REUNION OF MASCULINE
AND FEMININE:
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT BLY
by Bill Bruzy ©1999
Originally printed in
Creations Magazine, February 1999
I recently had a chance to talk with Robert, by
phone, just after the Christmas holiday.
Robert Bly, winner of the
National Book Award for poetry, is probably most well known for his
groundbreaking book
Iron John. Robert has illuminated masculine consciousness and
men's need to reconnect with themselves and their essential
masculinity. His latest work,
The Maiden King, is co-authored with Marion Woodman, Jungian
analyst and author of
Leaving my Father's House, and
The Owl is the Bakers' Daughter. This
new book addresses the reunion of the masculine and feminine and the
hunger we have for reconnection. Rich and evocative, reading this book
is like having a thousand small lights go off inside the self,
connecting dark passages in the deep of our being.
Robert and Marion are a natural
alliance of Jungian and mythic, male and female. The authors present,
in
The Maiden King, a captivating journey
into an old Russian story. The story is one of a young man betrayed by
his stepmother and his tutor. He is sought by the divine feminine but
is tricked into sleep by this shadowy pair of guardians. First he has
to awaken and then he takes the mythic path to find and reconnect with
the divine feminine who has left him behind while he was sleeping. In
the course of his journey he has to encounter the shadow of the
feminine, the Baba Yaga, who eats anyone who takes an adversarial
position with her. As the book jacket says, this is a tale of digging
down into the "deeper, messier mysteries of life."
Bill Bruzy:
Let's start with an intriguing comment in the book. You said we've
moved from a literal to a psychological understanding with the help of
Freud. Now we are moving into a mythological understanding. So let's
frame your work in terms of that. What is mythological understanding
as opposed to literal and psychological understanding?
Robert Bly:
Good question. When Marion and I gave ten talks in late November we
told the Maiden King story together. So the literal part of it was we
had to warn people that when, for example, we used the word
'stepmother' one is not literally to think of stepmothers.
'Stepmother' is a code word meaning the dark side of
your own mother. This is a code word to describe a psychological
situation in which the dark side of every human being, which one must
give credit to Freud for bringing forward clearly, is looked at. So at
that point we moved immediately to the psychological level.
John Lee
and I were just talking about Christmas. Looked at from the literal
point of view Christmas is a matter of giving and receiving gifts,
reconstituting the family and so on. Psychologically though what
happens at Christmas is the dark side of a lot of people's personality
often comes out. You know, the uncle gets drunk and ruins everything.
The parents with their cunning psychological skills manage to destroy
the marriages of all their children. (laughter) You know what I mean?
Bill Bruzy:
Don't we all. So you didn't do that this weekend did you?
Robert Bly:
No, no … we had it done to us! (laughter)
So you need everything Freud and Jung understood to
see the psychological things that happen at Christmas. There's a lot
of 'stepmother' stuff in Christmas.
So in the workshops after we tell the story a few
literal things come up. Then a lot of psychological things come up,
including the psychological force that a false tutor has in your life.
The stepmother and false tutor were the forces that put the young man
to sleep so he missed his chance with the divine feminine.
People in the workshops have concerns about the
psychology. Why does a false tutor betray you? Why does the false
tutor and the dark side of your own mother make a unit so that your
own openness to the ecstatic is blocked? Those are tremendous
questions that psychology opens up.
So if it takes us a half-hour to tell the story it
takes another half-hour to get the psychological material spoken. At
that point a lot of people are really satisfied. They're ready to stop
right there. So then if we have another half-hour we begin to touch on
the question of what is the knowledge that mythology gives?
Now, that is what really is in danger in our
culture, mythological knowledge and also, of course, psychological
knowledge. We know that global capitalism, brought inside, is trying
to get rid of Freud and Jung and substitute pills for knowledge.
Bill Bruzy:
What a statement! But I think you're right. So you are saying global
capitalism is trying to pull us back to the more narrow literal
understanding rather than moving us deeper into other, more
comprehensive, types of understanding?
Robert Bly:
Yes. Global capitalism, when brought inside the psyche, does that.
When it operates 'out there' in the world, it destroys the working
class. There is a wonderful book by William Dryder called One World
Ready or Not. He says the war between capital and labor is over.
Capital won. Period. Anything as powerful as global capitalism doesn't
only operate in the exterior world though. The mood of global
capitalism moves inside the psyche.
All the attacks on Freud and Jung say we don't need
therapy anymore, that therapy doesn't do any good. Just take these
pills. The whole advance psychology made in working through suffering,
all of that is thrown away, and you simply try to give people a few
pills for their depression. Psychological understanding is in a lot of
danger now. HMO's are going to refuse to handle it. We receive
pop-psychology instead of deep-psychology. But the understanding
that's the most exposed to danger by internalized global capitalism is
the mythological understanding.
We are dealing with areas of truth here and areas of
truth go from fundamentalism or literalism, to psychological
understanding and the next step is the mythological.
