In this essay, therefore, I wish to deal with symbols as they come to us in psychoanalysis and psychology. After noting the present interest in symbols and myths in these fields, I shall give an example of a symbol in a dream. I wish, then, to present some general observations about symbols and the symbolizing process in psychoanalysis, and to discuss the Oedipus myth in the light of these observations. Finally, I propose to offer some implications about the healing power and function of symbols.

There has been a radical change during the past three decades in this country in the importance of symbols as subjects for discussion and inquiry in psychology and psychiatry. In the 1920s the tendency in these fields was to rule symbols out as much as possible (except a few sign­symbols in science and mathematics), never to raise the topics of symbols or myths if it could be helped, and otherwise to regard symbols as temporary concessions to our ignorance in matters which we should soon be able to describe in clear, rational terms. we left these esoteric topics to the poets and literary critics,. Neither term, symbol or myth, even appears in the index of the standard psychology textbook--written not by a Watsonian behaviorist but by a dynamic psychologist who was certainly enlightened and broad of interest--which my class and many similar classes studied in colleges throughout the country. We tried to he "hard headed" men, as Alfred North Whitehead put it in his essay cited in this volume, who "want facts and not symbols," and who therefore "push aside symbols as being mere make-believes, veiling and distorting that inner sanctuary of truth which reason claims as its own.."

This attitude brought with it a tendency to smile condescendingly at all the diverse meanings Freud claimed he found in so­called symbols in dreams and other subrational processes. In the edition of 1929, Woodworth writes, with amazing naiveté to our and no doubt to his­­ present ears, "A large share of dreams seem too fantastic to have any personal meaning. Yet they are interesting to the dreamer and they would be worth going to see if they could be reproduced and put on the stage. Isn't that sufficient excuse for them? May they not be simply a free play of imagination that gives interesting results just because of its freedom and vividness?" Thus dreams, like symbols, may have an aesthetic, whimsical interest but they are not for us realistic, tough-minded investigators!

This position in psychology was of course an understandable outcome of the proclivity for singling out for study those aspects of human behavior which overlapped with that of animals, and which could ultimately be described in physiological or stimulus­response terms. To the extent, indeed, that the psychologist does thus restrict himself, he can avoid the problem of symbols in his subjects; for as we shall indicate later, symbolizing and symbol­using are unique with human beings. Quite apart from the accuracy or inaccuracy of the above methods (these psychologists blandly evaded the highly intricate symbolic problem in the very concepts, such as S­R, they themselves used), the general upshot of this tendency was a widespread impoverishment and beggaring of our knowledge of man.

The revolutionary change in the middle of our century with respect to psychological interest in symbols is due chiefly to the study of the inner, deeper levels of human experience by Freud, Jung and the other psychotherapists. It is ironic indeed that those psychologists who really had to be "hard­headed," that is, to deal with actual suffering people whose anxiety and distress would not be calmed by abstractions or theories were the ones who could not escape becoming concerned with symbols. Once we were forced to see the patient in relation to his world­-what Freud called his "fate" and "destiny,'" or what the existential psychoanalysts were to call the "being­in­the­world"--we could not overlook symbols, for they have their birth in just that relationship of the inner experience with the outer world, and are indeed the very language of the patient's crises and distress.

Let us now ask what we mean by a symbol. The patient from whom we take this example was a young lawyer who had come for treatment because of recurrent sexual impotence, embarrassing and uncontrollable blushing, and various psychosomatic illnesses which had kept him out of professional school for long periods of time. During the period I happened to be working on this essay he brought in the following dream fragment:

I was standing at the mouth of a cave, with one foot in and one out. The cave inside was dark, almost black. The floor in the center of the cave was a swampy bog, but it was firm on each side. I felt anxiety and a strong need to get out.

This symbol of the cave is less dramatic than dozens of other symbols-- "werewolf'" "tarantula's web," ad infinitum--which come up in the course of any one day's analytic sessions. We present this figure of the cave precisely because it is undramatic and not at all unusual and therefore cannot be relegated to some special literary imagination on the part of our patient. The dream came during a period in his analysis when he was trying to work on his difficulty in making dates with girls; it indeed occurred the night after a day in which he had blushed a good deal, much to his discomfort; felt envy of a colleague who could "pick up" girls, and worried about his own possible homosexual trends. In the session some of his associations to the dream were: "The darkness was like standing under the cables of Brooklyn Bridge, where I kissed a girl the other night." ''The middle of the cave was like quicksand; it would suck you down." "`Cave' reminds me of Plato's story of the cave where men couldn't see reality." "The cave is like a kangaroo's pouch in which it carries the baby." And then, out of the blue' "I can't stand fat women."

