PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SOUL

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SEXUAL ERA

In the "true character" of Don Juan, woman struggled over this spiritual love and the recognition of its spiritual laws. As a sexual and diabolical hero, Don Juan fell short of his roleof divine animator, and at this stage of moral and social development he cheated the woman as well as the child. Such treason against the soul was condemned by man as well as woman. In the sense of this feminine ideology, every hero of a Don Juan legend met his downfall with the very first love to whom he was "untrue," just because he still owed her his soul. On the basis of the old beliefs, man wanted to refrain from fructification even though such abstinence would cost him his soul, which needed a feminine ideology to survive. Yet woman had no reason to dissuade the man she first possessed from a belief which would be useful to him were she to have him permanently, so that the Don Juan material portrays woman's second attempt to free herself from the bonds of sexualized spiritual belief. This attempt was turned not against the father and husband, as in the instances of Helen and Turandot, but against the illegitimate fructifier whose primal spiritual role had become diabolical, and against the "lover" who was a vulgarized "divine" fructifier of the sexual era. It is the spiritual role of such a fructifier, and not the "psychology of sex," which explains so many baffling "triangles." This reversal of the sexual relationship which is so significant for our own society goes back to man-made spiritual belief, from whose gradual change and decline woman derived the greater benefit. Since it originally had been not only a duty but a religious honor for woman to be fertilized by the divine soul before giving herself to mortal man, a new moral evaluation resulted both from man's adherence to this custom which preserved his idea of immortality, and from woman's growing opposition to it. Pre- and extramarital intercourse sustained man's tacitly guarded right to maintain his illegitimatized spiritual belief, but it antagonized the woman as mother. Just as such privileged classes of men as priests, kings, or heroes had once been sexual instruments of the divine soul, a tabued class of woman now became witches and harlots, or mere instruments of carnal satisfaction. This was a complete spiritual and moral reevaluation of the old views that had been founded in spiritual belief. For men had previously been divided into two classes, one of which had a special spiritual power to fertilize woman prcmaritally, and the other could only use sexual intercourse to the same end. Now women fell into two classes, one of which served men hetairically in the sense of his superseded spiritual belief, and the other, as mothers, gave themselves to man in the sense of the new sexual ideology of the soul.

In considering Don Juan as a humanized Devil we have gone beyond the sexual concretion of primitive spiritual belief characteristic of our own psychological era. Humanized spiritual representatives had been prominent in all rites and cults, from the primitive dance and sacrifice to Greek tragedy, and had found their ultimate dramatic and tragic expression in the life of Christ. The era of the drama produced a new form, for Don Juan, who symbolized an accursed sexual ideology and Devil, implied an effort to explain and motivate the soul's otherwise incomprehensible psychological qualities by portraying its ancient symbol in a form that was humanized as well as human. This ascription of human motives reflected the spirit of the times which the dramatist portrayed consciously, as well as his unconscious portrayed the ancient spirituality. About the time the drama of Don Juan appeared in witchridden Spain, Elizabethan drama was at its height in England. For us Shakespearian drama was a lofty art of psychological characterization.

A closer scrutiny of this art discloses a humanized version of the mythical and historical materials that had appeared in earlier novels and dramas. Shakespeare ascribed palpable motives to these traditional characters, because their old spiritual meanings had been lost; and since he interpreted spiritual motives in terms of character types, he appears to have been the first Western psychologist to achieve a scientific psychological doctrine and characterology. For the moment I cannot utterly prove what I have just stated, because to do so I would need to explore not only Shakespeare's sources and personal experiences but also their temporal relations to other events.15 I must be content to cite an example related to our present theme which should show the trend of spiritual belief over the sexual era and into contemporary psychology. As a point of departure for his Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare adopted Giovanni Fiorentino's novelistic conception of the ancient spiritual motif relative to man's sexual abstinence on the first night, which had become woman's responsibility during the sexual era.16 In the original legend the Venetian merchant ran into debt financing three attempts on the part of his adopted son, Gianetto, to win the clever and beautiful Lady Belmont. On the first night the Lady drugged Gianetto and stole his belongings. On the first and second nights she condemned him to involuntary abstinence, which symbolized man's wish under the original spiritual belief. At Gianetto's third attempt, which meant the "third night" in spiritual terms, a female servant warned him of the sleeping potion and enabled him to win his lady, so that in a roundabout way he still exercised spiritual foresight and renounced his sexual resistance only by abstaining as spiritual belief dictated.

