Sam Laeuchli
Ever since the falling out between Freud and Jung, psychoanalytic writers have generally taken either a Freudian or Jungian position about the meaning and value of religious symbols and experience. The myth is no exception. The Freudian view is predominantly archaeological—every myth is a concentrate of protohuman horrors. The Jungian view is more teleological—myth is a testament to purpose larger than individual intentionality.
The mimetic enactment of myth, which serves the cause of both myth research and depth psychology, can generate experience that integrates the two viewpoints. The opposed ambitions of archaeology and teleology give way to very different levels of experience and explanation.
We developed Mimesis, an institute for mythic play, on the basis of a theoretical question: Could we enter myth more deeply, more intensely, could we learn more about its quality and mystery, by playing it, rather than by merely analyzing it rationally? Gradually, we developed a method of investigation that allows both hermeneutic and therapeutic access to myth through the vehicle of depth psychology.
We are not speaking here of psychodrama, a therapeutic technique credited to J. L. Moreno, in which participants act out scenes from their fantasies or their real-life situations. The Mimesis process has its origins, rather, in the healing drama at the Sanctuary of Asklepius. The medieval mystery play also incorporates mimetic principles, as does poetry, drama, and literature in general.
As we worked with a process of mythic play, we came to realize its therapeutic and depth-psychological potential.1 To re-enact a myth is to gain entry into the depth dimension not only of our own experience as individuals, but of our tradition as a culture. As a path of hermeneutic and therapeutic exploration, Mimesis permits both spontaneity and purpose, a mixture of conscious and unconscious activity. Projection and identification quickly come into play, and at the same time, the opportunity to use distance and denial. Insights arise unexpectedly. The process can seem quite innocent, but it is a tinderbox of unacknowledged tensions and feelings, including deceit, rage, and the struggle for power.
We use Mimesis in various ways: in seminars at universities, in therapeutic group work with patients, in workshops, at seminaries, and at churches.
When we use Mimesis, we first describe the process and choose a myth familiar to our participants—for example, the story of Adam and Eve, the myth of the Fall. This particular story has four players—a nice example of the quaternity that Jung discerned in myths involving “wholeness.” In the middle stands the tree, the axis mundi, the central symbol of the myth of the Fall.
We ask for volunteers to play the four principals. Individuals choose a particular role for a variety of reasons. Often it is a role they need or want to work through, involving an issue that they have not resolved or are in the process of resolving. Most of the time, though, the reasons for that choice are unconscious. The player may in fact deny that the role relates to or accords with something in his or her personality or life history.
A man and a woman have been created to live in paradise. How does it feel to live nude in this beautiful oasis called Eden? Players rarely draw from literature or film to describe what is happening to them. Instead, they feel their way into their parts and create their own paradise. They name the world and watch the rivers flow. “It is a gorgeous place,” they tell us. We detect a longing in them for something possessed a long time ago; a poetic vision of past happiness, a childhood fantasy, perhaps, of remaining in their parents’ garden for a lifetime. Most players pretend to be happy here, although an occasional performer cannot tolerate the paradisiacal bliss and will protest the scenario from the outset. In this way, the myth begins to work even before the tragic drama has come about.
And the tragedy does happen. Adam and Eve tell us that something bizarre is going on. God has put them here and planted a tree, but he has forbidden them to eat from it! Even as they say this, their words carry an undertone that cannot be missed: Why shouldn’t they eat the fruit of this tree? Why would God plant a tree right in front of them, tease them with the promise of knowledge, then threaten them with death if they go after it? The elements of human tragedy are already in place, long before the snake makes its appearance. The players almost invariably understand themselves to have been manipulated. The drama of rebellion is set in motion.