Since the meaning of the symbol of the cave was clear on the basis of these as well as numerous other data which he and I already had accumulated, I shall not give more associations. To him and to me this seemed the meaning: the cave is a womb and vagina symbol (the latter less central, for reasons I will not go into), a symbol which brought up before him the threat of being sucked into annihilation, absorbed by his own attachment to his mother (who, needless to say' is fat). The dream pictures him as now standing in a dilemma, wanting and needing the protection and warmth of the mother (the kangaroo's pouch) but realizing that this not only blocks him from seeing reality (Plato's cave) but threatens to suck him like quicksand into a smothering death.

We shall return to the more complex implications of the dream later. Here let us only note several characteristics of this symbol. First, the figure of the cave with its quicksand is infinitely more powerful than the specific words "womb" or "vagina" or such rational, positivistic statements as "I am afraid of being absorbed by my mother's womb," would be by themselves. Indeed, many patients in psychoanalysis try to phrase experiences in these rational statements precisely in order to avoid experiencing the vital power and immediate reality of their situation which the symbol would force them to confront.

The second thing we note about this symbol is that it brings together the various unconscious urges and desire, of both a personal depth on one hand and an archaic, archetypal depth on the other: and it unites these with conscious elements in the young man's day to day struggles with his problems. He would not have had a dream with a symbol which so clearly and forcefully showed his predicament except after several months of analysis. The symbols which arise in psychoanalysis are not, thus, to be viewed as special imaginative productions, but rather as the day-to-day language by which the patient communicates as a totality; he is able to say in the symbol not only what is present in the situation with respect to his problems, but to speak in the same symbol from unconscious depths as well.

In the third place, this symbol presents a picture in which some decision, some orientation toward movement, some action is called for; he has one foot in the cave and one out, and experiences anxiety in his urge to get out. We term this the conative element of the symbol. In my judgment the distinguishing characteristic of genuine symbols which come up as the language of psychoanalysis is that they always involve this orientation toward action. It is not adequate to describe this as an expression of the "repressed wish" alone, or the expression of instinctual impulses from the "Id"; such descriptions refer only to one side of the picture. In its full form the symbol rather presents an existential situation in which the patient is asking himself the questions, "In which direction shall I move?" It is not a question of how will "my wish" or "instinctual urge" or any other part of me move (except in sophisticated patients who have learned that by this language they can avoid the impact of their true symbols) but "in which direction shall I move?" This orientation toward movement obviously involves more than conscious levels of the self; it is by definition a function of the totality of the self; the "wish" from unconscious levels is related in complex, subtle fashion to the "will" from conscious levels, an interplay not to be oversimplified by saying that the former is the infantile, antisocial, and the latter the mature and social. Sometimes just the opposite is the case. Just as one cannot set out consciously to "construct" symbols, so one cannot confront a genuine symbol on merely conscious, rational levels. One must like the patient in the dream, engage it and struggle with it on all levels of affect and willing. The commonly assumed idea in psychoanalysis that "willing' follows "wishing" is only half the truth, and thereby false in implication; it is just as true that the patient cannot become aware of "wishes" until he is ready to take some chance of "willing'" and that he cannot let himself either dream or experience symbols, except as he has become ready in some way to confront the decision posed in the symbol. It may, of course, be many months and perhaps a couple of years--involving thousands of little decisions along the way--before our patient has fully moved beyond the threat of the annihilating maternal womb; but that should not lead us to overlook the fact that the symbol of the cave poses the issue demanding decision, and that some such element, no matter how minute, is present in all genuine symbols arising in psychotherapy.

The final point we note in the young man's dream is that the symbol of the cave cannot be said always to mean "womb" or "vagina" or what not; rather it is given its power and character as a symbol by the total situation of the patient's life at that moment. This patient might dream of a cave in another dream in which it would not be a symbol, or it might have any one of an infinite number of other meanings depending upon his existence at that time. This point is important to emphasize because of some tendency in psychoanalysis to equate given words and symbols with specific meanings. This is a literalistic, fundamentalistic approach, and in my judgment it is inaccurate. This is part of the reason Kahler holds that what Freud calls "symbols" in dreams are really "symptoms'' expressed in images. Kahler goes on to say, in discussing Freud's and Jung's interpretation of symbols, "In all such cases. the actual `symbolization' is done, not by the person in whose unconscious the image arises, but by the analyst through inferential interpretation. To him alone these images are meaningful, just as the physical symptom carries meaning only for somebody who looks for its cause." Kahler's argument is based upon his very important point that some conscious process must always be involved in a symbol. No image can have the power of a symbol if, as it is assumed in dreams, the patient himself is totally unconscious of its meaning. Kahler is right in holding that the equating of specific images and figures with specific meanings is a process occurring in the analyst's mind and depends indeed upon his particular theoretical system.