Bill Bruzy: So
how do these levels or styles of understanding play out in the story
of
The Maiden King?
Robert Bly:
The reunion of masculine and feminine is related to understanding the
kind of sleep the boy in the story falls into. The sleep is induced by
the false tutor in the male world and also the stepmother in the
female world. They work together to put the young boy, or it could be
a girl, to sleep. So we ask if that alone is understood, if we awaken,
will that result in the reunion of masculine and feminine?
The story says no.
The story says there is a limit to how much you are
able to achieve by waking out of sleep. It's valuable for a therapist
to remind you that you were in a trance in childhood, that in the
first two years of your marriage you were in a trance, both of you
were in a trance, imitating your parents trance. So the therapist
tries to wake you up out of that trance.
Bill Bruzy: So
waking up from the trance is a step into a kind of awareness but there
is a lot more distance to cover to reach unity?
Robert Bly:
The story says waking up is good but we know that at a point the
divine feminine leaves a note for the young man. The note says your
stepmother and tutor have betrayed you and my advice is to cut off
your false tutor's head and if you want to find me you'll have to go
off to another place to find me. I'm gone.
When the young man reads this note he takes his
sword and cuts off the tutors head. I associate that awakening with
the energy that comes with good psychological information. But the
story doesn't end there.
Men and women are hoping that men can come out of
their trance. Men's trance is a kind of obedience to conventional
ideas of masculinity. The trance is the desire-for-warfare trance, the
obsession with achievement. And men are hoping that the women come out
of their trance. Women's trance is a resentment and a female sort of
relationship. Female relationships are brilliant in themselves but the
women think that if they can teach men to do relationship of this kind
it'll solve things. That's a trance too in a way.
Psychology, you know, is in many ways a feminine
activity. You bring the male in and he is immediately fighting. He
knows that he is going to be taught the feminine way of relationship,
which is terrific. However there's something in it slightly alien to
the male and he knows that he's in danger.
Men express this immediately by their fear when they
enter a therapist's office. I think psychology has to really admit
sooner or later that it tries to solve problems in marriage by trying
to get both male and female to adopt the feminine mode of
relationship. Which, by the way, I feel blessed to have been taught.
Let's go on. That's as far as you go in psychology.
It's a good step. But in mythology we get to this point, see the male
has been asleep now he's awake. He knows that he has lost something.
But the mythological says 'I've got news for you.' It says you are
going to have to go to the underworld if the male and female are going
to reunite. Whoa!
Bill Bruzy:
Waking up is not the end of the work, end of the road, to unity.
Robert Bly:::
I think that's right. The main thing is the problem of separation is
solved in the underworld among the dead.
Bill Bruzy:
Not a Norman Vincent Pealish sort of thing!
Robert Bly:
You can immediately feel the shock of that. The whole concept of going
to the underworld is a mythological piece. It is not a psychological
piece. Psychology says, for example, that an overt depression is more
thorough than a covert one. That's an image of descent in psychology.
What psychology says is right but the mythological says to grasp the
deepest meaning of the descent into the underworld you have to accept
the idea of huge powerful beings down there. It's beyond psychological
understanding. There is an enormous sister of the Virgin Mary who
doesn't have the Virgin's compassion.
Bill Bruzy:
That's the Baba Yaga, the Kali figure, the shadow of the feminine?
Robert Bly:
Yes, she likes to eat people. You know Goya's picture of Saturn eating
his own son. You know that one?
Bill Bruzy:
Goya's picture? Yes. I studied Goya's work. It's fascinating but
disturbing.
Robert Bly:
That is not a psychological picture. That is mythological. We were
just in Madrid and went to the Prado and saw these works. You know you
are not in psychology viewing those.
I think that's why it's fascinating. You're looking
at Goya's work and see a scene of people and a giant being is standing
twelve hundred feet tall in the midst of this and nobody seems to
notice it. Or you've got three witches floating over a scene. Goya had
that courage that's asked for in this story, the courage to go into
the mythological world.
So the story says the male and female will not be
reunited in our culture until they are willing to go down and deal
with the dead. We particularly need to deal with this enormous figure
who is female but also devouring, who is feminine but also demands
truth, not merely relationship but also truth.
Bill Bruzy: So
how does the audience react? This is powerful, disturbing. Do people
get nervous, want to go home, get interested, what?
Robert Bly: My
guess is one out of ten feel how this is a big truth. 'How come my
priest doesn't talk about that when he talks about the Virgin Mary?'
What about the Protestants? They could not only not take the Baba Yaga
they couldn't take the Virgin Mary either. I would say the Protestants
underneath feel they have solved all this and don't have to face it.
We have to take seriously the Virgin Mary and her
sister. Of course then we're immediately in a no-no land as far as a
lot of politically correct women are concerned.
Let me ask you a question. How do you understand
what I've just said?
Bill Bruzy:
Running a counseling center for men I get a lot of feedback from
women. I hear a lot of women's anger.
