From the Elephant's Back

by Lawrence Durrell

  Groddeck was often approached for permission to set up a society in England bearing his name, on the lines of the Freudian and Adlerian Societies; but he always laughed away the suggestion with the words “Pupils always want their teacher to stay put.” He was determined that his work should not settle and rigidify into a barren canon of law; that his writings should not become molehills for industrious systematisers, who might pay only lip-service to his theories, respecting the letter of his work at the expense of the spirit. In a way this has been a pity, for it has led to an undeserved neglect—not to mention the downright ignominy of being produced here in a dust-jacket bearing the fatal words, “Issued in sealed glacine wrapper to medical and psychological students only.” And this for The Book of the It, which should be on every bookshelf!

  There has been no space in this study to quote the many clinical case-histories with which Groddeck illustrates his thesis as he goes along; I have been forced to extract, as it were, the hard capsules of theory, and offer them up without their riders and illustrations. But it is sufficient to say that no analyst can afford to disregard Groddeck’s views about such matters as resistance and transference any more than they can afford to disregard him on questions like the duration of analysis, the relation of analysis to organic disorders, and the uses of massage. If he wholeheartedly accepted many of Freud’s views there were many reservations, many amendments which he did not hesitate to express. For if Freud’s is a philosophy of knowledge, Groddeck’s is one of acceptance through understanding.

  Another fundamental difference deserves to be underlined—a difference which illustrates the temperamental divergence between Freud and Groddeck as clearly as it does the divergence between the two attitudes to medicine which have persisted, often in opposition, from the time of Hippocrates until today. While Groddeck is campaigning wholeheartedly for the philosophy of non-attachment, he refuses to relinquish his heritage as a European in favour of what he considers an Asiatic philosophy. In his view the European is too heavily influenced by the Christian myth to be capable of really comprehending any other; so it is that his interpretation of the religious attitude to life refers us back to Christ, and if he accepts the Oedipus proposition of Freud, he does not hesitate to say that it seems to him a partial explanation. But Groddeck’s Christ differs, radically from the attenuated portraits which have been so much in favour with the dreary puritan theologians of our age and time.

  Christ was not, neither will he be; He is. He is not real. He is true. It is not within my power to put all this into words; indeed I believe it is impossible for anyone to express truth of this sort in words, for it is imagery, symbol, and the symbol cannot be spoken. It lives and we are lived by it. One can only use words that are indeterminate and vague—that it why the term It, completely neutral, was so quickly caught up—for any definite description destroys the symbol.

  And man, by the terms of Groddeck’s psychology, lives by the perpetual symbolisation of his It, through art, music, disease, language. The process of his growth—his gradual freeing of himself from disease, which is malorientation towards his true nature, can only come about by a prolonged and patient self-study; but the study not of the ego in him so much as of the Prime Mover, the It which manifests itself through a multiplicity of idiosyncrasies, preferences, attitudes, and occupations. It is this thorough-going philosophic surrender of Groddeck’s to the It which makes his philosophy relevant both to patient, to artist, and to the ordinary man. Thus the symbol of the mother on which he lays such stress in his marvellous essay on childhood fuses into the symbol of the crucifixion, which expresses in artistic terms this profound and tragic preoccupation.

  The cross, too, is a symbol of unimaginable antiquity…and if you ask anyone to tell you what the Christian cross may seem to him to resemble, he will most invariably answer “A figure with outstretched arms.” Ask why the arms are outstretched and he will say they are ready to embrace. But the cross has no power to embrace, since it is made of wood, nor yet the man who hangs upon it, for he is kept rigid by the nails; moreover he has his back turned to the cross.…What may that cross be to which man is nailed, upon which he must die in order to redeem the world? The Romans use the terms os sacrum[13] for the bone which is over the spot where the birth-pangs start, and in German it is named the cross-bone, Kreuzbein. The mother-cross longs to embrace, but cannot, for the arms are inflexible, yet the longing is there and never ceases.…Christ hangs upon the cross, the Son of Man, the man as Son. The yearning arms which yet may not embrace are to me the mother’s arms. Mother and son are nailed together, but can never draw near to each other. For the mother there is no way of escape from her longing than to become dead wood…but the Son, whose words “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” gave utterance to the deepest mystery of our human world, dies of his own Will and in full consciousness upon that cross…