But the critical issue here is that no symbol of which a patient dreams is ever completely "unconscious." This brings us to a development of our point raised above, namely that, contrary to popular assumption, every dream has its conscious pole. Indeed the matrix out of which the dream is born is precisely the inter-relation, often in struggle and conflict, between the conscious pole of the crises of the day and the unconscious depths within the person. Our young lawyer struggled during the day over his problem of embarrassment, immobilization and impotence with girls; and at night he constructed out of archaic and archetypal material the symbolic picture depicting what this immobilization consisted of. The dream is an "answer" from unconscious levels to a "question" posed by the patient's immediate existence. This is why we always ask, when interpreting a dream with a patient what critical events occurred during the day or evening before the night of the dream; these events are almost invariably essential to our grasping what the dream seeks to tell us. The generally accepted ides that some chance happening "cues off" the dream (Such a penetrating psychologist in other ways, as Nietzsche, makes much of the chance physical events like posture in bed or what one eats before going to sleep) cannot be adequate. If so-called archaic, unconscious elements come up by such accidents, one would indeed be right in questioning whether they have more than whimsical, aesthetic interest! But the "unconscious" levels do not operate hit or miss. We finds in actuality that the dream is an endeavor to work out some way of life, to get some perspective, to picture some "answer" to the issues which confront this person awake and asleep. And the dream has its particular blessing for us in that it is able to answer such questions posed by the patient's predicament by drawing upon the totality of levels of experience, whether we call these levels "subconscious," "preconscious," "unconscious," or what not. The symbol thus does not simply "surge up," as though it were carried within one like a foreign body with which one had no relation. Out of the matrix (or, as Rank would put it, dialectic) of conscious and unconscious the symbol is conceived, molded and born. The symbol is "mothered" by the archaic material in so-called unconscious depths, but "fathered" by the individual's conscious existence in his immediate struggles. Figures like our patient's cave, then, have the genuine meaning of a symbol in the patient's existence, providing we as analysts are able, with him, to read that meaning. Whether or not we can read this meaning does not depend on our theories; their constructive use is rather to show us the wide possible diversity of meanings. It depends rather upon our capacity to participate in his world and to experience the symbol from the point of view of the questions his existence poses for him.

A first observation which clinical work in psychoanalysis forces upon us is that symbols and myths, far from being topics which can be discarded in psychoanalysis forces upon us is that symbols and myths, far from being topics which can be discarded in psychology, are rather in the very center of our psychoanalytic understanding of men. Clinical data supports the thesis that man is uniquely the symbol-using organism, and is distinguished from the rest of nature and animal life by this fact.

The research of the neuropsychiatrist, Kurt Goldstein, graphically demonstrates this point. As director of a large mental hospital in Germany during and after World War I, Goldstein studies many patients with brain lesions, especially soldiers with parts of the cerebral cortex shot away. We observed that these patients could function adequately if their world were shrunken in space and time to correspond to their limited capacities. These patients kept their closets, for example, in compulsive order; if they were placed in environments where objects surrounding them were in disarray, they were at a loss to react adequately and showed profound anxiety. When asked to write their names on a paper, they would write in the extreme corner of the paper-any open space (any "emptiness") representing a threat with which they could not cope.

Now what had broken down in these patients was the capacity for symbolic behavior, the capacity to relate to themselves and their worlds in terms of symbols. They could no longer experience the self over, against, and in relation to a world of objects. To have a self and a world are correlates of the same capacity, and it was precisely this capacity that in these patients was impaired. They lost the capacity, in Goldstein's words, to transcend the immediate concrete situation, to abstract, to think and live in terms of "the possible." Though we can never draw a one-to-one relationship between a specific part of the neurophysical equipment and a specific way of behaving (the organism reacts as a whole or it does not react at all) it is still significant, nevertheless, that the part of the organism which was impaired in these patients was the cerebral cortex. This is the part which most radically distinguishes man, the part which is present in considerable size in human beings but very small or not present at all in animals. Goldstein points out, furthermore, that these patients, in losing the capacity to transcend the concrete situation, lived in a radically shrunken range of possible reactions, and in proportion to this, they therefore lost their psychological freedom.

