Solitude_A Return to the Self

by Anthony Storr

  It will be recalled that this is the story of John Marcher, who, all his life, has been sure that a particular, unusual experience was lying in wait for him, which he pictures as a beast tracking him in the jungle, awaiting its chance to spring. He has confided his secret to a woman. May Bartram. When, after a ten-year interval, they meet again, she reminds him of his confidence, and asks him if anything has happened. It has not; and when he goes on to describe what he is still anticipating, something which may suddenly break out in his life, something which, he thinks, might annihilate him or alter everything in his world, May Bartram hazards the guess that what he is expecting but cannot describe is what is familiar to many people as the danger of falling in love. John Marcher dismisses the idea.

  During the many years to come, they continue to spend much of their time together. Eventually, May Bartram dies. Marcher has failed to respond to, failed even to recognize, the offer of love which, at one point, she clearly makes him. Only when she is dead does he realize that the beast in the jungle sprang at that moment.

  The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived – who could say now with what passion? – since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use.22

  Marcher, kneeling on May Bartram’s grave,

  saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of his image what had been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and darkened – it was close; and, instinctively turning in his hallucination to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.23

  In a letter to Hugh Walpole, James wrote:

  I think I don’t regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth, I only regret in my chilled age certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.24

  Henry James’s last novels exhibit at least some of the characteristics of third period works to which reference was made earlier. His elaborate style makes no concessions, so that it is fair to say that he is less directly concerned with communication or with trying to woo or convince the reader. Pattern and order, although evident throughout his work, are even more insistently present in The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. However, James is not so concerned as some of the artists mentioned in this chapter with exploring remote areas of experience beyond the personal. His late acceptance of the physical element in love actually enriches his work at a time in life when those artists who, like Bach, had fully experienced this aspect of life, seem to be reaching out beyond it. In this sense, he is also achieving a new unity between disparate elements. Leon Edel writes:

  ‘Live all you can,’ had been central to The Ambassadors: man had to learn to live with the illusion of his freedom. Life without love wasn’t life – this was the conclusion of The Wings of the Dove; and having found love James had come to see at last that art could not be art, and not life, without love. He had become his own Sphinx; he was answering his own riddles.25

  12

  The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole

  ‘Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows

  Like harmony in music; there is a dark

  Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles

  Discordant elements, makes them cling together

  In one society.’

  William Wordsworth

  In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes takes it upon himself to initiate his friends into the secret of love’s power. He begins by recalling the myth that there were originally three sexes: hermaphrodite, male, and female. The male originated from the sun, the female from the earth, and the hermaphrodite from the moon which partakes of the nature of both sun and earth. Each human being was a rounded whole, with four legs and four arms, able to walk upright in either direction, or to run by turning over and over in circular fashion.

  These original human beings were so arrogant, so insolent, and so powerful that they constituted a threat to the gods, who debated how best to restrain them. Zeus decided that they should be bisected, and later arranged matters so that reproduction took place by means of sexual intercourse rather than by emission on to the ground, as had happened previously.

  The consequence of this bisection of the human race was that each half-being felt compelled to seek out a partner who would restore its former wholeness. The male sought another male, the female another female, and the hermaphrodite a contrasexual partner ‘Love’, says Aristophanes, ‘is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.’1

  Plato’s myth is a potent one. Down the centuries, the notion that we attain wholeness and complete ourselves by merging sexually with another person has been the chief inspiration of romantic literature and the climax of thousands of novels. There is enough truth in the myth for most of us still to be powerfully affected by it. In youth, especially, sexual union with a beloved person does bring with it, however ephemerally, a sense of completion which few other experiences can match. But sex is only one out of a variety of ways of attaining unity.

  Although Freud continued to regard sexual fulfilment as the main source of satisfaction in the lives of both men and women, and to think that neurotic problems were the consequence of psychological blocks preventing the attainment of sexual maturity, he did retain some doubts as to whether complete emotional fulfilment was actually possible. In a comparatively early paper Freud wrote:

  It is my belief that, however strange it may sound, we must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction.2

  In spite of this, and in spite of the fact that, at this time, Freud thought that cultural achievements were the result of sublimation of aspects of the sexual impulse which could not find direct expression when trammelled by the restrictions of civilization, sexual fulfilment continued to represent an ideal both for Freud and his followers.

