted, as they are in individual patients, in the autonomous or involuntary functions of the collective unconscious. Only in this case, Hitler’s Nazism, the madness affected society as a whole. Though leaving this vital work of examining the relationship between the unconscious pathologies of individuals and cultures to future generations of investigators, Jung repeatedly warned that this subject of mass violence in war represented the most promising and important application of his theories for the benefit of humankind as a whole. Sadly, this unfinished task remains largely ignored by succeeding generations of scholars and theorists in the field, including Jung’s incomparable interpreter, Joseph Campbell, who in his later writings, like Jung, pointed to a similar task – expanding the application of the hero journey paradigm to mass culture – as his own most important unfinished work.
Today, in these uncertain and perilous times, when the urge to mass violence again seems to have taken irrational possession of humankind, as witnessed in the
Furthermore, these models may be constructively applied to the task of understanding our contemporary and future war psychoses, i.e. epidemics of State violence. Jung and Campbell left their work unfinished largely because they were required to focus their energies on the daunting task of cataloguing and illustrating the cornucopia of symbols found in dreams, fantasies, religious symbols, myths, initiatic rites and so forth and to interpret these images as metaphors for the description of psychic realities not otherwise describable, that is, as poetry. In short their purpose was to trace the records of mythic images back to their intra-psychic origins within the individual psyche, within the deep essence of human nature. Meanwhile, parallel and complimentary work, undertaken by other notable thinkers in parallel but different fields, including field anthropologists, approached the same subject from the opposite side, i.e., by the examination of the structure of aboriginal societies and even of civilization itself. Two noteworthy examples spring to mind: the groundbreaking theoretical scholarship of the cultural historian Lewis Mumford and the sociologist Ernest Becker. Mumford, a genuine if largely unsung prophet of our times, was the first historian of note to apply the theories of the unconscious developed by Freud and Jung to the underpinnings and evolution of world culture and history. In his groundbreaking “Myth of the Megamachine” and other works, Mumford’s sweeping, wise and largely ignored analysis of the structure of civilization from the first ancient city states in Sumer to the present time offers profound insights into the nature of war and mass violence as an essentially ritualistic function of the sovereign Nation-State, ancient and modern. Becker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his equally important work on the “Denial of Death”, sought a unified field theory of the social sciences based on the theories of Freud and Jung’s great colleague, Otto Rank. In his trenchant analysis of the origins of social evil, “Escape from Evil”, Becker examines the history of societies from ancient times as “hero-systems for the denial of death” based on Rank’s theory that the chief motive underlying human nature is the search for immortality. As such, he argues that the structure of society itself represents a symbolic attempt to overcome death and that, paradoxically, it is this very ritualistic attempt to transcend death that ultimately creates more death, particularly evidenced in modern warfare. Combined, the work of Becker and Mumford present a compelling case for the religious basis, preserved unconsciously in national myths and rites from time immemorial, of even our most seemingly secular, modern (and presumably post-modern) societies.
My task in the proposed presentation is to summon the audience to take up, each in their own way, this great unfinished work bequeathed to us by Freud, Jung, Campbell, Eliade, Becker and Mumford, among many others, and to examine – in sufficient detail - their collective works for clues as to how we might constructively proceed in doing so. I’m confident that, hidden in the symbols of Jung’s individuation process, Eliade’s initiatic schema and
In conclusion, we may discern, “as through a glass, darkly”, that the basic structure of contemporary society in the form of the sovereign Nation-State, with its penchant for violence and what William Blake called “religion hid in war”, is a mass, externalized, unconscious projection of our own deep-seated psychic needs. If today we are externally threatened by escalating and potentially apocalyptic war, with the possible extinction of the human race hanging in the balance, perhaps there is something necessary in the deep psyche that summons such an ultimately perilous situation. Perhaps our own unconscious, deep-seated spiritual longings for transcendence, immortality, even for divinity on earth, are in some way to blame, albeit in some unconsciously inverted, pathological form. Perhaps the time has come to seek and discover the primal and primordial origins of this contradictory urge to greater life that results in its own anti-thesis of societal self-destruction – of the urge to immortality that leads to species extinction – hidden within the darkest recesses of our inmost souls. And through such self-discovery, re-discover the “pathless path” of the mythic hero of all times and places that may lead -- obviously with great effort, courage and similar virtues -- out of the depths of Hades back into the light.
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About the Presenter