Another angle from which our point finds confirmation is the genetic. The capacity to use symbols, including language, emerges in the growing infant at the same time as the split between consciousness and unconsciousness and the capacity "to repress" which bulks so large in later psychotherapy. This split is not present at birth; the infant in the first months "knows neither guilt or shame," as Auden puts it. But sometime after the first couple of months we can detect the emerging of this capacity to experience himself as distinguished from the world of objects; separate from people around him, to know himself as the one who has a world. This is generally called "the emergency and development of the ego," I think a not entirely felicitous phrase. For our purposes here it suffices to say that this, when developed in maturity, is my capacity to experience myself as the being who exists and will exist in this world a limited number of months or years and will then die; but the being who, in this period of unknown length, can by virtue of this experience influence how I shall respond. Thus I can exercise some element of freedom and responsibility. Man, as Erwin Straus well puts it, is the being who can question his own being. Not only can, but must; as he must likewise ask questions of the world around him.

Symbols are the language of this capacity for self-consciousness. the ability to question which arises out of and is made necessary by the distinction of subject and object. As Erich Kahler points out, the symbol is a "bridging act," a bridging of the gap between outer existence (the world) and inner meaning; and it arose out of man's capacity to separate inner meaning and outer existence. What is important to see is that a "hard fact" or a description of a "hard fact." can by itself never bridge that gap; all the objective, intellectualized talk in the world with words which have become signs and have lost their symbolic power about the "dangers of morbid dependence on the mother," would not help our young lawyer patient. The only thing that will help him is some breaking through of an expression that will do justice both to the objective situation and the subjective meaning within him. This the symbol of the cave does for him. The psychological essence of the symbol is that it has the power to grasp the person as a totality as he immediately exists in his world.

It follows, thus, that an individual's self-image is built up of symbols. Symbolizing is basic to such questions as personal identity. For the individual experiences himself as a self in terms of symbols which arise from three levels at once; those from archaic and archetypal depths within himself, symbols arising from the personal events of his psychological and biological experience, and the general symbols and values which obtain in his culture.

A second observation impressed upon us by our psychoanalytic work is that contemporary man suffers from the deterioration and breakdown of tile central symbols in modern Western culture. I speak here mainly out of experience with neurotic patients; but it will be self-evident that our patients in psychoanalysis are not suffering from some special ailment but show in their symptoms the general, though not yet overt, predicament in our society. The neurotic is characterized by the fact that his defenses are not as firmly thrown up as those of the majority of people, and he generally possesses some special sensitivities as well as special needs which make him unable to "adjust," so successfully. Therefore the neurotic problems of one decade generally reflect underlying conflicts in the society which the man in the street so far can defend himself against, but which will come out endemically in the society of the next decade.

Now what we find typically in our patients in this decade is that no symbols seem to have compelling power and meaning to grip them any more - not "God" nor "father" nor the "stars and strips." A decade or so ago the symbols related to "competitive success" and "love" did have power to grasp people and elicit their allegiance; but there is reason for believing that these symbols too have lost their power. Our patients do not have to be told that

But the bitterest aspect of their situation is that "blowing on the coals of the heart" also lacks efficacy for them. Since the symbols of love have largely been swallowed up by the needs for security, and the myths of success absorbed by the new myth of the organization man, even these time-honored Western symbols have lost their power. It is not, of course, that our patients have lost the capacity to symbolize, like Goldstein's organic patients; but rather that they have no available contents for their symbols which they can believe in wholeheartedly enough to make commitment of themselves possible. This is a central aspect of the "emptiness" experienced by so many contemporary sensitive persons; they can transcend the concrete situation indeed, but they land in a symbolic vacuum.

Nathan Scott is of course right in his discussion later in this book of the crisis of values in modern literature, that our present situation is that of a "broken center." As Robert and Helen Lynd pointed out in their discussion of the "chaos of conflicting patterns" in the typical American town of Middletown in the 1930's, every individual is caught in a chaos of conflicting patterns, none of them wholly condemned' but no one of them clearly approved and free from confusion; or where the group sanctions are clear in demanding a certain role of a man or woman, the individual encounters cultural requirements with no immediate means of meeting them." Since the 1930's the "chaos of conflicting patterns" seems to have developed toward an absence of patterns. We often observe in our patients that they cannot discover any accepted symbol in their culture these days sufficiently accepted even to fight against!

Let us now make clearer what we mean by the "central cultural symbols" and then refer to the case of our patient. In every society there are certain formative principles which infuse every aspect of that culture - art, science, education, religion. These formative principles are expressed in certain basic symbols and myths which lend form and unity to the culture. Such symbols are the culture's form of transcending the immediate situation; they will always be bound up with the fundamental values and goals accepted in the society. Tillich uses the expression "style" for these underlying unifying principles in a given culture; Malinowski used to refer similarly to the "charter" of the society. This "style" will always have a religious dimension since it points to a meaning beyond the immediate situation of the culture.

