Hermeneutics of continuity: Theorizing psychological understandings of ancient literature

Ancient literature as a source for psychological understanding

Using ancient literature to inspire new ways of thinking about psychology runs the risk of concretizing the metaphorical and universalizing the historical. When the distinction between the historical reference and the interpretation collapses, we are in danger of becoming monological, oblivious to the possibility of other interpretations; reifying a text as if it offered evidence for definite knowledge claims. Meaningful interpretations of ancient archetypal literature can seduce us into a feeling of timeless significance. Yet, stories are recounted and interpreted within lived embodied realities and say something about the salient existential dynamics in which the interpreter lives.

Projecting ideas of the present into the past is considered a basic fallacy of historiography (Danziger, 1997; Fischer, 1970; Harris, 1997). Introducing present-day ideas into historical texts distorts the unique meanings of the time in which the literature was produced. In instances where psychologists make use of ancient literature, some are inclined to take from the past without including the original context. Evans, McGrath, and Milns (2003), for example, review Greek and Roman literature to assess the prevalence of diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia in the ancient world. Using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, they claim that diagnostic evidence for schizophrenia is absent whereas, for other psychiatric disorders, the specified diagnostic criteria are present. In another study that uses ancient literature as a source for psychological understanding, Milns (1986) discusses ancient Greek and Roman attitudes towards mental illness based on a reading of historical plays, dramas, and comedies. These researchers seem to assume there is historical continuity of the meaning of “mental illness.” Such interpretations seem overly literal and uncritically presentist.

Psychological studies of ancient literature range from literal readings used to justify present-day interpretations, to more metaphorical readings that open dialogue with the past to inspire new understandings. On the more literal and naïvely presentist end, Francis Pasche (1971/2010) reads Perseus’ shield as central to the construction of the fetish and transitional object. Jeff Sandoz (2005) uses mythological stories to describe the essential quandary that traps alcoholics, depicting the path they must take for recovery. Patricia Marsden (1997) sees a parallel between the Demeter/Persephone myth and the relationship of bulimic patients with their mothers, such that “themes of the myth … can be seen as vivid enactments of the unconscious struggles of the bulimic women” (p. 324). Also somewhat uncritically presentist, the legend of the European vampire, for Richard Gottlieb (1994), symbolizes experiences of object-loss and bereavement, including transference bereavement. A more hermeneutic and dialogical engagement with archetypal literature from the past seems to occur with a reading of Richard III, Hephaestus, and Echo to understand sexual difficulties of youth who have mental and physical disabilities (Sinason, 1988). Andrea R. Jain (2010), sensitive to cultural context, considers the dynamics of mother and son in light of Krishna’s relationship with the gopis, arguing how “the mythology of a religious text would express characteristics of the cultural psyche … and reflect a reality of Indian culture” (p. 63). Tammy Bertolette (2010) provides a hermeneutic exploration of the senex, the puer aeternus, and Ananke to revision possibilities for the meaning of aging in Western European culture. Through reflections on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Giuseppe Nucara (2009) seeks to understand the melancholic dimensions of homosexuality. And, using an ancient myth as a paradigm for listening to present concerns, Judith Greenberg (1998) considers the figure of Echo as a literary trope that can offer insight into the condition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while, conversely, the notion of trauma recasts issues that seem to be at stake in the story of Echo. Greenberg is careful and reserved with these interpretations, stating that “my aim here is neither to define trauma nor to explain the root of all cases of PTSD” (p. 320). “The lens of Echo allows us to revision – or perhaps more importantly, rehear – representations of trauma in both survivors’ stories and literary texts” (p. 343).

Making space in psychology for ancient literature places these cultural forms at risk of being stripped of the social-historical milieu in which they were generated. Collapsing the vibrant interplay of the social-historical and the symbolic seems to fix meaning into atemporal knowledge claims, forgetting that any conceptualization of a text is a social account. Overextending the relevance of a text diminishes the potential of the symbolic. When an interpretation is not couched within a sense of history, conversation seems shut into a static knowledge claim which does not illuminate present understanding, or inspire refigurations that move one into future possibility. Ahistorically stabilizing renditions of understanding can preclude living in an unfolding world of meaning. Making interpretations without a sense of dialogue, and therefore time, forgetting to consider the social, political, and moral worlds that an interpretation is reflecting, can generate a search for evidence to prove the correctness of currently identified interpretations at the expense of exploring further meaning. Moreover, using ancient archetypal literature as evidence for timeless concepts can preclude understanding differences, making it difficult to suspend disbelief and open one’s world to that of another.

