James Hillman, An Essay on Pan, in Pan and the Nightmare. Spring Publications, 1972.
(1)
In sum: masturbation may be understood in its own right and from within its own archetypal pattern, condemned neither as substitute behaviour for prisoners and shepherds, as regressive behaviour for adolescents, as recurrence of Oedipal fixations, nor as a senseless compulsion of physiology to be inhibited by the opposite prohibitions of personal relations, religion and society. As masturbation connects us with Pan as goat, it also connects us with his other half, the partie superieure of the instinctual function: self-consciousness. Because it is the only sexual activity performed alone, we may not judge it solely in terms of its service to the species or to society. Rather than focussing upon its useless role in external civilization and procreation, we may reflect upon its usefulness for intern al culture and creativity. By intensifying interiority with joy – and with conflict and shame, and by vivifying fantasy, masturbation, which has no purpose for species or society, yet brings genital pleasure, fantasy and guilt to the individual as psychic subject. It sexualizes fantasy, brings body to mind. intensifies the experience of conscience and confirms the powerful reality of the introverted psyche <…>. By constellating Pan, masturbation brings nature and its complexity back into the opus contra naturam of soul-making.
P. xxxv
(2)
<…> The union of fantasy and behaviour means that there is no pure, no objective behaviour as such. Behaviour may never be taken on its own level, literally. It is always guided by imaginal processes and expresses them. Behaviour is always metaphorical and requires a hermeneutic approach as much as does the most fantastic reverie of mystical vision.
These observations may relieve the term ‘psychopathology’ from having to serve two masters, the legitimate one of psychology and the parasitical one of morality. Moral criteria of behaviour belong to ethics, law and religion, but these fields should not influence the perspectives of psychopathology, whose judgments concerning behaviour are determined less by what, where and with whom actions take place than how. We become more psychopathological when we miss, in this or that segment of our lives, the fantasy in what we are doing or that what we are fantasying is physically happening, even if subtly and indirectly . Instead we literalize, and the metaphor, that which keeps life psychologically intact, breaks apart. As extreme examples we have, on the one hand, literalized fantasy in hallucinations and delusions; on the other, literalized behaviour called psychopathy or behaviour disorder of which rape is sometimes considered a symptom.
We become less psychopathological when we can restore the metaphorical appreciation of what is going on. Therapy speaks of “psychological insight”, which would mean the reconnection of fantasy with behaviour, and the dissolution of literalism through the power of insight. Because law, ethics and religion tend to take behaviour with the same literalism that psychology regards as the origin of psychopathology, these fields must not encroach on ours – more, their judgments arise from the same psychopathological literalism as the behaviour they judge.
P. xxxix – xl
(3)
In our discussion of panic we said that fear is a call to consciousness. The nymphs show this fear in their panicked flight. They are thus showing one of nature’s ways, flight, which is one of the four primary instinctual reactions described by Lorenz. Psychologically, flight becomes reflection, (reflexio), the bending backward and away from the stimulus and receiving it indirectly through the light of the mind. As Jung says about this instinct:
“Reflexio is a turning inwards, with the result that, instead of an instinctive action, there ensues a succession of derivative contents or states which may be termed reflection or deliberation. Thus in place of the compulsive act there appears a certain degree of freedom…
<…>
“Through the reflective instinct, the stimulus is more or less wholly transformed into a psychic content, that is, it becomes an experience: a natural process is transformed into a conscious content. Reflection is the cultural instinct par excellence…” (Coll. Works 8, para. 241-43).
Here Jung has conceptualized the archetypal mytheme of Pan’s chase and the nymph’s flight. The same story is told by Jung’s conceptual fantasy as is expressed by the imaginative fantasy of the tales. In both we find the transformation of nature into reflection, into speech, art and culture (the Muses). In both the base of this transformation is the power of images released by the flight-reaction. In a sense, culture begins in Pan’s compulsion and the flight from him.
Pp. liii – liv
(4)
Pan’s hour was always noon. At this moment he would appear in the blaze and shimmer of midday, startling man and animal into blind terror. This seems to have little to do with the nightmare. Perhaps we need to regard high noon, the zenith of the day, as the highest point of natural strength, which constellates both the life force and its opposite, the necessary fall from this height. It is the uncanny moment when I and my shadow are one. Noon like midnight is a moment of transition and, like midnight, daybreak and sunset, a radix of primordial orientation for what might be called the symbolic clock. These are the moments when time stands still, when the orderly procession of moments disrupts. So must certain things be accomplished before the cock’s crow at dawn, or the stroke of midnight, or before night falls. At these moments time is broken through by something extraordinary, something beyond the usual order. The “Mittagsfrauen” appear, or ghosts at midnight – compare Nietzsche’s vision of the eternal at noon in his Thus Spake Zarathustre. This is the moment when only the moment itself matters, where the moment is severed from before and after, a law unto itself, <…> without continuity and therefore without connection to “…the waste sad time! Stretching before and after”(T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” V).
P. lvi