by May, Rollo
With something of the wonder and the awe
Those mutinous sailors saw …
Sleepy and cursing, damning drink and bread,
To see before them there,...
But thin with distance, thin but dead ahead,
The line of unimaginable coasts.*
THE MYTH OF THE FRONTIER
In his keen insights into the influence of the frontier on American society, Frederick Jackson Turner set the important myth for understanding the frontier. He saw the significance of what people were getting away from as well as what they were getting to. The free land on the frontier, drawing people away from Europe, enabled Americans to build a new frontier and a new culture, partially dependent upon Europe but with its own special characteristics. The frontier was thus the crucial myth; its special characteristics became distinctively American.
Turner pointed out that the restless energy in our new settlements and cities was combined with the individualism, the self-reliance, “the bounteousness and exhuberance which comes with freedom.”† The new country had distinctive characteristics which Turner believed were largely due to our leaving Europe behind and striking out for ourselves. He emphasized the impact of the wilderness on this transplanted existence. Although his penetrating analysis did not come until 1890, he described a new western spirit and a new way of thinking about American history. Within the United States, this viewpoint lifted local history from the confines of an tiquarianism into mythic meaning.
America was to become for the West a myth of the rebirth of humanity, without the sin or evil or poverty or injustice or persecution which had characterized the Old World. Our Statue of Liberty is emblazoned with an inscription, erected in the nineteenth century but expressive of these earlier centuries as well,
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming
shore,
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside
the golden door.
This myth of the New World has continued down to the present. In his orations during World War II, Churchill proclaimed that “England will hold on until the New World comes to the rescue of the Old.”
In the settling of this land the pilgrims and pioneers and explorers, even the forebears of the Hollywood gunmen like Clint Eastwood who took the law into their own hands, were pictured as believing in divine righteousness or its synonym, manifest destiny. The myth of the lone pioneer borrowed power from the classical myth of Odysseus, whose own heart had become the battleground for the strife of the gods, as the frontiersmen portrayed in this country are the expression of the destiny of America. Lord Byron interrupted Childe Harold to rhapsodize about Daniel Boone and the American wilderness, in which Boone is pictured as innocent, happy, benevolent, not savage but simple, in his old age still a child of nature “whose virtues showed the corruptions of civilization.”*
There was a sense of destiny in the western desert, or if you were religious, a sense of the presence of God wherever the desert might be. Hence Jesus went into the desert for forty days and nights; Buddha did the same, and many a hermit has gone into the solitary desert to commune with himself and God. The desert of the West is what Paul Tillich called the “holy void.” It is a myth into which one sinks, and whether or not it is holy or anxiety-producing depends upon you, the individual viewer.
The fact that Satan (or Mephistopheles or Lucifer) was originally God’s co-worker casts light on the strange identification of people in America with the evil figures, say Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde or the train robber called the Grey Fox, whom all the townspeople including the school band turned out to cheer as he was taken off to the penitentiary. Even now when children sing the western song, “He robbed from the rich/And gave to the poor,” it is part of their identification with the myth of Robin Hood, a mythical medieval outlaw who robbed for the sake of the poor.
One of the curious things about the myth of the Wild West is that the west was reputed to have a healing power. Theodore Roosevelt, a sickly teen-ager, went west to develop his physique, to find himself psychologically, and to build himself into a courageous man. In the Horatio Alger myth, as we shall see in “Luke Larkin’s Luck” (see Chapter 7), the “evil” family, the members of the aristocratic Duncans, were sentenced by the judge to go west to rebuild their honesty and integrity.
Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Mike Fink, Calamity Jane, even Custer and Buffalo Bill, not only were our personal heroes but also stood for the myth of the healing power of the new land. These mythic heroes were quite conscious of their function as God’s agents appointed to civilize the west—Buffalo Bill believed that he stood between civilization and savagery.
The myths of American freedom can also be used for very different effects. A young man in therapy described how his family had come from the Old World as homesteaders and moved as immigrants to a farm in South Dakota. Nobody would speak to this homestead family for the first four years. As a child he and his siblings took the bus to school, where they were also ostracized. His family was Catholic, and when he harmlessly asked another child which church the latter attended, the other child’s mother drove a horse and buggy later that afternoon four miles to his house to rebuke his parents noisily for their son’s prying into others’ religion. His older brother got into fights because he was mocked in school; his older sister dropped out of the unhappy environment in her eleventh year and went to another school, but she seems not to have gotten over the neurotic difficulties the previous ostracism left.
The Statue of Liberty does not “lift her lamp beside the golden door” for all immigrants. The fear of ostracism is often present in the crowds of immigrants who moved into Minnesota and northern Wisconsin and Michigan. As children most of us—to our profound later regret—spoke of immigrants as Bohunks and Polocks, and in the cities they were Dagoes and Kikes. The romantic air with which we surround our Statue of Liberty covers up the fact that we generally hear of the successful immigrants like Andrew Carnegie and Edward Bok and other immigrants who became great.