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15 I hope to do this later in a separate study of Shakespeare.

16 See Simrock's Sources of Shakespeare (Quellen dcs Shakespeare), Berlin, 1831. The novel depicts the first of four days in the pecorone, and is supposedly a creation based on the Gestis Romanorum.

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If the foregoing illustration represents another "interpretative" projection of man's spiritual anxiety on sexually resistant woman, this motif is entirely lacking in the Merchant of Venice, which substitutes for it the novelistic theme of a choice amongst several small boxes or caskets.17 This latter motif suggests the basic one, only in that the hero left two of the caskets untouched and opened the third. But like the Portia act, this whole episode serves the dramatist only as a foil for his creation of Shylock who, although human, still lacked that spiritual quality which would have made him a definite personification of the Devil. The legal texture of the act makes it a true Devil's pact, though the much criticized sophistical solution of the plot was not a deus ex machina but a diabolus ex machina in which the Devil was cheated not only of his money but of a Christian soul symbolized by blood. Just as the blasphemous Don Juan was well suited to portray a sexual Devil, the unspiritual Jew was an appropriate representation of a money Devil. It is interesting that as in Don Juan the success of Shakespeare's humanization of the legend should have remained unrecognized as such. This art of characterization, which presupposes a great personal gift on Shakespeare's part, appeared in an era in which sexual ideology was declining under Christianity's influence and was about to be replaced by a psychological and motivational doctrine of the soul.

Accordingly, a further parallel may be drawn between the Spanish and English dramatists. In Hamlet Shakespeare interpreted characterologically another spiritual theme which had played a prominent role in Don Juan and which concerns the victim of murder who finds no rest in his grave.

Without any question, it seems to me that the "stone visitor" and the ghost of Hamlet's father were not only similar in appearance but were products of the same fundamental kind of thinking.18 In Don Juan it was Donna Anna who avenged her father's death, because there was no son to carry out the blood revenge. Hamlet was not incapable of executing this task, because he finally did accomplish it; he only delayed the vengeance to which tradition ascribed a mythical motive, and to which Shakespeare gave a psychological motive. Therefore in explaining Hamlet, one never really achieves an understanding of Shakespeare himself, because the latter's account was just a many-sided characterological motivation and psychological interpretation of a long-forgotten spiritual meaning which Freud could not discover even with the help of the Oedipus complex. In depicting the hero as a hesitant and melancholy neurotic type, Shakespeare gives a psychological account of both his theme and the hero. This account depicts, but does not explain,the postponement of the act. Freud accounted for the underlying spiritual motif in terms of an ideology of the sexual era, and consequently had to use the Oedipus myth. Yet what is the basic spiritual content which tradition motivated mythologically as feigned stupidity, which Shakespeare explained characterologically as psychological inhibition, and which psychoanalysis has interpreted as incest wish under a sexual ideology of the soul?

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17 See Freud: "The Motif of the Choice of the Casket" (Das Motiv der Kastchenwahl), Imago, II, 1913.

18 I have already drawn the parallel in "The Don Juan Character" (Don Juan Gestalt).

This spiritual motif obviously inheres in the ghost of the murdered person, whose immortality was a persistent curse because his soul was bound to the dead body and could not find a new one. This tie created the duty of blood vengeance which a son was obliged to carry out upon the murderer, but which also consigned the son to the blood avenger of his victim. Such a process is the vendetta, which often exterminates whole families or clans, and parallels for which may be found in the Greek Tantalid legend, among North American Indians, in the history of the Italian Renaissance, and elsewhere. As a presumptive blood avenger, Hamlet was in constant danger of his life, so that his postponement of his own act of vengeance could not possibly have been motivated by a desire to prolong or save his own life.18* However, this proves to be true in a more personal sense.