How, then, can we respectfully use the psychological meanings inspired by ancient literature? And how is the meaningfulness of these ancient texts understandable theoretically? We will first consider the possibility for critically presentist interpretations of ancient literature and then consider a theoretical underpinning for these investigations in a hermeneutic reading of Jung’s theory of archetypes.

Critical presentism

Critical presentism is critical of claims to both historical continuity and purely situated understanding. From this standpoint, text must be considered within the context of the specific circumstances in which it was generated and those in which it is understood. To understand historical representations on their own terms and not as nascent forms of contemporary ideas, they must be understood as belonging to unique economic, socio-cultural, and political milieus as well as being in dialogue with contemporary understandings. Nonetheless, something of the meaning of historical times is always lost to our contemporary minds.

Critical presentism is not new. Allan Buss (1977) defended a version of this approach some time ago, based on Marxist historiography and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, tracing its origins to work in historical philosophy of the early twentieth century. Buss (1977) defined critical presentism in terms of “the critical evaluation of the past in light of the present, and the critical evaluation of the present in light of the past” (p. 259). In its two-way focus on critical evaluation, critical presentism differs importantly from naïve or justificationist presentism, which is the usual target of historigraphic criticism. Whereas critical presentism critically interprets the past and present in terms of each other, justificationist presentism regards the past uncritically as inevitably justifying the present.

Psychology’s critical historians challenge the claim that ideas and practices have continuous meanings through time, emphasizing instead how the meaning of a psychological phenomenon depends on its circumstances (Harris, 1997; Hill & Kral, 2003). Social and political forces unique to a specific context are always at work to construct the significance of things. There may be a resemblance of practices through time because psychological, social, cultural, and political pressures may repeatedly delimit certain meanings and not others. However, existential similarity does not mean there is an essential, eternal significance, nor does it mean that ideas were handed down from one person to the next in continuous succession to the present.

Critical presentism can also be distinguished from naïve historicism, which attempts to understand the past entirely on its own terms by suspending judgment in the present. Buss (1977) argued that such an attempt undermines a critical approach to history, as there can be no judgment-free historicism any more than there can be a theory-neutral empiricism. When we view the past critically, it is inevitably from the perspective of some current framework of concerns, which itself is subject to critique in light of the past. Buss’s arguments for critical presentism were not systematically followed up in the subsequent historical literature, but the notion is nonetheless worth revisiting for the light it can shed on issues of psychological continuities of meaning over time.

Critical historians debate how similar or different meanings might be through time. Recently, critical historians of psychology have recognized that historical discontinuity can be overstated (Danziger, 2003; Lovett, 2006; Stam, 2003). Thomas Teo (2005) writes how “traditional historiography has wrongly emphasized continuity but that there may be more continuity than the new critical historians originally perceived” (pp. 19–20). Arguably, this continuity is best theorized as metaphorical and hermeneutic. Although it is important to examine the historical dynamics that produce certain meanings, from a critical presentist perspective we can rethink the present and disrupt what is taken for granted by refiguring the present in light of past representations.

Literature from the past allows us to imagine what another world might have been like and, in so doing, the play of similarity and difference across time can disrupt our typical psychological descriptions. Ian Hacking (2002) writes of understanding as constituted by way of available descriptions such that these descriptions interact with the things named (Sugarman, 2009). Reading ancient literature makes available alternative descriptions and new interpretations. So, for example, although it seems clear that descriptions in ancient literature do not form a continuity of meaning with modern conceptions of psychological disorder, as long as this illumination of meaning is not mistaken for claims to factual historical understanding, resemblances can be taken as if they were related to current conceptions and, then, illuminate further interpretations (see, e.g., Smythe, 2005). The symbolic dimension of literature does not lead to identification of universal characteristics of human psychology; rather, as Fathali M. Moghaddam (2004) writes of the possibility, “it is not ‘data’ as such that psychologists will find most valuable in literature, but new and deeper theoretical insights about human thought and action” (p. 508).