We may, for examples following Tillich, propose "circle" as a symbol for classical Greek culture. We can see this "circular form resplendent in Greek sculpture (in radical contrast to the later Gothic vertical lines and the Baroque horizontal lines). We can find this "circle" in philosophy in the emphases on balance and perfect eternal movement, and in such precepts as the golden mean and "nothing in excess." And it is so emblazoned in the spirit of Greek architecture that no one could possibly miss it. During several years of living in Greece I was continually struck by the circles of the islands rising out of the sea, the circular promontory of Salamis stretching away below Athens, the low round curves of the hills encircling Athens, all rising up in concentric circles to include the Acropolis and its Parthenon, a monument of dignity and magnificence that itself seemed to grow directly and organically out of the unending curves of the land and sea.

If we seek a geometric symbol for the Middle Ages, I would propose the "triangle." Mont St. Michael rises in a vast triangle, constructed partly by the rock of nature and partly by the marble hewn by man, ascending up from the ocean toward heaven. The triangle is reflected also in Gothic architecture in general and is present in the concept of the "trinity" so basic to medieval philosophy and theology.

When we ask what the central symbol is in the middle of the twentieth century, I do not have to hesitate long as I look out of the window of my office in the city of New York. I see a sea of skyscrapers, each one surging upward from its narrow base, utilizing nature not to be united with but simply to stand upon, each building rising upward not for spiritual purposes but for achievement, getting to "the top, the spirit of moving "onward and upward" every month and every year, surging on and on not to infinity or heaven but caught in the perpetual motion of the everlasting upward drive of finiteness. The skyscrapers outside my window are a beautiful form of art indeed, and I do not wish to disparage the marvelous use of concrete and steel and aluminum with such power and lace-like delicacy. But what is the underlying meaning of a symbol that "scrapes" a sky which is never there? This standing on nature in order to move forever away from nature, upward toward "a top" which never exists, is obviously parallel to the competitiveness in business life and is reflected in the mottos on the fronts of the churches among those skyscrapers, "How to Be Happier and Happier." It is revealed, too, in the restlessness, frustration, and often despair of our patients and countless other people living in the shadows of these vertical shafts of aluminum power.

The psychological symbols and values which go along with this are, of course, those of competitive success and achievement. In late decades, however, as Riesman in The Lonely Crowd classically demonstrated, the inherent contradictions in these values too became more and more evident. The ethical aspects of the modern "style" have been through the last four centuries associated with the humanistic and Hebrew-Christian traditions. Now these values, it is generally agreed, are in process of radical disintegration and transition. This makes the psychological task of modern man much more difficult as he struggles to find and work out not only symbols by which he can relate to his world but also symbols by which he can know himself and work out his own identity.

When the transcendent symbols in the culture lose their cogency, furthermore, the individual's personal symbols, including biological and sexual symbols, seem to lose their power or be thrown into self-contradiction all down the line as well. Let us note again the cave symbol brought by our patient. The positive side of such a symbol would be the protection and warmth that one has a right to expect of the "womb," or the encompassing love associated with a loving mother's healthy relation to her child. When a typical patient from exurbia, let us say, exhibits in a psychotherapeutic session the desire for such mothering, we would ask the question, to ourselves if not to him, "Why not?" For we can assume that accepting the healthy aspect of this maternal form of love will proceed hand in hand with his capacity to get over the morbid dependency. In other words, what keeps him from being able to experience a cave without quicksand? But what we typically find is that our exurban executive fights, as though his life depended on it, against letting any woman, his wife included, mother him at all. This does not depend on whether or not the wife is dominating and exploitative (as was the mother of our lawyer patient) but rather upon the man's own inner inability to accept the mothering. The assertive, dominating roles are so often given to the woman in our culture described as "momism," our "new matriarchy," and so on) that the exurban man does not know how to orient himself or by what standards and symbols to establish his own conviction of strength. Our young lawyer, for example, reported one day that he was impotent with a girl until he could hint to her that he had made a good deal of money recently on the stock market; then he became suddenly sexually potent. This confirmation of his strength as a competitive middle­class man enabled him to feel on an even level, at least for the time being, with the powerful woman "queen." But soon these values and symbols also no longer worked, for he discovered, as anyone must in our present decade of organization men, that it is now demode to get ahead and that he encounters resentment and hostility from those below him, even from the women. The symbols associated with love lose their power to give potency in a period when love is more and more identified with security. For how can one enjoy potency with the very woman who is also his source of security, and when sexual potency also is measured in terms not of his own joy and strength but of his power to satisfy the "queen" as gauged by her reaction to and "grading" of his efforts? This rough schema is related to many diverse problems which come up in psychoanalysis, from impotence and internalized aggression on one end to such psychosomatic symptoms as ulvers on the other.