  However, there is more to the experience of falling in love than the desire for, or achievement of, sexual union. Falling in love is, for the majority, one of the most compelling emotional experiences which anyone can encounter. Whilst the state of being in love persists, the person experiencing it usually feels an ecstatic sense of unity both with the world outside and also within the self: a sense of unity which was initiated by encountering the beloved person, and which may continue to depend upon the existence of the beloved person, but which does not necessarily require his or her actual physical presence. Being in love is usually thought of as the closest, most intimate form of interpersonal relationship; but it is a state of mind which, once triggered, may persist for some time independently of any actual encounter with the beloved. The earth assumes a smiling countenance; and, although this may be no more than a projection of the inner bliss of the subject, there is a sense in which feeling that all is right with the world may actually promote a better adjustment to it. All the world loves a lover, and a lover loves all the world.

  In Chapter 5, I anthropomorphically assumed that creatures who were more or less perfectly adjusted to the environment could be called ‘happy’. It seems to me that those in love experience happiness because, for a brief period, they feel a sense of being perfectly adjusted to the world around them as well as a sense of ecstatic peace and unity within. Whilst the state of being in love persists, there appears to be no discrepancy between actuality and the world of the imagination. The ‘hunger of imagination’ is temporarily sated. This is something other than sexual infatuation. Although sexual intercourse can sometimes be an immensely fulfilling experience which brings in its train a sense of peaceful relaxation, the state of being ‘in love’ is a different condition. Ecstasy is not the same as sexual orgasm; and being in love is a state of mind closer to ecstasy than it is to orgasm. As Marghanita Laski points out in her book Ecstasy, sexual imagery is used to describe ecstasy only by those who have no experience of a normal sex life.3


  Freud certainly appreciated the difference between sexual fulfilment and the sense of unity which accompanies the state of being in love, but he exalted the former experience and denigrated the latter. In Chapter 3, brief reference was made to Freud’s discussion with Romain Rolland of the ‘oceanic feeling’. It will be recalled that Freud designated the oceanic feeling as ‘a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole’.4 Freud goes on to compare this feeling with that of being in love.

  At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.5

  In Chapter 3, I suggested that Freud was right in seeing a similarity between the feeling of unity with the universe and the feeling of unity with a beloved person, but wrong to dismiss such experiences as merely regressive illusions.

  The sense of perfect harmony with the universe, of perfect harmony with another person, and of perfect harmony within the self are intimately connected; indeed, I believe them to be essentially the same phenomena. The triggers for these experiences are of many different kinds. Marghanita Laski lists ‘nature, art, religion, sexual love, childbirth, knowledge, creative work, certain forms of exercise’,6 as being the most common. Admiral Byrd’s description of feeling at one with the universe, which was given in Chapter 3, is a characteristic example for which the triggers were solitude, silence, and the majesty of the Antarctic. Experiences of this kind can also occur spontaneously in solitude without the aid of any external stimulus. Such transcendental experiences are closely connected with aspects of the creative process; with suddenly being able to make sense out of what had previously appeared impenetrable, or with making a new unity by linking together concepts which had formerly seemed to be quite separate.

  Plato’s myth is an accurate account of the human condition in that it depicts man as an incomplete creature constantly in search of wholeness or unity; but confines itself to describing unity in terms of a sexual relationship. In fact, transcendental experiences of things suddenly coming together or making sense of life can even be triggered by something as impersonal as mathematics. Bertrand Russell describes such a moment.

  At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world.7

  Einstein was likewise transported by Euclid at the age of twelve, when, at the beginning of the school year, he received a book expounding Euclidean plane geometry.

  There is a good example of the oceanic feeling being triggered by scientific discovery in an early novel by C. P. Snow. The same example is used by Marghanita Laski in Ecstasy, and underlines her contention that, although orgasmic experiences may share some features with ecstatic experiences, the latter are of a different order. In Snow’s novel, which is clearly autobiographical, the young scientist has just received confirmation that some difficult work he has been doing on the atomic structure of crystals has turned out to be correct.

  Then I was carried beyond pleasure. I have tried to show something of the high moments that science gave to me; the night my father talked about the stars, Luard’s lesson, Austin’s opening lecture, the end of my first research. But this was different from any of them, different altogether, different in kind. It was further from myself. My own triumph and delight and success were there, but they seemed insignificant beside this tranquil ecstasy. It was as though I had looked for a truth outside myself, and finding it had become for a moment part of the truth I sought; as though all the world, the atoms and the stars, were wonderfully clear and close to me, and I to them, so that we were part of lucidity more tremendous than any mystery.

  I had never known that such a moment could exist. Some of its quality, perhaps, I had captured in the delight which came when I brought joy to Audrey, being myself content; or in the times among friends, when for some rare moment, maybe twice in my life, I had lost myself in a common purpose; but these moments had, as it were, the tone of the experience without the experience itself.