To pursue these insights without reifying a trans-historical truth, it is important to maintain the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning. The metaphorical depends on a tension between literal and figurative meanings. For example, the historical may be considered literal while the elaboration of this meaning in terms of one’s contemporary concerns can then be considered metaphorical. Conversely, the original historical meaning can be viewed as metaphorical with presentist interpretations as historical. Paul Ricoeur (1978) explains that, “[i]n the same way as the metaphorical sense not only abolishes but preserves the literal sense, the metaphorical reference maintains the ordinary vision with the new one it suggests” (p. 154).

The relationship between the historical reference and the metaphorical interpretation is not necessarily sequential. Although the literal may be considered “first,” this is merely heuristic and in certain instances metaphorical understanding may be “first” and then be concretized into historical meaning. One is not necessarily the foundation for the other. Instead, there is play between metaphorical and historical across a difference. For one to disrupt the meaning of the other, each must be respected as belonging to its own world—only then does new meaning become available across a world of difference. A further feature of this relationship is that metaphor is not possible without the historical, but the historical tends to become absorbed by the metaphorical. For this reason we must make a special effort to recall the distinction between the two.

Charting a course between justificationist presentism and naïve historicism, critical presentism forges a relationship of metaphorical sameness and literal difference. In this way, a dialogue between past and present can elaborate understandings, avoid atemporal universal claims to knowledge, and respect the specificity of a text’s history and culture without becoming so narrow as to prevent interpretations across time and place. Known neither by itself nor through a conceptual process that would bind it to a contemporary context, a shared existential background seems necessary for the possibility of understanding across time and place.

The possibility of understanding ancient literature seems to imply a common ground of existential themes. History and existentialism can explain significance, but an archetypal focus on the symbolic provides opportunities to generate what is meaningful. Cultural productions and their interpretations can be explained in terms of power, economics, and social authority, but interpreting the symbolic can generate new understanding. A hermeneutic reading of the archetypal theory of C. G. Jung provides a way of accessing continuity of human meaning without reifying understanding into explanation.

The hermeneutic background

In this section we outline a hermeneutic reading of C. G. Jung’s theory of archetypes as an approach to understanding meaningful continuities across time (see also Smythe & Baydala, 2012; Smythe & Chan, 2009). This is consistent with a body of modern scholarship that highlights hermeneutic aspects of Jung’s work, including a focus on the interpretation of meaning, the elaboration of meaning through comparative analysis, the understanding of meaning in context, and a dialogical approach to inquiry (Barnaby & D’Acierno, 1990; Beebe, 2004; Clarke, 1992; Hewison, 1995; Hogenson, 1983; Pietikainen, 1999; Rauhala, 1984; Steele, 1982). We believe that a hermeneutics of archetypes is uniquely valuable in providing a frame of reference for amplifying meaning and exploring imaginative possibilities in a way that touches on perennial existential themes in human life and figures in the interpretation of ancient texts. While our hermeneutic reading of archetypal theory is a departure from the normal foundationalist reading of Jung, it is nonetheless consistent, as we will show, with his mature formulations of the notion of archetype. For our purposes in this paper, Jung’s theory of archetypes is invoked not as a foundation but, rather, as an approach to inquiry.

Although Jung never fully and consistently developed a hermeneutic approach to inquiry (Smythe & Baydala, 2012), he argued that it is important to understand the products of human imaginative activity as “authentic symbols,” not merely as signs or symptoms. He proceeded to define the symbolic in the following way:

The symbol is not a sign that disguises something generally known. Its meaning resides in the fact that it is an attempt to elucidate, by a more or less apt analogy, something that is still entirely unknown or still in the process of formation. If we reduce this by analysis to something that is generally known, we destroy the true value of the symbol; but to attribute hermeneutic significance to it is consistent with its value and meaning. (Jung, 1916/1966b, p. 291)

Hermeneutic inquiry, as Jung then conceived it, meant an attempt to flesh out symbolic meaning by way of analogies—both subjective analogies based on individual experience and objective analogies based on cultural symbolic forms. Such analogies could never yield definite concepts or testable knowledge claims, but they could nonetheless serve to enrich and flesh out meaning. This early reference to hermeneutic method was omitted from a subsequent version of Jung’s (1935/1966a) essay, however, and he never returned to an explicitly hermeneutic conception of method in his later writing. Jung’s theory of archetypes is nonetheless rich in hermeneutic implications (Smythe & Baydala, 2012; Smythe & Chan, 2009).