Robert Bly:
Well give me a story about it.
Bill Bruzy:
Okay, the last time was Christmas Eve. I was at a friend's house. He's
an academic, art historian. One of his university colleagues, who I'd
never met, was there. We were having a very pleasant conversation
talking about travel. I'd just gotten back from Spain and North
Africa. She loved the Mediterranean. We enjoyed each other's company.
Then she asked me what I did besides writing and I
told her I run the Austin Men's Center. She got cold. The change was
very sudden. I don't think she thought she was being mean, but she
dismissed all men with one sweeping gesture of condemnation of 'men's
ego's.' All men were less than women because of ego. Period. This
otherwise gracious and intelligent woman turned daggerlike and sharp
in a microsecond.
You know I figured it was Christmas Eve and I wasn't
about to get into that conversation.
Robert Bly:
What the story says is what she was expressing. It was not so much
women's anger as an indulgence in adversarial thinking.
Bill Bruzy:
That's interesting.
Robert Bly::
It's interesting that what the sister of the Virgin Mary, the Baba
Yaga being, cleanses people of, is adversarial thinking. That's
amazing because what psychological thinking does is allow us to have
adversarial thinking.
As soon as that woman said to you, the egos of men
are bigger and that's all they're interested in, that's psychological
language. It's okay but it's psychological and what's more it's turned
to an adversarial position. Because it means that egos of women are
not. That's exactly where you get in trouble.
The mythological point of view can say that this
sister of the Virgin Mary with her raucous humor and her knowledge
that big seals eat little seals, lions eat gazelles, that if she
weren't in the world everyone would live to be four hundred years old.
Her knowledge has a totally unexpected side to us. She eats anyone who
thinks in an adversarial way.
She asks that question in the story, "did you come
here from your own free will or did someone send you?" That's a setup
for adversarial thinking. So if you had such a big ego or whatever way
she puts it, she eats you as long as you're in that adversarial place.
This woman who said to you on Christmas Eve that men
have such big egos and that's the main problem they have, she was
feeling no real grief when she said that. On the contrary she was
feeling some kind of triumph. There was a solution here in which the
woman can be a kind of Alexander the Great and be triumphant in every
conversation.
But to Baba Yaga this means that she's got to be
eaten immediately. And in the course of her saying that to you Baba
Yaga's eating her. If there's a man there who responds and says well
men are much more fair than women, or whatever, to make the woman feel
small, Baba Yaga eats him as well.
So the understanding here is men and women cannot
become reunited unless they are willing to move to the mythological
space. Which means going down into the underworld and dealing with
this Goddess we have omitted for hundreds of years. Secondly, until
you are willing to answer an adversarial question in such a way your
voice is full of grief you can't be uneaten.
The question came up in the groups we did and Marion
said this reminds her a lot of addicts. The question the addict has to
answer is, "did I come to this addiction of my own free will or did
someone force me to it." That's a heavy, heavy question. And somehow
the answer given in the story was he came two hundred percent of his
own free will and three hundred percent because someone sent him. That
avoids the adversarial because it didn't add up to one hundred.
The longer we worked with this story, night after
night, we realized the voice itself had to change when answering that
kind of question. So there was the low, deep sound of grief in the
voice.
Bill Bruzy: So
this is an energetic component of the mythological?
Robert Bly:
Yes, it has to be in the voice. So if men and women are in that voice
they are no longer in the adversarial. Is that clear?
Bill Bruzy:
Yup. I see that as energetic, that the individuals are inhabiting
themselves more completely at that point where the voice holds grief.
Robert Bly:
Yes and you're not hiding. Women are not blaming men and men are not
blaming women.
Bill Bruzy:
And there's a humility in that too.
Robert Bly:
That's right. It amazed me that the contrast between the psychological
and the mythological would be that clear. And always we know the
mythological includes invisible beings. The psychological includes the
id, the superego and the ego but they're not exactly invisible beings.
They're visualized qualities. But in the mythological you have to deal
with these enormous beings.
So by the way I have to tell you the hunger for that
knowledge of reunion of the masculine and feminine was huge. There was
a deep longing that there be a reunion of the masculine and feminine,
not that the women will triumph or the men will triumph.
When we were in Portland there were about 900
people. The hunger I felt in that room reminded me of the early Viet
Nam readings I did. Wanting some kind of truth here, in that case
about the war, in this case about the war between men and women. That
was the thing we felt tremendously hopeful about, the positive hunger
from both men and women, that something be said as to how men and
women can come back together.
The answer given in mythology, going to the
underworld, agreeing to live in a world the opposite of Walt Disney,
agreeing that you deal with the mistress of the dead (or in the Mayan
the Lords of Death) and then feel enough grief that you give up your
adversarial thinking. That's a big answer.
E-mail Bill Bruzy:
billbruzy@aol.com
Copyright 1999 Bill
Bruzy, all rights reserved