What do modern people, using our patients for our data still, do when they experience this vacuum of symbols and values? By and large, they try to fill the vacuum with tools rather than symbols, They seize on signs and techniques borrowed from the scientific and mechanical spheres. It is not surprising, for example, that a plethora of books on sexual technique and methods comes out at just the time when people have difficulty experiencing the power of their own emotions and passions with the sexual partner. It makes sense to them to borrow technical symbols, for the symbols and values connected with science and technical prowess seem to most people in our day to be the least open to contradiction. True, tools and symbols have a somewhat analogous function. Tools are the method of communicating with nature, Kahler tells us; they are aids toward the transcending of the immediate situation with respect to nature. But the trouble from the psychological side is that when tools and techniques are substituted for genuine symbols, subjectivity is lost. The person may establish some power over nature (say, power over his own body, which our patients often desperately seek); but he does so at the price of separating himself ever more fully from nature, including his own body. When emphasis beyond a certain point is placed upon technique in sexuality, the person finds that he has separated himself all the more from his own affects, from his own spontaneity and joy and the surging up of his own experience of potency. This means that the substituting of tools and techniques for symbols short-circuits his own search for potency; and in the long run adds to his feeling of emptiness. In my judgment the most serious moral issue facing modern psychoanalysis is the tendency inherent in psychoanalysis itself to play into the patient's need - and our need in the whole society ­ to perceive ourselves and others in terms of the newly accepted psychological techniques, and to make ourselves over in the image of the machine.

Our third observation is that the breakdown of these transcendent cultural symbols and values is fundamentally related to the emergence in our day of what we call psychoanalysis. This point needs to be emphasized because of the tendency among many psychoanalysts, particularly of the central Freudian stream, to hold that psychoanalysis is to be understood as the discovery of a new method of diagnosis and a new method of treatment, roughly analogous to the way penicillin and the other antibiotics were discovered in the biological sciences. Granted the importance of Freud's great contribution in making the phenomena of dreams and other unconscious phenomena amenable to the methods of Western science and his revolutionary influence on the image of man, - contributions which will endure in literature and science - it is nevertheless true that psychoanalysis was called forth by certain historical crises. Chief among these was the disintegration of the symbols and myths in our age of transition which left the individual in the position in which he could not orient himself or find his identity in accord with these symbols or in rebellion against them.

When we look at other historical periods from this perspective, we note that concern with such problems as anxiety, despair, overt and endemic forms of neurotic guilt, and activities like psychoanalysis designed to help individuals meet such problems, emerge in the disintegrating. transitional phases of the historical period and not in the phases when the symbols and myths of the culture possess strength and unifying power. For example, in reading Plato and Aristotle and other writers of the classical fifth and fourth centuries in Greece, we find it almost impossible to discover any references to anxiety as we know it today. Socrates discusses death and fear of death in the Apolouia and Phaedo, but he is confident throughout that given moral virtue and the right ideas death can be confronted without anxiety. Plato comes close to describing anxiety in a passage in the Republic when he talks of a man's lying awake at night in dread of dying; but he states as though it were self-evident that if this man has no wrong on his conscience, that is, has not cheated anybody in financial dealings, he will have Hope and therefore no fear of dying and going on into the next world. (And Alephas, who makes this speech in the dialogue, adds that the chief value of having money is that you are then able to avoid cheating others; to which Socrates agrees!) We can find nothing here of modern Angst which falls on the good man not only as much as, but often more than, the bad; the rich man as well as the poor. Objective "fear" is present, to be sure, and discussed by Plato and Aristotle; but such fear by very definition is precisely not anxiety. The whole aura of these times makes one know he is in a different psychological and spiritual world from our own.

To be sure, anxiety, guilt and despair are presented in the dramas, and hence we tend to see Aeschylus' Oresteia and Sophocles' Oedipus from the point of view of our modern guilt and conflict. But there is a radical difference, obvious to anyone who views the actual modern interpretations of these myths, say Sartre's Flies and Robinson Jeffers' Tower Beyond Tragedy. The difference is in the aura of objectivity in the Greek dramas, the assumption of the presence of accepted conditions of man's relation to himself, his fellows and the gods; and though Aeschylus and Sophocles, and the other creative spirits of their era, are engaged in molding the symbols, and changing, struggling and fighting against accepted attitudes and aspects of the myths, at least the symbols and myths were there to fight against in the first place.

