By Rollo May, Ph.D.

Rollo May, one of the most influential psychologists of our time, has continually sought to deepen and redefine the study of human beings by combining an understanding of the arts and humanities with psychology. His newest work, The Cry for Myth, will be published in August 1988.

The myths of creation form a backdrop for all human creativity. As I have argued in the theory of the Daimonic, the spirit of evil is present in the struggle to create as surely as the ugly gargoyles are present in the facades of every beautiful Gothic cathedral from Chartres to the lowliest village in France.

It has been said so often as to become a platitude that the birth of new life -- whether the seed which becomes the oak or the cocoon which gives birth to the butterflies miracle enough; we don't need esoteric things with which to associate our experiences of mystery, awe and wonder. The grandeur, the sense of surprise, the experience of awe, are all present, though in differing degrees, in the birth of any creative act. whether it is composing a simple two line haiku or writing Hamlet.

There is no necessary conflict between science and the sense of wonder and mystery, for, as Einstein as well as countless other authorities have said, scientific discovery begins in the experiencing of mystery. Indeed, science and mystery are close together; for science rightfully can, and ought to lead us to cultivate our capacity for wonder, our openness to the mystery of existence itself. One of the misuses of the scientistic, in contrast to the scientific view, is that we lose the meaning of the wonderful, i.e., the full-of-wonder state. This atrophy of the sense of mystery is the death knell of precious human capacities Testifying to this, Darwin remarked in his old age that if he had his life to live over again, he would read some poetry every day since his preoccupation with gathering the facts of evolution had allowed his poetic sense to atrophy.

Mystery does not consist of what we don't know; nor does it diminish as we come to know more. One of the delusions of the Enlightenment was the assumption that there existed a finite amount of knowledge in the universe and that we would conquer more of it each year. Today, we see the obvious untruth of this, since we are poignantly aware of all the things we don't know, particularly how to control our vast nuclear power or how to avoid cyclic economic depressions. It is more relevant to think of our knowledge as an ever expanding circle, and therefore the realm of mystery, or ignorance, becomes greater as the circumference of the circle becomes larger. Thus I am not counseling obscurantism or anti-rationalism but rather an attitude toward life that appreciates the grandeur and awe in everyday things, such as the pearl of water from the dew on each blade of grass which contains the spectrum of all the rainbow colors. I am proposing an attitude which appreciates the awe of existence, which became especially vivid as we viewed the photographs taken at the time of the first circling of the earth.

The blocking of one's capacity for wonder and the capacity to appreciate mystery can have serious effects upon our psychological health, not to mention the health of our whole planet. Psychologically, this "psychic numbing" to borrow Robert Lifron's phrase, this dulling or absence of sensitivity, leads to a loss of the sense of grandeur of life and death, and makes for boredom. The personality type called "compulsive-obsessionals" in some quarters and "narcissistic personalities" in others, comes to mind when we consider this psychological numbing. Frighteningly, the type is increasing these days. Associated generally with an inability to reach out and relate more than superficiously to other people, this narcissistic type, the mechanical man or woman, atrophied of emotions and inwardly lonely, is unable to make gratifying personal partnerships in sex or love. All of this appears externally as boredom.

Now boredom is the loss of the capacity to wonder, to appreciate the sense of mystery and awe in life. Here we are haunted by Harlow Shapley's conclusion as he pondered the possible causes of the destruction of Western Civilization; he cites, along with nuclear war, a radical climatic change, a plague, and the simple condition of boredom. Our planet may die because we have become simply bored. It is already observable in some groups as a sense of dullness, joylessness and apathy.

I am proposing that the aspect of myths which deals with the sense of mystery, the recovery of the sense of surprise, wonder and awe toward existence, is essential not only for out outward salvation in the face of nuclear warfare but for an inward salvation from the psychic difficulties which make life for so many people insufferably dull and boring.

Therapy has become the talk of the "success people," i.e., people always concerned about being a success. It is assumed that every problem can be "fixed," and as Robert Bellah warns us in Habits of the Heart, being adjusted individuals becomes the goal.

The great problem is that this takes away the wonder in psychotherapy, the sense of mystery, the feeling that we both -- patient and therapist -- are on an exploration, neither of us knowing where it will lead. If this element of surprise is lost, therapy becomes just another profession which you learn in school as you learn how to take a case history. I well remember the excitement, the wonder we used to feel in the early days of psychoanalysis when we few analysts in New York would tell each other, with eyes wide and minds full of wonder, about some new constellation one of us had discovered in a patient during our sessions.