Archetype is a term that Jung used to refer to basic patterns of meaning that constitute the unconscious heritage of human life everywhere. Archetypes are not determined specifically as “ideas” but, rather, are considered general forms of or dispositions toward certain ideas and symbolic expressions that constitute the most common mythological and religious motifs of cultures around the world and that also appear frequently in individual fantasy and dream imagery. These “primordial” ideas and images were said to stem from an impersonal, collective layer of unconscious mental life for which the archetype was the basic structuring and generative principle. Jung first used the term archetype in 1919 in a paper presented at a British symposium on “Instinct and the Unconscious” (Jung, 1919/1969a). Thereafter, he characterized archetypes in both biological and metaphysical terms. On the biological side, archetypes were identified as instinctive modes of apprehension, patterns of behavior, and constituents of a phylogenetic layer of the unconscious, consistent with 19th-century organic memory theory (Shamdasani, 2003). On the metaphysical side, archetypes were linked to Kant’s categories and considered a priori conditions of human experience (Jung, 1936/1968). This merging of biological with metaphysical conceptions is the source of the more familiar tensions in Jungian theory and has been the focus of a number of philosophical critiques (Bishop, 2000; deVoogd, 1984; Jones, 2003; Shamdasani, 2003).

Jung (1947/1969b) undertook his final major reformulation of the notion of archetype in a paper presented at the Eranos conference in 1946. Here he distinguished archetypal expressions (images and ideas) from the “archetype as such,” which he considered something “irrepresentable” and incapable of conscious articulation or direct knowledge (p. 213). The archetype in itself, then, was considered not as a conceptual or theoretical category but, rather, as part of “a background not previously suspected, a true matrix of all conscious phenomena” (p. 168). This characterization of the archetypal as a kind of “background” is something to which Jung frequently returned in his subsequent writing. Insofar as archetypes constitute a background that is inherently unknowable, they cannot provide a conceptually structured a priori framework for the interpretation of meaning, contrary to the common foundationalist reading of Jungian theory.

Jung’s reference in this context to the archetype as “background” is significant, moreover, as it suggests a link to a hermeneutics of archetypes (Smythe & Chan, 2009). A fundamental notion in modern hermeneutic philosophy (Dreyfus, 1991; Taylor, 1995, 2004) and in philosophical discussions of language and meaning generally (Searle, 1980, 1983, 1992, 1995, 2002) is the tacit background that constitutes an essential condition of intelligibility of meaningful human activity. The basic argument is that human meaning making and understanding presuppose and rest upon an unarticulated background of shared human practices, capacities, skills, and forms of life that are irrevocably embodied, contextually embedded, and non-amenable to full and explicit articulation in conceptual terms. It can be shown that understanding the meaning of even the most literal expressions presupposes such a background (Searle, 1979, 1980). While the existential background of human life cannot itself be fully explicated or conceptualized, it is nonetheless a source of fresh articulation and so can be spelled out to a limited degree (Taylor, 1995).

Two arguments have traditionally been put forward in support of the basic intractability of the background to full articulation. The first is that any attempt to bring the background to articulation through explicit representation would presuppose its own form of background, which, in turn, would require yet further articulation and further background, and so on indefinitely; the reason is that no representation of meaning is self-interpreting and so the process of explication is, in principle, unlimited (Searle, 1980, 1983, 1992, 1995, 2002; Taylor, 1995). The second argument for the fundamentally tacit character of the background is that it functions by way of enactment rather than through description or representation. The existential background and tacit understanding of how to get along in the world can only function as such so long as they remain embedded in the tacit, taken-for-granted context of our embodied and engaged activity in the world (Dreyfus, 1991). Thus, the background constitutes both the basis and the essential limits for the articulation of meaning.

While a shared existential background is a pervasive and ever-present aspect of human meaning, it is by no means homogeneous or fixed. A minimal “geography of the background,” to use John R. Searle’s (1983, 1992) term, would need to distinguish between the local and the deep background. The former has to do with specific historically and culturally situated practices in the context of “everyday coping” in Heidegger’s sense (Dreyfus, 1991), which have traditionally been of concern in hermeneutic inquiry. The deep background, in contrast, has to do with aspects of human embodiment and human life that are pervasive among human beings everywhere. These aspects are embedded not only in our biology (as Searle argues) but also in the continually recurring situations in which humans find themselves and the perennial existential concerns of human life—with mortality, sexuality, affiliation, and aggression, to name a few. As Searle (1983) pointed out, differences in the local background underlie the familiar difficulties in intercultural understanding, whereas the deep background is what makes such understanding possible at all. Some form of shared deep background would seem in any case to be an essential precondition for mutual understanding between individuals from different cultural and historical contexts.