It takes only a few minutes, then, of such an enactment for tension to rise in the room. The realization of what is happening comes as a shock. The harmony of the garden has been disturbed by an insistent question: If God does not want Adam and Eve to eat from that tree, why did he plant it there in the first place? The assumed meaning of the myth—that Adam and Eve disobeyed a loving God and were banished from the garden for their sin—becomes a converse suspicion that the two were betrayed, manipulated into eating the fruit. It occurs to some participants that planting the tree, and at the same time prohibiting the man and woman from eating its fruit, is not the act of a loving God; it is an act of violence.
We ask Adam and Eve to talk about their plan of action. The prohibition has forced them to a choice. But Adam is passive. Eve makes all the choices; Adam simply follows her lead. At the end, he will accuse her of having led him astray. This dynamic often leads to discussions among the participants about the masculine fear of the mother, and about passive-aggressive male behavior in a patriarchal culture. The audience usually becomes enraged by Adam’s need to hide behind Eve’s decision making. Again, the assumed meaning of the text is called into question. The audience credits Eve with curiosity and initiative, not with being a temptress.
Now God enters the picture. We introduce him politely, saying that he has graciously accepted our invitation to answer questions. The audience reacts cautiously at first, with a mixture of awe, respect, and perhaps fear of authority and religious tradition. But the questions quickly increase, and they become angry: “Why did you plant this tree? You’re God, you created all this! Why did you say it was very good when you knew the humans would fail your test?”
The discussion has become deadly serious. Whoever plays God can choose his or her role and metaphysic, just as all theologians and philosophers have done for centuries in an attempt to cull meaning from the drama of life. God can indulge in self-justifications, can choose to be understanding, arrogant, pejorative, apologetic, or sadistic. Sometimes the player is rational or distant—or defiant: “Hey, I was bored!” He can be defensive, abdicate responsibility, or deceive us. He may even want to forget this story.
The answers become part of another symbolic code describing the dilemmas of power, the problems of triangulation. The questioners have long ceased talking about Genesis, and there is nothing abstract about the discussion. They are dealing with their own personal lives and feelings. The rebellion, sexuality, and aggression of the tale of Genesis has become their own.
The last character is now introduced: the snake. For many participants, this character is the epitome of evil: clever, arrogant, callous. Frequently the most cunning of the four, the snake is witty, shrewd and conniving; but he is also aggressive, bright, and incisive. The snake often plays the part with sexual innuendo, flirts with Eve, cultivates her cynicism even as he blandishes her with compliments. Frequently there is an open conflict between the snake and Adam. The sexual, at times homosexual, undertones of the Genesis tale come to the surface in these exchanges.
Finally, we ask the snake to talk with God. This is the most troubling scene. It may take the form of a tart battle of wills, the dance of a chess game, or a contest of feigned submission and manipulation. Whatever form it takes, it usually recalls the opening scene of Job or Faust—a deadly game played by God and Counter-God whose effects are suffered in the created world.
In a session at Temple University, a vivacious woman from the Black ghetto of Philadelphia played the snake. She had little training in myth and psychology, but as she sat before God, she experienced something like a revelation: She felt her anger rise: “You could not have created the world without me!” she told him. God, played by a bright graduate student in religion, became enraged; his academic knowledge availed him nothing in the face of her clarity of perception. She laughed, her eyes shone, and her body was like that of a victorious dancer: “I snatched the coals out of the fire for you!!” At the end she almost wept: “You take credit for that creation of yours, but if I hadn’t done the dirty work, you would not have it today! No cities. No healing. Least of all Jesus Christ!!”
This woman was not familiar with the concept of the Shadow or with the god Shiva. She had never studied the Kahbalah or Faust: yet she felt herself “a part of that power which always wants to destroy and always creates the good.” She had spontaneously created Mephistopheles. In a creative spontaneous act, she experienced that union of opposites, the conflict of values with which philosophers had struggled for centuries.