LONELINESS IN AMERICA
Our most powerful and pervasive myth, which has had an amazingly widespread influence in this country and wherever radio is heard throughout the world, is that of the lone cowboy and the west.* We recall the Lone Ranger, introduced by the overture to William Tell (the hero of a similar myth in his own country of Switzerland). The program went into its nightly adventure, in which the Lone Ranger wore camouflage to show that he would continue to be unknown. With Tonto, his faithful helper, the Lone Ranger galloped ahead to redress some wrong. At the end of the program, his identity still unknown, the Lone Ranger galloped away into the lonely evening again. This myth merges loneliness and the myth of the west. The loneliness seems a kind of cultural inheritance, with our lone ancestors, the hunters, the trappers, the frontiersmen, all of whom lived a life of relative isolation and bragged about it.
Chronicled by an endless number of films, the myth of the lonely cowboy was made to order for Hollywood and the American mood. The background was the western mountains in their scarlet and purple against the endless ochre of the desert sand. In the films the courage of American frontier men and women dared all. The women who were saved—or saved themselves—from villains were delicate southern beauties or rugged frontier women who could chop wood and shoot with the best of the men. And there was the final lone shootout between the hero and the villain. Westerns illustrate the love for repetition that Freud mentions; we seemed to have an endless appetite for seeing the same theme over and over again as an authentic myth.*
When Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, was asked by Oriani Fallaci how he explained “the incredible movie star status” he enjoyed, Kissinger replied that it came from “the fact that he had always acted alone.” Kissinger was referring to his role as a “lonely cowboy” in flying f
rom Lebanon to Jerusalem to Cairo, not by horseback but by diplomatic jet. “Americans like that immensely,” he said.
Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into town … with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol…. This cowboy doesn’t have to be courageous. All he needs is to be alone to show others that he rides into town and does everything by himself. Americans like that.*
This early loneliness would seem to be connected, as a kind of cultural inheritance, with our lone ancestors, the hunters, the trappers, the frontiersmen, all of whom lived a life of relative isolation and bragged about it. But now it is not physical loneliness that we in the twentieth century are troubled with. In this age of radio and television no one is far from another person’s voice at every moment. We noted the loneliness of Deborah in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; even though people were around her all the time she felt completely alone and had to construct her own gods. We are often considered a country of joiners; we join everything from Rotarians to Kiwanas clubs to fraternities and sororities and women’s societies of all sorts. This perpetual joining, I propose, is a reaction-formation, a device for covering up the competitiveness and the loneliness underneath.
Some people come for therapy simply because they are unbearably lonely. We therapists are now seeing more and more patients who seek help because they are driven to find someone who will listen to them with no stake in it except to wish them well. Again like Deborah in Chapter 1, in our day of instantaneous communication by electronics and satellites, more patients than ever have never experienced anyone who would genuinely listen with only his or her welfare in mind. One joins Lennon and McCartney in their Beatles’ song: “All the lonely people—where do they all come from?”
The loneliness goes deeply into our American mythology. On the turnpikes in New York or Houston or Los Angeles, many drivers look as though pursued by an inner loneliness hurrying some place but never knowing where that place is. Their expressions have a forlorn quality as though they had lost something—or rather as though they were lost. Or they act as though they were pursued by guilt, or by what memories of violence, or by what frantic hope? What is lacking in people’s attitude in our day is a sense of peace—quiet, deep, relaxed peace.
The loneliness is one expression of our rootlessness.* Many people in our day, separated from tradition and often cast out by society, are alone with no myths to guide them, no unquestioned rites to welcome them into community, no sacraments to initiate them into the holy—and so there is rarely anything holy. The loneliness of mythlessness is the deepest and least assuageable of all. Unrelated to the past, unconnected with the future, we hang as if in mid-air. We are like the shades Odysseus meets in the underworld, crying for news about the people up in the world but unable themselves to feel anything.
Part of the cause of this loneliness is our lack of historical roots in America and our continual moving, so that we rarely give ourselves time to put down roots. When we are pressed, we pack up and take the plane or car or train to some other place. De Tocqueville records his surprise that the American, on building a house in which one naturally expects him to live and to enjoy, no sooner gets the roof on it than he puts it up for sale and is off to some new place.
We lack the sense of history that Europeans feel. On walking out of doors, a French villager immediately sees a cathedral which connects him with history of centuries ago; his rooted ness is obvious in his eyes and mood, and it is a real assuagement of loneliness. Whether he ever goes to the church or believes what its representatives teach is irrelevant, the great edifice stands there connecting him with myths of centuries of the past. But in America we pride ourselves on building skyscrapers to tear down in a hundred years or less. While the European moves mostly in time, the American moves mainly in space.