We propose that archetypal motifs can be understood as non-conceptual aesthetic expressions of the deep background. Archetypal story and images can communicate common ground across differences. Such non-conceptual representations can communicate a common existential lifeworld that indicates something unarticulated that is shared even though what that is, when articulated, is unique in every social-historical situation. While the local background underlies the activities of everyday coping, the deep existential background comes to archetypal expression when the activities of everyday coping are for a time suspended, as in psychopathology, dreaming, fantasy, and creative imagination—the traditional domains of analytical inquiry. Archetypal expressions arise in these contexts spontaneously from the deep background in response to the perennial demands of human life rather than strictly through a process of cultural or historical transmission.

Locating archetypes in the deep non-conceptual strata of human existence has two important consequences for our argument in this paper. First, given their lack of definitive conceptual structure, archetypes cannot provide a basis for historical continuity or for universal claims of any kind, notwithstanding Jung’s own frequent references to archetypes as universals. In the usual philosophical sense of the term, universals are predicated on concepts and so cannot be derived from anything that is not already conceptually structured (Angeles, 1981). Universals of both the etic (theoretical) and emic (everyday) varieties are based on conceptual generalization (Brown, 1991), the means for which are entirely lacking in the archetypal realm and in background conditions of existence generally.

A second consequence of the non-conceptual nature of archetypes is their basic intractability and inexpressibility via any form of conceptual or theoretical language; this is a general feature of the background, which has no natural vocabulary of its own (Dreyfus, 1991; Searle, 1983). Alternatives to conceptual language such as non-linguistic modes of symbolization and non-literal uses of language, especially metaphor and narrative fiction, provide more adequate means of expression for archetypal meaning. What cannot be expressed directly in literal, conceptual terms can nonetheless be alluded to or hinted at through metaphors, narratives, and symbols that evoke the background in specific ways. As Searle (1983) pointed out, “[T]he price we pay for deliberately going against ordinary language is metaphor, oxymoron, and outright neologism” (p. 157); Charles Taylor (2004) referred in this context to meaning that is “not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends” (p. 23). The aesthetic function of archetypal symbols is fundamentally expressive in character, where expression can be understood, following Nelson Goodman (1976), as a form of metaphorical exemplification. Archetypal expressions do not classify psychological phenomena as instances of a type but, rather, metaphorically present, display, or amplify perennial themes of embodied human life. While these metaphorically exemplified meanings cannot be circumscribed conceptually, they can nonetheless be grasped experientially insofar as they resonate with a deep background of human existence. We apprehend archetypal expressions in much the same non-discursive ways as we respond to works of art, which enables an intimacy of understanding that is not generally available at the conceptual level.

Thus, while archetypes defy conceptualization and cannot then be invoked in support of universal claims, archetypal motifs can nonetheless serve as a source of endlessly varied interpretations that provide symbolic continuities across diverse historical and cultural contexts. A hermeneutic understanding of archetypes allows for the expression of perennial themes of human life without invoking problematic claims about universals or identity of meaning across time and culture. Interpreting the meaning of archetypal stories and images both appropriates the symbolic expression into the present and honours its historicity through recognizing the unarticulated yet common ground of our human way of being.

This approach nonetheless differs from the historical ontology of Hacking (2002) and Sugarman (2009), which is concerned with psychological phenomena that come in and out of being in historical time by way of conceptual expression and interpretation. As Sugarman noted, “[O]ntological investigation is by necessity conceptual” (p. 7); the interpretation of archetypes, in contrast, is conceptually and ontologically indeterminate. Whereas historical ontology examines the historical emergence and transformation of psychological concepts (e.g., Foucault), a hermeneutics of archetypes stays with the unarticulated background underlying such emergence and transformation. This allows for interpretation and the amplification of meaning rather than explanation.

To provide an example of critical presentism and unpack this hermeneutic understanding of archetypes in dialogue with historical explanation, we will next consider the subject of psychological disorder and psychotherapy in light of reading an ancient archetypal drama.