The danger is that this wonder, this excitement, this mystery, this adventuresome day is past, and therapy has become just another profession by which people earn their living. The purpose of this book on myths is to reignite the profession, to resurrect the original mystery and wonder in psychotherapy. For myths are another route to the unconscious, like dreams, a route to the hidden levels of the human being who comes for help because he or she is troubled. Trouble, in that sense can be a boon, for it spurs people to appreciate the mystery of their lives and the wonder in their human relationships.

The problem is that psychotherapy has become a matter of helping persons toward adjustment. Therapy is said to be the way to manage your work force. As Bellah and his colleagues point out, the mistake is that being a manager and a therapist are seen as almost the same function; these people hyphenate the terms. The successful manager, in other words, is one who sees his work as therapeutic. Thus the form of therapy which Freud and Jung and Rank gave us has gone a long way toward becoming the substitute for our function in managerial posts. The therapist "manages" the lives of his patients!

Bellah believes on the basis of his research that therapy continues the theme of "expressive individualism."

In asserting radical pluralism and the uniqueness of each individual, they (the therapists) conclude that there is no moral common ground and therefore no public relevance of morality outside the sphere of minimal procedural rules and obligations not to injure...These contradictions.... make us wonder if psychological sophistication has not been bought at the price of moral impoverishment."

One of the more serious paradoxes of therapy, and therapeutic attitude, is that it undermines morality, despite the vocal disclaimers. The moral person must to some extent, stand against his or her immediate society, in favor of a greater social vision, whereas therapy seeks by and large to help the individual become a success in present society.

I propose that the core of this problem is that the mythic dimension of psychotherapy has been lost. We have become part of the work-a-day world, with the loss of our erst - while sense of wonder, mystery and awe. The proposals (and the jokes) about advising the patient to talk into a tape recorder have become more than mere jokes and reflect the fact that the heart of the therapeutic relationship has become the shallow question of adjustment. Nowadays, the questions among young therapists seem to be - How can I develop a practice? How do I become well-known in my community? How can I get "exposure" so I will get more patients? Many therapists experience a burnout, inasmuch as dealing only with people's conscious problems can become tedious, since these problems are so similar.

Psychotherapy has all but lost its sense of mystery, its feeling of adventure, its discovery of new depths in the patient or in one's self, which were so prominent in the promise of the art in the early decades of this century. In this book we hope to regain, whether one is patient or therapist the sense of adventure and challenge, the excitement, the electric feeling in the air. This can come by way of our concern with myths, which are first cousins to the dream. The myth is a public dream. and the dream is a private myth. Freud held that what was secret in dreams becomes in the group, a myth. One could understand why the therapist spoke so little in those early days. for he or she was often struck with wonder and with a feeling like Keats,

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies. When a new planet swims into his ken.

Hence I offer the quest for myths, and the understanding of them as far as that is possible, as the antidote for burnout, for those whose routines cry for some deeper understanding of men and women. Myths are the royal road to wonder, to mystery, to ecstasy in an otherwise drab life.

Freud and other leaders down to Sullivan have regularly seen myths as the public form of the dream. The dream of the group is called myth, says Freud. Sullivan discusses both dreams and myths under the same heading. The "Strange Passenger," a character in Ibsens drama Peer Gynt, whom we identify as the therapist. speaks of wanting to know Peer's dreams. This is Ibsens way of saying the myth and dream are almost interchangeable - the one private, the other expressing a group experience. Another rich myth is The Great Gatsby, which reads like a dream.

Myths are dreams that connect persons with their people and their race. Myths go beyond the rational limits, just as dreams do; myths and dreams speak the same language. Both are doors to the unconscious, to the submerged, underlying levels in our lives. Myths reveal the supra-rational of persons at the same time as they connect people with their shared constructs, and hence give moral counsel. The myth of the Lone Ranger, for example, gives the child a con nection with history and the community, it relates the child to the social group; the child may then have dreams of saving others, of riding Silver, and journeying to the frontier where such "Lone Rangers" are needed.

This book seeks to open up a. forgotten avenue to what Freud called the unconscious, thereby providing access to the discoveries, the surprises. The myths are passages of adventurousness, carrying us beyond the burn out and the tediousness of listening, to explore new unconscious areas in a person and society. This enables us to discover again the wonder, the mystery and the awe of being human.