  It is in his writings on the nature of art and myths that we can see, most clearly revealed, the kernel of his thought concerning the nature of symbolism and the relation of man to the ideological web he has built about himself; it is here too that one will see how clearly and brilliantly Groddeck interpreted the role of art in society. He is the only psychoanalyst for whom the artist is not an interesting cripple but someone who has, by the surrender of his ego to the flux of the It, become the agent and translator of the extra-causal forces which rule us. That he fully appreciated the terrible, ambivalent forces to which the artist is so often a prey is clear; but he also sees that the artist’s dilemma is also that of everyman, and that this dilemma is being perpetually restated in art, just as it is being restated in terms of disease or language. We live (perhaps I should paraphrase the verb as Groddeck does), we are lived by a symbolic process, for which our lives provide merely a polished surface on which it may reflect itself. Just as linguistic relations appear as “effective beliefs” in the dreams of Groddeck’s patients, so the linguistic relations of symbolism, expressed in art, place before the world a perpetual picture of the penalties, the terror, and magnificence of living—or of being lived by this extra-causal reality whose identity we cannot guess. “However learned and critical we may be,” writes Groddeck, “something within us persists in seeing a window as an eye, a cave as a mother, a staff as the father.” Traced back along the web of affective relations these symbols yield, in art, a calculus of primitive preoccupation, and become part of the language of the It; and the nature of man, seen by the light of them, becomes something more than a barren ego with its dualistic conflicts between black and white. Indeed the story of the Gospels, as reinterpreted in the light of Groddeck’s non-attachment, yields a far more fruitful crop of meanings than is possible if we are to judge it by the dualistic terms of the ego, which is to say, of the will. “Only in the form of Irony can the deepest things of life be uttered, for they lie always outside morality; moreover truth itself is always ambivalent, both sides are true. Whoever wants to understand the Gospel teachings would do well to bear these things in mind.” And Groddeck’s Christ, interpreted as an Ironist, is perhaps the Christ we are striving to reinterpret to ourselves today. There is no room here for the long-visaged, long-suffering historical Christ of the contemporary interpretation, but a Christ capable of symbolising and fulfilling his artistic role, his artistic sacrifice, against the backcloth of a history which, while it can never be fully understood, yet carries for us a deliberate and inexorable meaning disguised in its symbolism.

  If we have insisted, in the course of this essay, on the presentation of Groddeck as a philosopher it is because what he has to say has something more than a medical application. In medicine he might be considered simply another heretical Vitalist, for whom the whole is something more than the sum of its parts: certainly he has often been dismissed as a doctor “who applied psycho-analysis to organic disease with remarkable results.” While one cannot deny his contributions to psychoanalysis, it would not be fair to limit his researches to this particular domain, although the whole of h
is working life was spent in the clinic, and although he himself threw off his writings without much concern for their fate. Yet it would also be unjust to represent him as a philosopher with a foot-rule by which he measured every human activity. The common factor in all his work is the attitude and the It-precept which was sufficiently large as to include all manifestations of human life; it does not delimit, or demarcate, or rigidify the objects upon which it gazes. In other words he refused the temptations of an artificial morality in his dealings with life, and preferred to accord it full rights as an Unknown[14] from which it might be possible for the individual to extract an equation for ordinary living; in so doing he has a message not only for doctors but for artists as well, for the sick no less than for the sound. And one can interpret him best by accepting his It-concept (under the terms of the true-false ambivalence on which he insisted so much) both as truth and as poetic figment. And since Groddeck preferred to consider himself a European and a Christian it would be equally unjust to harp on the eastern religious systems from which the It may seem to derive, or to which it may seem related. (“The power of the eye to see depends entirely on the power of vision inherent in that Light which sees through the eye but which the eye does not see; which hears through the ear, but which the ear does not hear; which thinks through the mind but which the mind does not think. It is the unseen Seer, the unheard Hearer, the unthought Thinker. Other than It there is no seer, hearer, thinker.” Shri Krishna Prem.[15])

  Groddeck would have smiled and agreed, for the principle of non-attachment is certainly the kernel of his philosophy; but the temper of his mind is far more Greek than Indian. And his method of exposition combines hard sane clinical fact with theory in exactly balanced quantities. One has the feeling in reading him that however fantastic a proposition may seem it has come out of the workshop and not out of an ideological hothouse.

  Four books bearing his name have been published in England. Of these the only one which pretends to completeness is The Book of the It;[16] the three other titles are composed of essays and various papers, strung together by his translator. They are The World of Man, The Unknown Self, and Exploring the Unconscious. At the time of writing they are all unfortunately out of print. The first and third volumes contain a thorough exposition of his views on the nature of health and disease; The World of Man contains the unfinished groundwork of his projected study on the nature of pictorial art. The last volume also contains some general art-criticism, but is chiefly remarkable for an essay entitled Unconscious Factors in Organic Process which sets out his views on massage, and contains a sort of new anatomy of the body in terms of psychological processes.[17] Despite the fearfully muddled arrangement of these papers, not to mention a translation which confessedly misses half the poetry and style of the original, these books should all be read if we are to get any kind of full picture of Groddeck’s mind at work.

  Even Groddeck’s greatest opponents in Germany could not but admit to his genius, and to the wealth of brilliant medical observations contained in his books; it is to be sincerely hoped that he will soon occupy his true place in England as a thinker of importance and a doctor with something important to say. It is fourteen years since Groddeck’s death and his complete work is still not available to the general public in England. Why?