Interpreting The Bacchae

Like madness itself, Dionysus or Bacchus (the name adopted by the Romans) is an ambiguous figure, bringing

joy and grief, calmness and dangerous excitement, life and death. Both smiling and cruel, he is neither Olympian nor entirely chthonian. … He inspires the Chorus to some of the most moving devotional poetry that has survived from the ancient world, and some of the most inconsistent and self-deluding claptrap in all the history of religions. (Kirk, 1970, p. 18)

In the story of The Bacchae (Humphries, 1955; Kirk, 1970; Martin, 2004; Sutherland, 1968), Pentheus, king of Thebes, outright mocks and deplores the worshipers of Dionysus and their reverence for the god of wine, ritual madness, and ecstasy. Pentheus is scornful of both inner darkness and of social classes mixing together in Dionysian celebrations. This disrespect prompts Dionysus to set his worshipers, the Bacchae, on a course of murderous revenge. Dionysus leads Pentheus to the site of the Bacchic rites. Pentheus is quickly detected as an intruder and Agave, Pentheus’ mother, incites the Bacchae to capture him. Like wild animals, they rip him apart. Agave returns to Thebes disoriented, carrying her son’s head as a trophy. The tale of Pentheus’ ruin leads to even more reverence, altars, and incense for Dionysus.

French ethno-psychiatrist Georges Devereux (1970) reads what follows as a “psychotherapy scene.” Cadmus, Agave’s father, diverts his daughter’s attention from her fantasy to their reality. First, he heightens her senses so that she becomes located in physical reality, supporting a sense of her continuity in time. He also helps her to recall the past, to remember where she belongs in society, thereby recreating social bonds. After reclaiming her place in time, but also knowing her place with others in the fabric of social being, she has then to acknowledge what she has done, to recognize the head in her arms. At this point, she tries to get her father to recount what has happened but Cadmus refuses and waits for her to voice her own recollections.

Cadmus proceeds by highlighting how the whole city had been driven mad and undone by Dionysus; the madness that overtook Agave did not happen to her alone. Agave focuses her attention on the influence of Dionysus. Once she recognizes the evidence before her—her son’s dismembered body, and the extent of her madness—she is shocked. The impact turns her further toward sober reason and away from fantasy and frenzy to consider her son’s fate, her own actions, and how all survivors will be affected. Agave, now more fully aware, begins to suffer. No longer divinely inspired, she sees her human madness and vulnerability.

Devereux (1970) senses a historical continuity and wonders at the contemporary clinical plausibility of this interaction between Agave and Cadmus, as if this were the first documented account of recall and insight psychotherapy. Here we can see how the historical blurs with the metaphorical in Devereux’s reading. Historically speaking, in ancient Greece, sophrosyne, ¹ moderation through wisdom, was widely regarded to ensure health and sound reasoning, but recall and insight-oriented psychological healing was not construed as such until the early 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 343). In this sense, The Bacchae is depicting a scene that may be read metaphorically but not literally as a form of recall and insight psychotherapy.

After two and a half millennia, Euripides’ Bacchae continues to be read and performed. ² Arguably, a non-conceptual continuity of meaning is conveyed in the symbolism of this story. Understanding across time and place could, in part, depend on the experience of being human along with the familiar social exigencies and cultural conventions into which we are thrown. The relatively stable existential ways of being human may explain why we can relate to this story instead of seeing it as a human anomaly.

Arguably, The Bacchae is a story that can be read into a contemporary lifeworld to enrich our understanding of psychotherapy without assuming that such contemporary meaning is evidence for historical sameness. Ancient representations of what we see as psychological disorder and psychological healing need not describe present ideas and practices of psychotherapy to provide insight. Ancient literature can be used to critique the present in light of the past and understand the past in light of the present without disrespecting important cultural and historical differences.

There are many ways of reading a single story for different purposes. Readings of The Bacchae have offered insights into existential theory (Sale, 1977), psychoanalytic theory (Arvanitakis, 1998; Hubback, 1990; Parsons, 1990), and politics (Medelsohn, 2002). In the psychological reading of The Bacchae provided here, somatic, interpersonal, existential, and social references define any understanding of the movement from madness to sanity. Géza Róheim (1941) cautions that “interpretation of cultural elements through individual analysis is probably correct, but should be combined with the analysis of anthropological data” (p. 163). Our interpretation of The Bacchae may resonate with some readers and carry forward as a reference for other interpretations. Our intention is to open a wide range of possible readings and not to sell a particular interpretation. Such a reading is meant not to convince the reader of a particular interpretation but, rather, to demonstrate how ancient literature can provoke meaning without becoming entirely appropriated by the present. The archetypal thus remains opaque and continuously available for alternative readings. We consider, now, the political social climate of Athens at the time of Euripides so as not to over-interpret the psychological significance of the work.

