James Hollis : Self, or Self-Image ?
Rembrandt - The Philosopher in Meditation (1632)
Extract from :
James Hollis
Living Between Worlds
SACRIFICING SELF-IMAGE FOR SELF
In 1949, analyst Erich Neumann published his book Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. In this book, Neumann asserted that what we now know about the deep Self, the world of psychospiritual reality that lies beneath the ego constructs, requires us to weigh the presence of the activity of that Self in all our decisions. By no means was he endorsing narcissism or self-absorption, or casual disregard of legitimate social and relational claims upon us. But, he said, decisions based only on an observance of the social norms, the group ethic, have led to the violation of generations of souls. Only a painful, sustained, and thoughtful suffering of the conflict within can bring a person to respect what the Self is seeking through his or her choices.
Around this same time, I recall being transfixed by an ancient Greek sculpture of the flaying of the satyr Marsyras in the Kunsthaus of Zurich. As I wandered through the galleries over many visits, I always wound up standing before that time-ravaged sculpture. Marsyras had found a flute and, flushed with hubris, challenged the god Apollo to a contest. (Let it be said that the gods may not win every contest, but that is probably the way to bet.) Naturally, or perhaps supernaturally, Apollo won the contest. To punish his hubris, Marsyras was tied to a tree and flayed alive. That was the statue whose numinosity kept calling me. I realized in time that that outer image was resonating with an inner image. Marsyras was my ego consciousness, my professed understanding of myself that was undergoing crucifixion.
In his challenging nineteenth-century book Fear and Trembling — a title inspired by St. Paul’s comment that we are to work out our salvation in fear and trembling, or humbly and not through inflation — Kierkegaard reached a conclusion analogous to that of Neumann a full century later. While the language Kierkegaard uses is theological, its implications are profoundly psychological, revealing again the wisdom of the scriptures when we understand them in forms psychologically accessible to our sensibilities.
Taking as his parabolic frame what he called “the scandal of Abraham and Isaac", Kierkegaard proposed to interpret what such a paradox might mean to moderns. Putting it bluntly and literally, if you saw your neighbor with a knife at the throat of his child, you would call the police or intervene directly, and rightly so. But how is it that Abraham is a patriarch of the faith in reward for such a heinous act ?
Kierkegaard identifies three layers of social, ethical, and psychological dilemma and decision making. The first level at which most of humanity operates is what he called “the aesthetic,” by which he means the narcissistic, eudaemonistic behaviors we see every day — the choices made from selfish interests, choices made from pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding agendas. Through maturation, the self-absorbed may mature and evolve into the second level, “the ethical,” whereby he or she recognizes the legitimate claims of the social contract, the accountabilities we have to each other.
But lastly, he noted, we may also be summoned to “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” As we saw with Antigone, this is a transcendence of the merely ethical on behalf of a still higher calling — Divinity or one’s own soul. Kierkegaard concludes that the meaning of this otherwise barbarous parable is that Abraham is called to determine what his highest value was. To consider that, he also was called to consider sacrificing what was most dear to him, his own child. In other words, Abraham was called to the crucifixion of his ego values. In my own life, such a crucifixion was really not about the choices before me — they were clear — but rather about the sense of self I wished to cling to about myself. Sacrificing our most precious self-image is always an invitation to a junction that none of us wishes to reach but that often comes to us in this journey. The goal of a selfsatisfied image of ourselves is sacrificed to a teleological, purposeful, mission assigned by the gods or by one’s own soul.
We all know what a slippery slope that constitutes for any of us. We all have witnessed, in ourselves or others, how one can justify almost anything to ratify the salient complex at any given motive and rationalize its righteousness even much later. But the key here is in the title, Fear and Trembling. We are asked to acknowledge how fearsome these choices are, this risk of being true to our soul, and to tremble in the face of what that acknowledgment will ask of us. Fear and trembling ask of us a genuine process of waiting rather than impulsivity, of valuing the opposites represented in our dilemmas, and then the willingness to allow what we had thought and believed pass for something else for which we hadn’t bargained. Who would ever go there, to these difficult junctures, willingly ?
Sometimes the external world takes us to those places as it did with Bonhoeffer, who left a secure position teaching in New York City to return to his beloved Germany to stand against the Hitlerian regime and in time become its martyr. Sometimes, this juncture is approached because the Self is engineering such a meeting, where something in us pushes us into a place where we are obliged to move beyond the simple rights and wrongs of social life, beyond the places of comfort and predictability. Thus, Bonhoeffer’s toughest ordeal was not opposing the Nazis. His values were clear. It was choosing between his sincere pacifism and his recognition that ending Hitler’s tyrannical regime was the higher good, the teleological suspension of the ethical to which his life had theretofore been devoted.
In those dark hours, the luminosity of the Self is often hard to discern, but it is the only light to guide us on the path yet to be undertaken. Nietzsche once said that before the path can be followed, one must first have found the lantern. And the lantern (or Emily Dickinson’s “compass”3) can only be found after a conscientious submission of ego sovereignty and a purgatory of fear and trembling. It is certainly understandable why the timorous ego, that wafer floating on a large, tenebrous sea, would prefer avoiding these difficult junctures or wish to rid oneself of the burden of such a summons, whether through pusillanimity, rationalization, projection onto others, or some form of somnambulant narcosis. We all have multiple evasive strategies that we have been practicing since the fretful precincts of childhood. But we do not get to choose whether life, the gods, or the Self will call us to those hours where, like Oedipus, we find ourselves in the wilderness where three roads diverge. Which to choose, and what the price ?
It is in those difficult times that the larger journey is forged in the alchemical smithy of the soul, a place where the heat grows until the lesser molecules transform and the larger emerge. From time to time, the will of the Self transcends the needs of the ego-world and often requires the sacrifice of our most cherished values. One remembers the words of the carpenter of Nazareth, “Not my will but Thine.” Those who have gone through that transformation have been to Hell and need not fear it anymore; they know that life will bring further tests but will not allow them to settle back into the old, familiar place. From that point onward, they live with a deeper integrity and are less and less defined by the old fears or the many hysterias found all around them. The price and the often grave consequences are compensated through a more profound experience of meaning, whether or not it is ratified by one’s tribe. This is a step into our own journey that, sooner or later, we are all asked to take.