VIOLENCE AND LONELINESS
The loneliness is expressed in our being a violent people at the same time as we are very democratic. The violence in America, even in our twentieth century, is easy to see but hard to admit and explain. With our “Saturday night specials” we murder fifty times as many of our fellow countrymen as the Swedes or the British; indeed, our homicide rate is much greater than any civilized nation outside of Central America. We “nice” Americans regularly identify with the pioneers who massacred Indians according to the will of God under a new name, manifest destiny.
We make heroes out of gangsters. In the movies we identify with the criminal; during Prohibition, Dillinger, public enemy number one, was a kind of hero, and other gangsters are heroic now as they are played by Clint Eastwood. The overwhelming violence on the television screen has become hackneyed, but whether or not it breeds violence in young viewers, it certainly ministers to the feeling that we can depend upon no one but ourselves. We are surrounded by potential enemies, which makes us feel we ought to consider wearing bulletproof vests and must never relax our guard. Indeed, one reads in the newspaper that a contemporary minister in Texas wears a bullet-proof vest during his sermons since he, standing alone in the pulpit, makes an easy target for an assassin’s bullet.
Hence loneliness and the denial of it, or the escape from it, are such important myths in America. Children can escape it by watching TV, adolescents cover it up by constant partying and episodic sex, middle-aged people repress it by the marriage-divorce merry-go-round. Hence encounter groups are so important in America; anybody can announce a new “growth” group and persons will flock to it to be taught the new techniques of living and loving spontaneously, unaware of the contradiction in the very phrase “techniques of spontaneity.” For we were all brought up, so goes the myth, on the subconscious equivalents of Paradise at Plymouth Rock and tales of the magic success on the frontier, and we find nothing to take their place except repeating the old shibboleths.
THE SEDUCTION OF THE NEW
From the beginning we early Americans pushed westward, always discovering something new. We named our states New York, New Mexico. The myth of the new was always beckoning to us. God must favor us, we believed, for every day new discoveries greeted our hunters and frontiersmen, our trappers and our miners; a lush countryside invited us in every direction. Ore was later to be discovered in the mountains, the forests on the hills kept a steady stream of the riches of lumber pouring upon us—all climaxed by the literal discovery of gold in California in 1849. No wonder in America we love any new technique; one kind of computer is pushed off the market by the invention of a new one; any new brand of aspirin or vitamin is grabbed up with insatiable appetite. The proliferation of cults and gurus, which occurs especially in our west, is the expression of new religions, new ways of life, new heavens, and new techniques for reaching these heavens, all summed up in the phrase “New Age.”
This helps explain why the different kinds of psychotherapy took off like rockets in this New World in contrast to the merely studied interest they received in Europe, although every early form of therapy—Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian, Rankian, Reichian—had been discovered in Europe. The representatives of new forms of therapy developed by Homey, Fromm, Alexander, Fromm-Reichmann, and others also came literally to these shores as emissaries from Europe. How we lapped up these new approaches to therapy! On all sides, we wanted the new.
In the field of therapy this became the myth of the changing self: we in America want to find a new self, a new set of expectations. The most important moral implication of this myth is that the typical American does not come to therapy to be “cured” but rather to find a new life, to change into a different way of living.
Change is a great word in America; we not only believe in it, we worship it. We see it all about us, and we shall see it emblazoned in Gatsby’s complete faith in his capacity to change his accent, his name, indeed to invent himself. De Tocqueville saw this clearly:
The American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural sta
te of man. He feels the need of it, more, he loves it; for the instability, instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.
Such change, whether it is judged as Providence or Progress, is always assumed to be good in America. In politics, which is a pattern of myths par excellence, the myth of the new is of great importance—vide the New Deal, the New Frontier, new blood, new visions. No one in this country runs on the platform of preserving the old frontiers. We recall that Kennedy’s charm in his election was partly that he represented new ideas, a youth leaving the old behind. The real question, namely, the quality of the new, is rarely asked. It is assumed in this New World to be better because it is new. This is the myth of change, where we put on the new self, where we follow the belief in Cuéism, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”
This mood is allied to the fact that we assume that history, even the little of it that we have in this country, is not significant; we cast off European history with a sense of relief. Many Americans secretly believe Henry Ford was right when he said, “History is bunk!” For him history began with the invention of the Ford flivver. Concerned only with the present and the future, our myth omits the actual richness of American history; for the very love of the new, the expectation of all kinds of change in psychotherapy, works against real progress. The patient in therapy, in his expectancy for a new life, misses the greater values of deep inner poise and serenity.
But all the while—to follow this myth to our present state—we have the underlying suspicion that we are simply running away by our New Age methods. When we talk about changing personalities, we need a more mystical term. The term that was born was “transforming”: we say we are engaged in “transforming persons.” In the 1970s Werner Erhard in California founded the EST seminars, and the movement spread like a prairie fire across the country.