The Bacchae is one of Euripides’ political plays. Athenians search for meaning in the midst of the Peloponnesian war, wherein failed negotiations for unity and diversity result in nightmarish scenarios. Daniel Medelsohn (2002) focuses on readings of The Bacchae that generate tragic consideration of the polis. Pentheus is a political leader trying to maintain state unity by suppressing the female characters that are tragic symbols of wilderness (p. 28). The uncivilized female heralds a diversity that must be contained because she “threatens to undo the city from within” (p. 29). In this reading, tensions within the polis, rather than the psyche, are the object of interpretation. Medelsohn explains how the female was seen in Greek culture as “a potentially anarchic element within the rigidly organized, carefully hierarchized, and finally, masculine world of the polis, whose male citizens, like the state itself, were meant to be paragons of self-control” (p. 29). He cited this as the reason why women are frequently characters in Greek drama, even though they have been evidenced as invisible in Greek society. In this case, Euripides’ tragedies are a vehicle for political theorizing. Medelsohn admits that such readings “animate the text,” but there is “no full recovery of the past that would be untainted by the critic’s own investments” (p. 27).

The Bacchae’s ceremonial inclusion of intoxication, madness, and ecstasy and the passage back to sanity seem relevant to current understandings of madness and psychotherapy. In Geoffrey S. Kirk’s (1970) translation of and commentary on The Bacchae he writes of “the inescapable power of the gods and the inviolability of established law” (p. 94). On this interpretation, resisting Dionysus is futile and dangerous. In Charles Martin’s (2004) recent translation of Ovid’s story of Bacchus and Pentheus, we read how, “[i]f you fail to show him fitting honors, the god will tear your mangled corpse to pieces and scatter them, your blood will stain the trees” (p. 111). Bacchus heralds a new social order, demands respect for frenzied inspiration, exhilaration, and excitement beyond the bounds of rationality. Pentheus is boastful and tyrannical. He refuses to understand the unreasonable antics of the Bacchae and his attempts to dominate their madness end in his own demise. Many of Euripides’ plays deal with this theme of “the cost of resisting those gods who reside in human nature itself” (Kirk, 1970, p. 1). Refusing space for the transformative chaos of untamed emotion becomes problematic because such unreason is inevitably a part of human experience. The madness of the Bacchae is transformative, divisive, and fertile, resulting in a new political order.

This further psychological animation of The Bacchae seems to include the possibility of losing oneself, suffering the unacceptable, resulting in transgressive actions, delusion, forgetting, and dissociation of self to resist remembering what is most shameful. Sanity seems to depend upon a sense of self sustained by a set of relationships in a given order. Recollection of oneself and one’s place does not repair the damage of transgression but transformation restores sanity along with a new social order necessary to live in relationship with others. Inevitably, ecstasy transitions back to sobriety. This transition is facilitated by Cadmus, Agave’s father, helping Agave come to her senses to recognize how she has returned. In the story of The Bacchae there is a semblance of understanding that allows us more clearly to recognize what we believe and what else might be possible in psychotherapy. The movement from irrationality, excitement, and exhilaration to careful sobriety, along with the awe and respect madness demands from society, provides a hermeneutics of psychotherapy continuous with events depicted in ancient literature. Understanding psychotherapy and madness in light of reading The Bacchae hints at political ramifications of madness and psychological healing. This reading has a unique contemporary cast in the context of modern phenomena of psychotherapy, which in turn sheds new light on the significance of The Bacchae.

Furthermore, The Bacchae resonates with other historical readings of psychotherapeutic subject matter. There are many stories of taboo and soul loss, which make one vulnerable to accident, dangers, and transgressions. The healer functions as a mediator between the irrational world where the soul is lost and the world of the living (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 6). Configured in the story of The Bacchae we can see a narrative structure that traces a metaphorical path of psychotherapy through frenzied irrationality, transgression, dissociation and resistance to remembering, recall, shock, insight, adjustment, and new social political order. On this reading, psychotherapy can provide a safe space for the transformative power of madness, restricting it to a place and time. In this way, the story of The Bacchae highlights the potential relationship of madness to political social transformation. As such, the specificity of Greek culture can be taken into account without narrowing the historical focus to the point of preventing symbolic interpretations that are relevant to contemporary life.