Now in this classic phase of Greek culture we notice that the problems which are dealt with in psychoanalysis in our modern world seem to be taken care of by a kind of "normal" psychotherapy operating spontaneously through the accepted practices in Greek drama, religion, art and philosophy. It is not difficult for a modern psychoanalyst to imagine the great abreactive effect on some person burdened with guilt feelings because of hostility toward an exploitative mother, who watches, let us say, the public performance of the drama in which Orestes kills the mother who had destroyed his father, is then pursued over hill and dale by the punishing Erinyes (who, since they track evil-doers and inflict madness would seem psychologically to be symbols of guilt. and remorse), and finally achieves peace when he is forgiven by the community and the gods. I do not mean, of course, that these therapeutic experiences would be consciously articulated by the citizen of Greece in the fifth century B.C. Indeed, our point is that just the opposite was true, that 'therapy'? was part of the normal, unarticulated functions of the drama, religion and other forms of communication of the day. One gets the impression in these classical periods of education rather than re-education, of normal development of the individual toward integration rather than desperate endeavors toward re­integration.

But in the subsequent decline of Hellenic culture, after the conquest of Greece by Alexander and later by the Romans and the dispersion of Greek culture to Asia Minor and Rome, we note a sharply different situation with respect to the problems of anxiety, despair, and guilt. In this Hellenistic period we find plenty of descriptions of anxiety; Plutarch paints a vivid picture of an anxious man which has entirely the ring of Angst. The numerous philosophical schools which had sprung up by that time­­ the Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Cyreniacs, Hedonists, along with the traditional Platonists and Aristotelians­­ not only now deal with the problems with which we are familiar in psychoanalysis but their concepts and manner of teaching have dramatic parallels to modern psychotherapy. Note, for example, the Epicurean doctrine of Ataraxia, a seeking to achieve tranquillity of mind by rationally balancing one's pleasures, and the Stoic doctrine of Apatheia the passionless calm attained by being above conflicts of emotion. Their teachings may not be good therapy from our modern cultural viewpoint, (the lectures of Hegasias in Alexandria had to be prohibited by Ptolemy because they caused so many suicides") But content of "good" or "bad" is not the point; for the content of repressions, and therefore what needs to be brought out to achieve "wholeness," varies radically from culture to culture. What is significant about these diverse schools in the Hellenistic period is that they took the form of psychological and ethical systems designed to help the individual find some source of strength and integrity to enable him to stand securely and gain some happiness in a changing society which no longer lent him that security. The term "failure of nerve" which Gilbert Murray used for the second and first centuries B.C. could be used for any period which is in the throes of basic transition and change. This change and disunity is not primarily a political phenomenon. (Athens in the Hellenistic period had relative peace and the Golden Age, at least in its last thirty years when Athens and Sparta fought continuously, did not.) The question rather is whether the transcendent symbols, the "style" of the culture, move toward unity or are in the process of transition and disintegration.

A society furnishes means for its members to deal with excessive guilt, anxiety and despair in its symbols and myths. When no symbols have transcendent meaning, as in our day, the individual no longer has his specific aid to transcend his normal crises of life, such as chronic illness, loss of employment, war, death of loved ones and his own death, and the concomitant anxiety and guilt. In such periods he has an infinitely harder time dealing with his impulses and instinctual needs and drives, a much harder time finding his own identity, and is prey thus to neurotic guilt and anxiety.

My point is that our historical situation in the last of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is likewise one of breakdown of transcendent symbols and has the above features. The emergence of psychoanalysis and its widespread popularity in America reflects this breakdown. Psychoanalysis is an activity which occurs in a culture when such symbols disintegrate; and it has the practical purpose of helping individuals endure, live and hopefully fulfill their creative potentialities despite this situation. This does not deny that we may learn a great deal of basic truth about man in his times of crisis, his periods of being robbed of the protection of his symbols and myths. It does imply, however, that in a culture which attains some unity--in a community toward which, if we survive, many of us feel we are heading-- the therapeutic functions will become more widely a normal and spontaneous function of education, religion and family life. This unity will be expressed in symbol and myth.

The healing power of the symbol and myth has two aspects. This power resides, on one hand, in the fact that the symbol and myth elicit and bring into awareness the repressed, unconscious, archaic urges, longings, dreads, and other psychic content. This is the regressive function of symbols and myths. But on the other hand, the symbol and myth reveal new goals, new ethical insights and possibilities; they are a breaking through of greater meaning which was not present before. The symbol and myth in this respect are ways of working out the problem on a higher level of integration. This we call the progressive function of symbols and myths.

The tendency in Freudian psychoanalysis has been almost universally to reduce the latter to the former, and to treat myths in terms of regressive phenomena, which are then "projected" into ethical and other forms of meaning in the outside world. The upshot of this is that the integrative side of myths and symbols is lost. This is shown in the great emphasis on Oedipus Tyrannus and the total omission of Oedipus at Colonus.

