Psychologist James Hillman argues: “If any fantasy holds our contemporary civilization in an unyielding grip, it is that we are our parents’ children and that the primary instrument of our fate is the behavior of your mother and father. As their chromosomes are ours, so are their mess-ups and attitudes. Their joint unconscious psyche—the rages they suppress, the longings they cannot fulfill, the images they dream at night—basically form our souls, and we can never, ever work through and be free of this determinism. The individual’s soul continues to be imagined as a biological offspring of the family tree. We grow psychologically out of their minds as our flesh grows biologically out of their bodies.
“If sharp definitions of parent and parents have begun to melt owing to the infiltrations of law, demographics, and biochemistry, the idea of parenting and parents is more hardened than ever in the minds of moral reformers and psychotherapists. The shibboleth ‘family values,’ expressed by catch phrases like ’bad mothering’ and ‘absent fathering,’ trickles down into ‘family systems therapy,’ which has become the single most important set of ideas determining the theory of societal dysfunction and the practice of mental health.
“Yet all along a little elf whispers another tale: ‘You are different; you’re not like anyone in the family; you don’t really belong.’ There is an unbeliever in the heart. It calls the family a fantasy, a fallacy.
“Even the biological model has puzzling gaps. Contraception is easier to account for and practice than conception itself. What goes on in that massive, virginally intact, single, round ovum that allows only this particular minuscule sperm among millions to enter? Or is the question more correctly addressed to the sperm? Is one of you more wily, more pushy, and more sympathetically congenial? Or is it just the randomness of ‘luck’—and what is luck, really? We know about DNA and the results of joinings, but we are left with the mystery that Darwin spent a life with, the mystery of selection.
“The acorn theory suggests a primitive solution. It says: Your daimon selected both the egg and the sperm, as it selected their carriers, called ‘parents.’ Their union results from your necessity—and not the other way around. Does this not help to understand the impossible unions, those antipathies and misalliances, the quick conceptions and sudden desertions occurring between the parents of so many of us, and especially in the biographies of the eminent? The couple came together, not for their personal unity, but to beget the unique person, endowed with a specific acorn, who turns out to be you.
“The parental fallacy depends largely on the fantasy of a one-way vertical causality, from larger to smaller, from older to younger, from experienced to inexperienced. Yet, just as actual motherhood is waning in the face of social changes that alter its conventions, so the theory of Mother’s importance is being undermined by evidence against vertical causality within families.
A twice-told tale about the behavior of a family of rhesus monkeys on an unpopulated Japanese island, where researchers left fresh sweet potatoes on the beach: “Imo spat out the sand clinging to her sweet potato, put it into the sea, and rubbed it vigorously with her free hand. She ate the cleaned potato, enjoying its salty taste. Nearby, Nimby watched—and thrust her potato into the sea. She didn’t get all the sand off, but it still tasted better than ever before. The two playmates’ example taught others; soon their age-mates, both male and female, had caught on to the potato-washing routine. Imo’s mother also learned, and soon was teaching potato washing to Imo’s younger siblings. Imo’s father, though he enjoyed a reputation for toughness and leadership, was too stubborn to try the new trick.”
“The researcher, David Roe, wants us to see that innovation and the transmission of ideas take place in various ways: horizontally within the family (sibling to sibling); vertically, but reciprocally, child to mother and mother to child; outside the family, as young monkeys learn from one another. Some—the old males—seem not to learn at all, or at least not about washing potatoes.
“But one crucial question is not asked: How did Imo get the idea? How come she washed that first potato? What prompted that bit of behavior? Her daimon, of course—which inspired the whole event to begin with, and also the oft-told report. Imo’s genius continues to teach you and me by means of this story. Yes, animals, too, have angels. As far back as we can imagine cultural history, it was widely believed that animals were the first teachers. Our earliest language, our dances, our rituals, our knowledge of what to eat and what not to eat, passed into our behavior through theirs.
“Suspicion of vertical causality, particularly suspicion of the mother as primary factor in determining fate, comes from another direction as well. Diane Eyer calls mother-infant bonding (which gives her books its title) ‘a scientific fiction’ (her subtitle): ‘Bonding is, in fact, as much an extension of ideology as it is a scientific discovery. More specifically, it is part of an ideology in which mothers are seen as the prime architects of their children’s lives and are blamed for whatever problems befall them, not only in childhood but throughout their adult lives.’
“For any one of us,” Hillman argues, “child or adult, the question eclipsing all other is: How does what comes with you to the world find a place in the world? How does my meaning fit with the meanings to which I am asked to conform? What helps growing down?
“Archaic peoples and tribal communities offered their children constancy, an unlimited time span of continuities. Cyclical changes and nomadic migrations did not shake the foundations. Myths made life livable, and hope was not even a category of archaic existence. Hope enters history, and our psychology, as trust in continuity fades.
“Our main myth,” however, “is apocalyptic, as the Revelation of St. John, the last book of our Bible, says, and our children today live among and act out images of catastrophe. Of course suicide among children shows a startling rise. How troubling it must be for a child to tie its star to a collapsing structure of depletion, extinction, and loss that cannot be repaired by bonding people together in satisfying human relationships. It’s all beyond people, says this myth. The only hope, according to the authorized version of the catastrophe, is in a divine redemption and a second chance. In face of that cosmic science fiction of Armageddon, psychology’s scientific fiction narrows the cause of devastated children to dysfunctional parenting, while a world with all the parents in it edges toward the cliff.
James Hillman, The Soul's Code.
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