Maintaining this distinction between the historical and metaphorical is crucial for psychology if it is to be taken seriously in using ancient literature as a way of furthering psychological understanding. Although Dionysus and The Bacchae may inspire contemporary understandings of phenomena of psychotherapy, this is not evidence for knowledge claims regarding the psychotherapeutic process, mental illness, or the validity of categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, nor does the story figure into a historical development of these practices. It is as if Dionysus were madness itself, and it is as if the scene between Agave and Cadmus could happen in the office of a contemporary psychotherapist.

Mark Freeman (1998) writes about the difference between historical time and mythical time and the limits of historical representation. Citing Mircea Eliade’s book The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949/1954), he explains how entrance to mythical time begins with imagining the first time something occurred. From there a world of multiplicity can emerge without losing the connection to a transcendent, primordial significance. Historical time, on this account, is empty of meaning because of its one-off quality, whereas mythical time repeats, albeit in multiple forms, in an archetypal gesture. Although there may not be trans-historical narrative structures, it seems there are narrative structures that can invoke a trans-historical experience. Reading the interpersonal, social body as a shared reference, a degree of common ground can be experienced across time and culture, such that interpersonal, social, and political processes form a basis for interpreting the present in terms of the past and the past in terms of the present.

Conclusion

Currently, there is little space in psychology for the symbolic interpretation of ancient literature. When ancient literature is used as a resource to develop psychological understanding, this is sometimes taken as evidence for knowledge claims about psychological phenomena. Presentism allows us to understand one thing as another and increases the capacity to experience greater meaning, but critical presentism discerns these interpretations as forged through cultural and historical context. We thereby interpret literature in the context of present concerns without finalizing the meaning of that interpretation.

Treating interpretations as facts can be oppressive and exclusionary when the stability of the reference is reified as if it were conveying an essential timeless truth (see, e.g., Said, 1978). From a hermeneutic perspective, any understanding is animated through a particular reading that is grounded in the present exigencies of life. These exigencies cannot be fully articulated but seem to imply a common background through which we relate to another time and place. The Bacchae is not evidence for an essential trans-historical cross-cultural truth about madness and psychotherapy. We are not claiming The Bacchae depicts a timeless representation of social-politicized madness and psychotherapy that maintains the status quo. However, this story suggests a tacit background and shared form of life that can be a source of fresh articulation for a current problem.

Currently, psychotherapies tend to ignore the social-political contexts in which mental disorders arise, such that psychotherapists inadvertently collude with dominant social authority to maintain the status quo (Cushman, 1996). The presence of political upheaval and its association with madness in The Bacchae cannot be used to justify such critiques of psychotherapy. The ambiguous symbolism of Dionysus and the Bacchae—depicting both possession and enthusiasm, drunken delusion and social force—may help increase our sensitivity to the sociopolitical nuances of madness and psychotherapy but it does not justify claims about the relationship between psychology and politics nor provide evidence that there is such a relationship at all. The Bacchae provides symbolism and a shared non-conceptual context for interpreting the meaning of madness and psychotherapy. Insofar as there is a call for greater sensitivity to the political dimensions of psychology, we can rethink the lack of sociopolitical awareness in psychotherapy and disrupt current assumptions by refiguring the present in light of ancient literary representations, even though social-politicized psychology is different past from present.

Taking a critical presentist view and employing a hermeneutics of archetypes, we can interpret the symbolic dimension of a story without assuming continuity of meaning across worlds. A shared background embedded in the taken-for-granted understandings of human existence makes it possible to form meaningful interpretations of ancient literature, but this is not to say there are timeless representations; rather, literature may portray meaning in symbolic form, hinting at unutterable significance that resonates across time and comes to be interpreted in time. Judith Butler (1999) writes of how she

came to understand how the assertion of universality can be proleptic and performative, conjuring a reality that does not yet exist, and holding out the possibility for a convergence of cultural horizons that have not yet met. Thus, I arrived at a second view of universality in which it is defined as a future-oriented labor of cultural translation. (p. 9)

Reading The Bacchae makes another world become relevant to the present as we imagine and interpret similarities. In connecting a historical narrative with the present, configurations of meaning become refigured. By refiguring one’s imagination, the present can open to future possibilities. In this way, reading ancient literature symbolically from the perspective of the present does not complete an interpretation but can increase the capacity to both disrupt understanding and enrich meaning.