In the end, all four characters pay a price. For the man and the woman, it is the pain of childbirth and hard labor, the enmity between the woman and the snake, and the angel barring the door to paradise. They all accuse each other. The man accuses the woman, the woman the snake, the snake God. God loses the unspoiled goodness of his creation, the humans lose their place in the garden, and the snake will be trampled by the woman’s offspring and crawl on his belly all his life. The soil itself is cursed.
Here we stop the enactment and open a discussion. Many express their feelings about the degree to which the scenes are all about power—parental authority or political manipulation. There is a feeling of anger in the room. People want to know why God would plant a tree and then prohibit his people from eating its fruit. The obvious analogy between parent and God has given the story a different meaning. Why is God attempting to create guilt in his children? Is he contending with unconscious issues of his own?
And what is the purpose of the snake? To protect God from blame in this tragedy? Maybe God cannot bear the responsibility for the fate of his creation. Someone asks: “Did God create the snake?” “Of course,” another answers. “Then God is responsible for the Fall!” “No he isn’t,” comes a protest. The group is agitated. “The absurd logic of religion,” someone else observes. “No,” yet another objects, “not of religion, but of life!”
How does a spontaneous process so quickly draw us into the depth of the myth? One answer is that creation and destruction are so intimately linked in it that we are confronted with that fundamental split in ourselves. But our purpose is not to discuss problems theoretically; it is to share experiences, express fear, and protect ourselves from the adverse reactions that might be touched off by the re-enactment of the story.
In order to examine the dynamic of this Genesis scene, we then use another version of the Adam and Eve story, this one written in the French vernacular by an unknown twelfth-century author. In this text, quoted by Erich Auerbach,2 Adam and Eve speak in the everyday language of medieval France. We follow suit by recreating the scene in contemporary language and context: a modern Adam and a modern Eve. We ask the players to be Adam and Eve as children. Their parents have gone out, having warned them not to eat the delicious cake on the kitchen table.
The modern scene can be staged in various ways—with teenagers, for example, at a party, where the parents have forbidden them to watch a certain video. “You can watch any of my tapes,” the father says, “but not the one on the table.”
The “teenage” players inevitably presume that the prohibited video contains sexually explicit material. This sets the stage for a classic scenario involving prohibition, control, guilt, and desire. Eventually, the group recognizes that the parental figures in each scene are either preventing the children from growing up—or forcing them to grow up by instigating selfconscious disobedience.
We would like to add some observations at this point about the hermeneutic task, the process of understanding; and the therapeutic task, the process of healing, both of which are part of Mimesis.
The enactment of the Biblical tale—the transformation of the mythic code into analogous scenes—is one way to enter the myth and to experience its power. Myth is understood as it is being transformed, played out in analogy. Analogy allows for a plurality of interpretation, without compromising the original tale’s integrity. Analogies also provoke us to ask questions and compel us to formulate explanations. However, the analogies and explanations are themselves part of the same mystery we encounter in the original tale. Theory becomes intertwined with the drama, but remains subordinate to it.
Of course, myth always invites theoretical conceptualization; yet, like art and symbolic expressions, it is not a concept. We cannot really understand myths by formulating theories about them. Otherwise we would not need them at all; the concepts would suffice.
Mimesis transforms the data of myth into re-enactment. Psychotherapists know that without experiencing our problems in the very act of reliving and transforming them, we can have no genuine connection to their sources and purpose. One can write papers on “shame” and “guilt,” yet have no idea what they mean, unless one has experienced their full force— as experiences. The mimetic re-enactment reveals a similar experiential dynamic at work in myths.3
Mimetic play gives us access to a wealth of unconscious experiences, to the numinous and healing worlds of image and feeling that exist below or beyond the surface of historical events and societal interactions. When we engage in spontaneous re-enactment, no matter what its specific expression is, the undercurrents of family and society, of personality and politics are always present. Whatever else the concept of “archetype” may refer to, something transcendent and suprapersonal is experienced when we enact a myth spontaneously.
We once led a workshop in which two young teenagers acted out the Old Testament scene where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. God was angrily c