Symbols and myths are means of discovery. They are a progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and our own existence, a revealing of new ethical norms. Symbols thus are educative­ e­ducatio­­ and by drawing out inner reality they enable the person to experience greater reality in the outside world as well. We have shown in this paper that the inner reality is revealed by virtue of the fact that the symbol and myth are able to draw out content on the various levels of "preconscious", "subconscious," and "unconscious" and that this is done with the affects of these experiences united with their perceived, cognitive form. But now we want to emphasize the side that is generally overlooked, that these symbols and myths discover for us a reality outside as well. They are roads to universals beyond discrete concrete experience. For example, such supposedly simple symbols as geometric forms, triangles or parallelograms or what not, were at one time painted on the neolithic pottery because we may assume, the forms had some relation to harmony and balance as the individual experienced it and therefore gave him some delight; but at the same tine these geometric forms reflected nature in the relations of stars and sun and moon to earth, and were mathematical symbols by which secrets of nature were revealed.

To turn again to our patient's symbol of the cave before bidding it adieu, we can now see how his growing relation to this symbol would both draw out repressed aspects of his own psychic experience and would also reveal and make necessary new forms in his relations with the outside world. His confronting and experiencing of this symbol in psychoanalysis ­ his seeing ''the cave" in fantasy, dwelling on it, turning it over in his contemplations with the disgust, anger, yearning, dread which could not be separated from it ­ would give him a greater awareness of his neurotic attachment to his mother and his desire to be carried by her as in a kangaroo's pouch. It would also give him greater awareness and experience of his neurotic anxiety connected with this: his fear of being sucked into annihilation in the quicksand bog. This kind of fantasy and the memories which go along with it often bring strong abreactive experiences in analysis; this is the point where Freud's idea of abreaction comes into its own and I have found it very useful. It is often good to help the patient live through as vividly as possible the great terror he must often have experienced in infancy and early years in this yearning to be encompassed by his mother but "knowing" (on subtle and certainly not centrally conscious levels) that his very desire would smother him and suck him into destruction.

Now the next steps in enlarged consciousness would be his insight into the fact that his blushing is related to his desire to be sucked into the womb, which he both wants and dreads; and the insight that his impotence is a way of withdrawing from the vagina lest he be trapped for good. It is terribly painful to be impotent, but it is better to be impotent than dead. He is not afraid of castration in the sense that he would lose his penis; he would lose a lot more than that, namely his individuality and total existence in this absorption into the bog.

So far most analysts and therapists of various schools would roughly agree, though they would use their own terms. But now we must bring out that as the patient works the above experiences through, it becomes evident that he has never gotten, and does not now receive, the normal dependence, love and protection which every human being not only has a right to have but absolutely needs for his survival, particularly in the early years of infant development. The question then arises as to why he is unable to let himself have warmth, protection, acceptance not only from new women (not the actual mother) but from other relationships in life itself. The possibility of his experiencing this question in self­consciousness ­ a step I would expect only some months after the first confrontation of the cave ­ already asks for some integration, some readiness for constructive steps. It is an error to view these stages in psychoanalysis as "automatic," or as results of "transference" or "relationship" of "communication" by themselves; I am convinced that as much attention needs to be paid to the integrative problems as to the regressive, and they are simultaneous, even though the latter may seem, at least on paper, to precede the former.

This "accepting of acceptance" is a very difficult task for modern man. It implies that he himself accepts others: our young lawyer can scarcely permit himself to accept and enjoy the warmth and protective qualities of love if he continues to view all women as prostitutes. So the symbol of the cave now implies the problem of Mitwelt, the reciprocity of attitudes in relation to one's fellowmen - what Paul Ricoeur calls "the problem of justice." But the patient does not stop even here. The side of the symbol relating to normal, constructive warmth and acceptance brings with it ultimate assumptions about existence itself: to what extent can one's existence be trusted, to what extent are we thrown; to what extent inseparably strangers to each other? I do not at all mean the patient will discuss philosophy or theology; if he does this very much, the odds are that some "resistance" is in process. I only mean that he cannot avoid coming to terms with ultimate considerations in his relation to his own existence, and willy-nilly he chooses for himself some essential presuppositions. This would be the "faith" on the basis of which he proposes to leap, to take his chances in love and other aspects of life from here on out. It is only on the basis of some such faith that the individual can genuinely accept and overcome the earlier infantile deprivations without the continued harboring of resentment all through life, which has the effect of holding him back in the future. In this sense the past can be accepted and does not block the future.

There are infinite subtleties and critical contradictions in this process, and every individual, certainly every patient, needs to make the journey in his own unique way. A concomitant process all along the way will be that his neurotic anxiety is transmitted into normal anxiety, his neurotic guilt into normal, existential guilt. And in this form both can be used constructively as a broadening of consciousness and sensitivity. We have sought to show that the journey is made by means of symbols and myths, and that the symbol and myth thus have not only an archaic, regressive side out an integrative, progressive, normative side as well.