  For the purposes of this brief essay, however, I have struck as far as possible to the philosophy behind his practice, and have not entered into a detailed exposition of his medical beliefs and their clinical application; with a writer as lucid and brilliant as Groddeck one is always in danger of muddying the clear waters of his exposition with top heavy glozes and turbid commentaries. In his work, theory and fact are so skillfully woven up that one is always in danger of damaging the tissue of his thoughts in attempting to take it to pieces. I am content if I have managed to capture the ego-It polarity of his philosophy, and his conception of man as an organic whole. But as with everything in Groddeck one feels that manner and matter are so well-married in him that any attempt to explain him in different words must read as clumsily as a schoolboy’s paraphrase of Hamlet. This fear must excuse my ending here with a final quotation.

  Every observation is necessarily one-sided, every opinion a falsification. The act of observing disintegrates a whole into different fields of observation, whilst in order to arrive at an opinion one must first dissect a whole and then disregard certain of its parts.…At the present time we are trying to recover the earlier conception of a unit, the body-mind, and make it the foundation of our theory and action. My own opinion is that this assumption is one we all naturally make and never entirely abandon and, furthermore, that by our heritage of thought, we Europeans are all led to trace a relationship between the individuum and the cosmos.…We understand man better when we see the whole in each of his parts, and we get nearer to a conception of the universe when we look upon him as part of the whole.

  Constant Zarian

  Triple Exile

  1952

  SOME ACCOUNT OF THE WRITINGS of Constant Zarian[1] is long overdue—and would no doubt have long since been given had not the general inaccessibility of his writings in the Armenian language left the common reader in Europe with only a slender sheaf of poems and essays in French by which to judge him. Now, in his sixty-third year, however, he is within striking distance of the European reputation which must follow the forthcoming translation of his books into French and German—and as such he commands the attention of the serious reader in England.

  But fame—or even for that matter recognition—are matters of indifference to this much travelled man of letters who now lives quietly on the island of his choice in the Gulf of Naples, happy in the memory of a long life well spent in travel and friendship, in good living and good writing.

  Zarian was born in the Caucasus, in the province of Shirvan, which, he says somewhere in a biographical note, was “well-known for its poets, roses, nightingales and its periodical earthquakes.” He adds: “So at the very start I absorbed poetry and a certain anxiety from my natal place.” Poetry and anxiety! An auspicious conjunction of qualities for a twentieth-century man! He attended a local school for some years before his parents, who were people of substance and position, decided to send him to France to be educated.

  Paris provided the school, and Brussels the university—but the results of a Western education were to be quite unforeseen by his parents. Zarian emerged from his studies as a promising poet. He joined the group of flourishing young Belgian poets who at this time gathered round Emil Verhaeren,[2] and his first essays in poetry marked him as a young man of determined and forcible talent.

  By now his writings had reached Russia and the Czarist authorities responded to them by forbidding his return; his disgusted family repudiated him; henceforth poetry was to become both a fatherland and a family. At this time his work in French had already earned him a deserved reputation as a writer to be watched. But now came a change.

  He had by this time all but forgotten his native language; “only some of my prayers, learned during childhood, clung with obstinacy to me.” One night after a memorable conversation with Verhaeren he took, on the advice of the elder poet, the decision to re-learn Armenian, and henceforth only to write in his native tongue. At this time the theories about the “autochthonous artist” were very much in the air, and Verhaeren assured him that however well he wrote in French he would always remain a deraciné, a rootless emigrant in French literature. Why should he not become, although an exile, a mouthpiece for his own people? The artist should accept the responsibilities conferred upon him by the native ties of birth and tongue—and by his stars.

  Zarian went to Venice where, on the island of San Lazaro, the monks of the Armenian monastery undertook to teach him his native language and (almost more important) gave him enough work as a translator to enable him to live. In the room, at the very table, where once Byron[3] had started to study Armenian, Zarian undertook this rediscovery of himself. “I realised now,” he writes, “that
language is simply part of the blood that circulates throughout one’s body; one doesn’t learn it, but simply discovers it.” For several years, absorbed in this self-discovery, he remained in Venice perfecting the instrument which he was henceforth to use.

  But it was not enough simply to reclaim the lost power of his native language; as an active and energetic writer with a mission, his duty was to turn his talents towards his own people. But how could he reach them—since he was now a political exile? In 1912 he was to be found in Constantinople, living in the greatest poverty, and gathering round him a group of exiled talents to help him with the foundation of a free literary newspaper written in Armenian. He recognised clearly that a writer’s duty is to devote himself to the field of human values and not to waste his talent on ephemeral political polemic. Politics change; values—the true workshop of the poet—have to be perpetually examined and recreated from new points of view. Their basic substance is unchanged, however, since they deal not with the temporal condition of man but with his unchanging inner disposition. They have to be reworked in every generation—“as bread is always the same but has to be kneaded and composed afresh every day if it is to be palatable.”