Legendary motivation of Hamlet's action with the mythical motif of pseudoinsanity, or simulated delusion, gave him a protective disqualification ofor the task imposed by circumstance, just as Odysseus, to whom Helen meant nothing, had simulated delusions when he took the field with Agamemnon and Menelaus to free her from her abductors. This simulation amounted to a rejection of duty, which will-psychology regards as an inability to act.19 Shakespeare was being psychologically consistent when he let Hamlet manifest pseudoinsanity, because the simulated delusions were almost real. Hamlet ultimately became an inhibited, neurotic type who was unable to do what he had previously not wanted to do. Because of our accent on the basic will-conflict, the problem becomes the purely internal one sensed by Shakespeare, andconcerns the reason for Hamlet's not wanting to act rather than for his inability to act. The reason lay in his revolt against his father's control over his soul and life.

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18a See Jos. Kohler: Shakespeare before the Forum of Jurisprudence (Shakespeare vor dem Forum der Jurisprudenz ) ,Wiirzburg, 1894; also The Principle of Blood Vengeance (Zur Lehre von der Blutrache), Wiirzburg, 1885.

19 See Truth and Reality (Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit,1929.

In order to appreciate the full ontogenetic significance of this matter, we must think of the change undergone by the problem of immortality during the sexual era. A common legend which I recapitulated in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Mytlius von der Geburt des Helden, 1st ed., 1908; 2nd ed., 1922) shows that during the matriarchal era a father opposed his son in many ways which signified his objection to giving up individual immortality for procrcative immortality.

Two such customs were infanticide and child exposure, which were foreign to primitive peoples but common to the heroic legends of civilized peoples. In conformity with primitive spiritual thinking, the spiritual resistance which primitive man had to the child as a spiritual heritage was expressed in the unique institution of couvade, or "paternal parturiency." In contrast with child exposure of the sexual era, one may recognize in primitive couvade a spiritual reaction on the father's part, which implied his acceptance of the child as the familial bearer of the soul. It was quite logical for the father to become spiritually ill at the time of his child's birth, because the child now received his soul from the father instead of from the collective soul or totem. Relinquishing a part of his soul to the child weakened the father almost to the point of death, and, because of his subsequent recovery, couvade signified a reconciliation between collective spiritual belief and partially accepted fatherhood. In the sexual era the father, who did not want to be killed or weakened by his son, exposed him not only to counteract the child's threat to his own life but to prolong his own life, as a number of legends will show. The devouring of childrenby Kronos, the Nordic legend of King Aun,20 and all like traditions indicate that the father was trying to recover his own soul-material through a kind of incorporation of his son. As Hamlet's duty signifies, this "ingestion" of paternal soul-stuff became just a legal, and finally a "moral," obligation for the son to sacrifice his own life and happiness for his dead father.

In his mythological and psychological refusal to avenge his father, which his simulated insanity and will-inhibition respectively betray, the son tried to destroy his spiritual relationship to his father, just as the father had once tried to disown his own spiritual perpetuation in his son. The son tried not only to emphasize his own individuality, but to win immortality for himself. As the father had done in the sexual era, the son also rejected the idea that he was a son begotten by his father, and reverted to the nai've spiritual belief that he had been conceived spiritually and not sexually. Numerous myths from the sexual era symbolize this primitive spiritual idea by the mother's dreams of conception, which were obvious substitutes for divine impregnation, and were incompatible with the mother's conserving role during this transitional matriarchal period.

Let us return to the son, whose disguise of insanity and denial of sexual knowledge served to liberate him from his father. This pretense implies that Hamlet underwent the sexual test in order to prove his sanity, his recognition of biological descent from his father, and his resultant obligation to execute blood vengeance.

In the saga Hamlet knew howto circumvent such tests, for he left the maiden untouched (abstinence) while eavesdroppers were near, and seduced her later in an out-of-the-way place. In the drama which betrays Shakespeare's characteristic rejection of woman, Hamlet both abstained and preached abstinence to his mother, while playing the obscene fool for whom sex was a pleasure devoid of all spiritual significance.