  Since then I have never quite regained it. But one effect will stay with me as long as I live; once, when I was young, I used to sneer at the mystics who have described the experience of being at one with God and part of the Unity of things. After that afternoon, I did not want to laugh again; for though I should interpret it differently, I think I know what they meant.8

  Freud dismissed the oceanic feeling as an illusion based on regression to an infantile emotional state. The notion that a kind of union or ‘wholeness’, which was not rooted in the body, could be a valid and vital experience, an ideal toward which men strive, would have seemed to Freud to be an evasion of the harsh facts of man’s physicality. Freud was always inclined to dismiss as unreal psychological experiences which could not easily be traced to, or linked with, the body. It is a limitation of his thought which we have already encountered when discussing his attitude to phantasy.

  When psycho-analysis was first developed as a method of treatment, Freud advised against taking on patients of fifty or older, on the grounds that, in most cases, the elasticity of the mental processes needed for change was lacking. Since psycho-analytic technique demanded scrupulous reconstruction of the past, Freud also felt that the mass of material which had accumulated during a life of this length would prolong treatment interminably. Although modern Freudians often treat patients of middle-age and over, the principal thrust of psycho-analysis has always been toward understanding childhood, youth, and the emancipation of the individual from emotional ties to parents. This is also the period of life when the sexual impulse is most urgently compelling, and when solution of sexual problems proves most rewarding.

  But, however sincerely one subscribes to the evolutionary view that man’s prime biological task is to reproduce himself, the very fact that the lifespan extends for so long beyond the period at which, at least for women, reproduction is possible, raises doubts as to whether the act subserving reproduction entirely deserves this pride of place. What Jung calls ‘the second half of life’ must surely have some other meaning and purpose.

  It was left to Jung and his followers to pay attention to the problems of the middle-aged. Jung’s major contribution to psychology and to psychotherapy is in the field of adult development. He paid relatively little attention to childhood, believing that, when children exhibited neurotic distress, the answer to their problems should usually be sought in studying their parents’ psychology rather than their own.

  Jung’s interest in the problems of adult development originated from the crisis which he himself experienced between 1913 and the end of the First World War. Reference was made to this period of distress at the beginning of Chapter 7. In July 1913, Jung reached the age of thirty-eight. By this time, he had married, fathered a family, and established himself as a psychiatrist of world renown. His hope had been that, together with Freud, he could develop a new science of the mind. But some force within him, against his own inclination, compelled him to develop his own individual point of view. The first fruits of this was the book originally known, in English translation, as The Psychology of the Unconscious, which was published in 1912.*

  In his autobiography, Jung describes how, for two months, he was unable to write the final chapters, because he knew that Freud would regard his divergence from him as a betrayal. The sad story of the estrangement between the two pioneers which followed can be traced in The Freud-Jung Letters,†

  Jung was the first psychiatrist to draw attention to what is now familiarly known as the ‘mid-life crisis’. His distress forced him into a long period of self-analysis in which he recorded his own visions and dreams, many of which were alarmingly threatening. But, out of this dangerous period, Jung forged his own, individual point of view. He wrote:

  The years when I was pursuing my inner i
mages were the most important in my life – in them everything essential was decided.9

  Jung’s self-analysis convinced him that, whereas the young individual’s task was primarily to emancipate himself from his original family, establish himself in the world, and found a new family in his turn, the middle-aged individual’s task was to discover and express his own uniqueness as an individual. Jung defined personality as ‘the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being’.10

  This quest was not primarily egotistical since, in Jung’s view, the essence of individuality could only be expressed when the person concerned acknowledged the direction of a force within the psyche which was not of his own making. Men became neurotic at the mid-point of life because, in some sense, they had been false to themselves, and had strayed too far from the path which Nature intended them to follow. By scrupulous attention to the inner voice of the psyche, which manifested itself in dreams, phantasies, and other derivatives of the unconscious, the lost soul could rediscover its proper path, as Jung himself succeeded in doing. The attitude or ‘set’ required of the patient is really a religious one, although belief in a personal God or adherence to a recognized religious creed is not part of the undertaking.

  Jung himself discovered, in childhood, that he could no longer subscribe to the orthodox Protestant faith in which he had been reared by his father, who was a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. It might be alleged that the whole of Jung’s later work represents his attempt to find a substitute for the faith which he had lost. Such a speculation may be interesting but is ultimately unimportant. Whether or not Jung’s ideas originate from personal conflict neither confirms nor invalidates them. As he puts it in one of his best-known statements: