Abstract
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that all variants [of a myth] should be taken into account. . . . There is no true version of which all the others are but copies or distortions. Every version belongs to the myth.
Created in Our Own Images.com, which includes an introduction and first chapter by its editor, Fred Sander, in addition to a three-act play and six essays, was edited for a general audience to introduce a variety of communities to the continuing relevance of psychoanalytic ideas in a rapidly changing era. Sander writes that as both a psychoanalyst and a couples and family therapist he has repeatedly listened to patients “express the wish that the person(s) they are living with change in accordance with the images they have of each other” (p. 16). He calls this aspect of family relationships the Pygmalion-Galatea process—the Pygmalion myth being an expression of our wish to create others in the images we would like them to possess. This desire, including fantasies of creation and rebirth, is ubiquitous as a potential aspect of clinical psychoanalysis—for analysand and analyst alike. (Sander, contrasting this process to the “Michelangelo phenomenon,” the generative process of seeking to find the real statue within the block of stone, points to the difficulty in distinguishing the two.)
In Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the first extant version of the myth, Pygmalion is a sculptor unable to love any of the women on Cyprus, whom he perceives as uniformly immoral. As God created Eve from Adam’s rib, Pygmalion carves a beautiful ivory woman. Venus answers his prayers that this statue be brought to life. Pygmalion and Galatea marry and have a child, Paphos. Since Ovid’s time, this story has found its way into visual art, literature, and drama. Yet, psychologically powerful as its many renditions attest, the myth has not entered the psychoanalytic lexicon as have the stories of Oedipus and Narcissus. Sander seeks to remedy this through the publication of this book, which focuses on how, as individuals and as a species, we seek to replicate ourselves. He includes as the book’s centerpiece W. S. Gilbert’s 1876 comedy, Pygmalion and Galatea. The play is followed by six essays that explore, from a variety of perspectives, our wish to reproduce, or copy, ourselves. The majority of these essays concern the question of genetic engineering. As Sander writes in his introduction, “We are now on the frontier . . . of creating ourselves in our own images in ways that have never before been possible. . . . Biological engineering will raise questions and influence the answers to ‘what does it mean to be human?’” (pp. 24, 7). Even before biological engineering existed, many versions of the Pygmalion story, including Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” (1843), ended ambiguously, suggesting that the wish to create another in our own image may be inherently problematic psychologically.
In Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea, which Sander reports was his most successful play, Pygmalion is an Athenian sculptor married to Cynisca. The couple have been unable to have children, but are happy together, and Cynisca serves as his model. In fact, his studio is full of copies of her. One day Cynisca leaves for the day to pray to Artemis for children. She urges Pygmalion, who fears loneliness, to find solace in contemplating one of the many reproductions of her in his studio. While she is gone, one of the stone copies—younger and more beautiful than Cynisca is now—comes to life and falls in love with her creator. At first Pygmalion is thrilled at having developed the capacity to create life. Next, smitten by Galatea’s beauty, he sits “sinfully” with her (p. 48). Before he and Cynisca married, they had vowed to Artemis that should either be unfaithful, the wronged partner would gain the power to blind the other. On Cynisca’s return, she discovers the betrayal and blinds her husband. However, in the play’s final act, she forgives him, his sight is restored, and Galatea is turned back to stone.
In his opening essay, Sander explains that he chose to include Gilbert’s adaptation of the Pygmalion myth because it both anticipates psychoanalysis and “metaphorically resonates with the 21st century of genomic medicine” (p. 4). Galatea, he believes, embodies Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality. As a newborn, she is highly sexual, keenly aware of her bodily sensations. Moreover, oedipal wishes and the need for repression are played out in the love between Pygmalion and Galatea. This relationship is, in effect, incestuous, and Pygmalion is punished for it by blindness—or castration. Galatea’s passion for her maker has preoedipal aspects as well. As an infant might with her mother, she longs to be only and always with him. Narcissism, too, is explored. Pygmalion hands Galatea a mirror and she instantly falls in love with herself: “How beautiful! I’m very glad to know / That both our tastes agree so perfectly; / Why, my Pygmalion, I did not think / That aught could be more beautiful than thou, / Till I beheld myself. Believe me, love / I could look in this mirror all day long . . .” (p. 47). Sander does not focus on the couple’s infertility as a possible determinant of Pygmalion’s infatuation with Galatea. But here, as well, the possibility of Pygmalion’s multidetermined disappointment, anger, and longing points to a psychoanalytic perspective.
As Sander points out, for the play to be acceptable to Victorian audiences, monogamy had to be reinforced as a value. Pygmalion is temporarily blinded for his sexual attraction to his model. But Galatea’s punishment is far graver—she is “disappeared,” turned back to stone, denied as both daughter and lover. Carolyn Williams mentions in her contribution to this volume, “Reproducing Gender Roles in Victorian England,” that Gilbert’s Galatea challenges Victorian gender norms. Like Freud, Gilbert shows how young girls are raised to conceal their sexuality and mocks the exaggerated innocence of Victorian women and the heroic masculinity of their men. Williams points to the different kinds of copying evident in this play—biological, technological, aesthetic, and cultural. “Crucially, [Galatea] does not reproduce correct gender norms and roles and that is one main point of the play’s humor” (p. 94). In some sense, her ultimate, literal dehumanization underscores and critiques the fundamental artificiality of those roles in the Victorian era. At the same time, Galatea has been a kind of gadfly. Her death relieves the entire cast—and Gilbert—of the obligation to confront ambiguity and conflict particularly regarding gender roles, an obligation that in the “messy middle” of the play (to use Williams’s phrase [p. 95]) she guilelessly imposes on them. At once the clone of her mother and the motherless production of her father, Galatea disrupts convention through, in the words of another of the play’s characters, her “audacity of innocence” (p. 68). She doesn’t understand, for example, why Cynisca, who loves Pygmalion, will not be happy that her husband has been comforted by another in her absence. Indeed, Galatea’s nature points up everyday hypocrisy at every turn. On another front—that of aggression—she does not understand why killing is wrong but soldiering and hunting are noble pursuits. She simply cannot grasp the rules we cannot do without: “Is it possible to say one thing and mean another?” she asks in a moment both comical and painful (p. 49).
In his contribution, the art historian Tom Freudenheim explores the age-old human impulse to create tangible images of objects. As he points out, the power of this impulse is emphasized by long-standing cultural prohibitions against the making of idols or carved likenesses. The Second Commandment involves such a prohibition. Again, in post-Biblical Jewish Midrashic tradition, Abraham smashes the idols in the home of his father, an idol maker. This legend is meant to demonstrate the powerlessness of idols, which, unlike the invisible deity, can be destroyed. However, as Freudenheim notes, “it also indicates their power as a threat, else why get rid of them?” (p. 101). He notes that in the Allegory of the Cave, Plato addresses the question of whether the power of artistic images, like idols, is dangerous and whether, therefore, art should be censored. The Pygmalion myth involves a version of idolatry in a man-made statue’s ultimately being brought to life by its creator. In Ovid’s poem this is unambiguously validated. In Gilbert’s version of the story it is a more problematic achievement. “It’s an ongoing conflict between the power of what can only be imagined and that which is tangible,” as Freudenheim puts it (p. 102). The enlivening of Galatea represents the power of the desire for the tangible. (So, perhaps—though this is not addressed in this volume—does the myth of the incarnation of Spirit in Jesus.) For me, Freudenheim’s essay raises several interesting questions: What are the fundamental psychological dilemmas at issue for us in representing or refraining from representing our deities? For that matter, does representation tend to be a way station between our desire (capacity? need?) for loved and hated objects to remain exclusively within our imaginations and our wish to find or create them outside ourselves?
Freudenheim does not explicitly address these questions, but they are suggested in his contribution. For that matter, his thoughtful discussion of the desire both to worship and to destroy our idols also leads implicitly (certainly if the reader is a psychoanalyst) to a consideration of generational conflict and the anxiety of influence.
Four of the essays following the play concern genetic engineering and new forms of copying that have developed from the sequencing of the human genome. Lee Silver, a professor of molecular biology and ethics at Princeton, forecasts a number of possibilities in this century, including the genetic alteration of human embroyos, the routine conception of human clones within the same single-cell embryo, and the synthesizing of genes and their placement into embryos. He creates an imaginary scenario in which increasing segregation between the GenRich and the Naturals—those who cannot afford genetic engineering—culminates in infertility between the two groups, that is, their evolution into two separate species. He warns that if the marketplace remains the arbiter of the use of reproductive technology, dramatic, unintended long-term consequences might result. In the essay “Too Much,” the environmental activist Bill McKibben sounds a strongly precautionary note about genetic engineering, particularly germline engineering with its goal of “improving” human beings. The development of cloning will hasten this possibility. He quotes Silver: “Without cloning, genetic engineering is simply science fiction. But with cloning, genetic engineering moves into the realm of reality” (p. 136). McKibben emphasizes how rapidly, and without the benefit of public discussion, technological developments like the widespread genetic manipulation of plants have taken place. Research leading to human genetic engineering is, he warns, galloping along without concurrent legal restrictions or widespread thinking about its consequences for our species. A number of scientists share McKibben’s concern. In 1997 Stuart Newman, a cell biologist interviewed by McKibben for this essay, applied for a patent on embryos and full-term creatures containing both human and nonhuman cells. Newman had no intention of producing human-animal chimeras, but wanted to raise public awareness and create an opportunity for public discussion about the damage that could be done by using the products of research and technology without adequate constraints.
Two other chapters in this volume, by Jamie Love, creator of the internet series Science Explained, and Jonathan Shaw, managing editor of Harvard Magazine, describe, respectively, the cloning of the sheep Dolly and the current state of stem cell research at Harvard.
Upon finishing the book, I felt uncertain about how to respond to it from a psychoanalytic perspective. Moreover, the volume seemed somewhat scattered to me. In his effort to repopularize a play, introduce a general audience to psychoanalytic theory, and address the question of cloning in the twenty-first century, Sander seemed to have cast too wide a net. However, on reflection, my viewpoint changed. It is true that Created in Our Own Images.com is not a coherent work. However, each of the essays and the play are accessible and interesting. Moreover, reading this volume led me to material I would not otherwise have read—in the areas of psychoanalysis, drama, and cell biology. Specifically, it led me to consider the implications of the Pygmalion story, which I had not thought about in years.
The additional reading I did in this area led me to wonder: Does a separate developmental line exists for the Pygmalion type of love? Or does this kind of love represent, rather, a way station between narcissism and full object love? Unlike Narcissus, who cannot love Echo, Pygmalion does fall in love with an Other, albeit of his own creation. Does he love Galatea as a transitional object? A selfobject? Does he attempt “to convert love into a less powerful emotion by giving it a rarefied and overaesthetic quality?” (Richardson 1956, p. 458). In a most interesting paper, Levine (2001) cites Bergmann’s paper on Narcissus (1984), in which he hypothesizes hermaphroditic elements in Pygmalion’s love: “we may assume that Galatea represented the artist’s own feminine aspects” (Levine, p. 109). In addition, Bergmann points to the fact that “creativity in men may represent a sublimation of the envy of the capacity to bear children” (p. 109). Levine also raises the extremely interesting question of why the Pygmalion myth has been largely ignored by psychoanalysts.
In short, I believe that this volume’s range represents a strength. I recall hearing Bollas remark, a number of years ago, that coherence is not necessarily a strength. Correspondingly, lack of coherence may not always be a weakness. Such, in my view, is the case with this open-ended book, whose rather loose structure turns out to encourage free association and inquiry.