Thus Hamlet's indecisiveness, which Shakespeare worked into a neurotic character study, was just the psychological expression of an ancient spiritual motif currently manifested as a son's unwillingness to accept the duty imposed on him by his father. Instead of sacrificing himself for his father, he used such indecision to emphasize his own individuality in the sense of ancient spiritual belief in immortality because he wanted to save his soul as well as his life. Consequently Shakespearian drama employed a device used with every sonhero in mythology, which made such heroes immune to all kinds of injury until they had completed their life tasks.

Heroes acquired such defenses from their mothers both physically (see birth legends) and in the spiritual sense of matriarchy, and it was to their mothers and not to their fathers that they were indebted for their souls and immortality. Moreover, as in the original version of Hamlet, the mother was the son's ally who deceived and consoled the selfish father by exposing a different child. Certain legends in which this substitute child appears as the hero's twin brother depict the twin as the hero's Double or guardian angel who not only protected him but died to save his life. The clearest idea of a dual, or mortal and immortal, soul is to be found among North American Indians who incorporated both individual and supra-individual parts of the soul into the ego or self. And, strange to say, this action connected the idea of a personal guardian soul with the generic totem spirit rather than with the individual body soul.21 It seems that this connection was made because the corporeal member of the double soul was no longer believed to survive death, as had been the case in the preanimistic era, and because the corporeal soul had been displaced by the totemistic collective soul which was conceived of individually as a personal guardian soul.

In both the saga and drama of Hamlet, this physical inviolacy against all attack is apparent not only in Hamlet's guardian spirit Double, Horatio, but in the fact of Hamlet's death by a poisoned sword, just as though he had been charmed against injury by ordinary weapons. However, unlike his heroic prototype, Hamlet was not just protected up to the fulfillment of his life task, but this very fulfillment itself proved his immortality and transformed him from a son into an individual. His return from the grave proved his capacity to survive tests of the lower worldj as well. But, unlike the spirit of his father, he returned as a living hero to avenge the threats to his life and happiness ( Ophelia ) .

This was Hamlet's turning point, because he could then prove not only the king's murderous intent but its involvement of himself. He was finally able to achieve blood vengeance because he could then act in self-defense and on his own will, instead of in obedience to his father. This developmental step resolves the whole problem of will and fate, and of procreation and individualization. Shakespeare's Hamlet seems to interpret the conflict between the son's procreative life task as receiver and giverof the soul, and his personal life task as guardian of his own immortality in terms of a type psychology characteristic of the "era of the son." It was not so important that the ancient spiritual belief surviving in this material could still be interpreted naturo-mythologically or even sexuo-psychologically, because it was the individual's new attitude that was crucial in this period of the son. The characterological typing signifies a transition from spiritual belief to psychology. The only meaning of the incest motif inheres in material translated from the mother's spiritual terms into the psychological terms of the son, whose sexual ideology did not outlast patriarchy. For, in the language of the sexual era, the marriage of a murdered father's widow was only an expression of the immortality wish which had been suppressed in nature mythology. As so many scholars22 have demonstrated, this whole group of sagas rests on a mythical and cultistic treatment of the ancient god of Winter, who suffered death at the hands of Spring, his youthful son, in order that the mother

Earth could remarry. But this nature myth itself was only a quasi-scientific attempt to prove human immortality by the analogy of recurrent processes in nature. Its inherent incestuousness again placed sexuality at the service of individual immortality, inasmuch as man was reborn as his own son by his own mother. This theme is suggested by that part of the saga in which Hamlet set out for England and in which he charged his mother to plan a year hence the celebration of his death, to which he would return. Yet when he appeared in the churchyard after his phenomenal rescue at sea, he rose from Ophelias grave.

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20Aim sacrificed nine sons to Odin, and thereby added so many years to his own life that he finally suckled like a child and could not stand without support (Ynglinga saga, chap. 29). My Incest Motif ( Inzest-Motiv ) , 2nd ed., page 289, refers to other legends like this one.

21 Sec Levy-Bruhl: How Natives Think (Die geistige Welt des Priniitiven, Miinchen, 1927, p.100 f); German translation of Lcs fonctions mentalcs dans les societcs inferieures. The English version was published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1926.

22 From the Simrock school (See Zinsow: The Hamlet Saga, Die Hamletsage, Halle, 1877) to Gilbert Murray: The Classical Tradition in Poetry, London, 1927.

In spite of all contrary explanations by legal history and sexual psychology, Shakespeare's Hamlet rejected both the blood vengeance which served paternal immortality22* and the incest which symbolized the sexual ideology of immortality. In pre-Shakespearian, Elizabethan drama of the Renaissance, which drew heavily from Seneca's incestuous and blood vengeful prototypes,23 this inner conflict of the individual was scarcely mentioned. Shakespeare took over this stageworthy motif, but intensified it in relation to his own personal experiences by interpreting the older intellectualized and sexualized material in his psychological character types. In Shakespeare's hands, diabolical Shylock, who was thought to be a stealer of souls, turned out to be a pettifogging lawyer. Hamlet, who was concerned with the welfare of his soul, became a character hesitant and unfaithful to duty. And Gertrude, stripped of her honor of motherhood, became a lascivious wanton. Because of his psychologizing, Shakespeare could not appreciate woman as an ancient spiritual character, but always characterized her as bad. At the beginning of the sexual era woman's veneration as bearer of the soul had granted her the superior status that became hers under matriarchy. In the saga even Helen was not "bad," but her feminine charms inflamed men to fight over her as they would have over the immortal soul which the soul-bearing, maternal woman ultimately represents. Under the influence of the Church and of belief in the Devil, woman became transformed from a symbol of the soul into one of sexuality divorced from the soul.

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2 2a According to Bachofen's penetrating analysis of the Orestes saga and similar legends, blood vengeance was originally a phase of matriarchy. Like many other phenomena, it sustained paternal power only at a later period.

23 Without any question, Thyestes' ghost in Seneca's Agamemnon seems to be a prototype for the ghost scene in Hamlet.

Then Shakespeare characterized her as evil, as an inferior example of the male sex, and as the seat of far more damnable passions than the male organism could ever possess. Almost all of Shakespeare's female characters were thoroughly bad. We need only to recall Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, the "Shrew," or Gertrude in order to appreciate Lear's and Timon's hatred for their wives. The sole exception was the daughter, Ophelia. In The Tempest., the aging poet who had no sons seemed obliged finally to turn to his daughter. And even though his own unfortunate marriage had certainly contributed to his degradation of woman, it is probably significant that the England of the ascendant Bard was ruled by a powerful woman who was the epitome of feministic dominance as well as of sublime matriarchy. Hamlet in particular may have represented a reaction of Shakespeare to the death of his father ( Brandes ) or a painful recollection of his own son, Hamnet, who was long since dead (Freud). Were either possibility true, our conception of the drama as a conflict of spiritual belief would be substantiated. This could be the case even though Hamnet's death belonged to the past, and even though we are ignorant of the date of Shakespeare's first conception of the play, except for the prototypical character of Hamlet, which stemmed ostensibly from Kyd. But all these sources, prototypes, and conceptions lend the material that collective quality which the deeply rooted problem of immortality demands. Hamlet's speculation on immortality, particularly in his first ( "to be or not to be" ) and in his final ( churchyard scene ) monologue, bears deepest impress of poetic art. In spite of the ghost's return, Hamlet could no longer believe in existence after death (see Seneca's version: "the bourn from which no traveller returns" ) .

But then, like the powerful Renaissance characters of his day (Claudius, Fortinbras), Hamlet could no longer prize earthly existence or abundant living. In the sense of the theme illustrative of this point, Hamlet was able to live without fulfilling his duty of blood vengeance, but he could not die honorably without having fulfilled it. The task was neither too hard for him nor impossible of fulfillment. What he struggled against was the task in itself as something imposed on him from without and not as an expression of someone other than himself. He represented the son-type produced by patriarchy and the sexual era, who was no longer a son, a blood avenger, or a second spouse to his mother, but a freed and autonomous person.

This ideology, which veered from the reckless type of Renaissance character to an ethical type, appeared in the concurrent religious thought of the German Reformation, whose major issues concerned immortality ( indulgences) and freedom of the will. But what interests us now is just the strictly spiritual ideology which determined reality in all eras, and finally forced the son the underdog, the proletariatto assume that attitude which is the ultimate manifestation of individual spiritual belief.