Mythology & Depth Psychology in the 21st Century | By Christopher Miller, Ph.D.

Myth & Justice VI.2 (“The Riddle of a Human Life”)

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Chris

In the last entry, Mythfire put forward the idea that empathy is an example not of personal bias but of an abstract impersonal feeling value which, furthermore, is inseparable from the judicial process. We also argued, toward the beginning of the blog, that some people are innately more feeling-oriented in psychological/typological terms while others are thinking-oriented. This is not good or bad but a fact – a fact, furthermore, which applies to all people including those serving as judges.

Perhaps it would be advantageous to provide a clear definition of empathy. President Obama writes on empathy in Audacity of Hope: “It is at the heart of my moral code and it is how I understand the Golden Rule – not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes.”* Compare Obama’s words with those of psychologist Heinz Kohut who in 1984 wrote that empathy means to “experience the inner life of another while simultaneously retaining the stance of an objective observer.”**

Kohut also employed a more technical-sounding yet curiously provocative term for empathy: vicarious introspection.*** Both words in “vicarious introspection” speak to the detached/objective experiencing of the inner life of another and not, as critics might argue, the subjective experiencing of the outer life of another. Empathy as an impersonal feeling value concerns itself with the inner conditions and motives that only later result in outward behavior. Perhaps the idea of empathy as vicarious introspection can offer another way of looking at the blindfold over the eyes of Goddess Justice. She is closing her eyes so as to inwardly and objectively contemplate the life and circumstances of those who enter her realm.

Jung suggests what empathy looks like between a therapist and patient during an analytical hour:

“If the doctor wants to guide another, or even accompany him a step of the way, he must feel with that person’s psyche. He never feels it when he passes judgement. Whether he puts his judgments into words, or keeps them to himself, makes not the slightest difference. To take the opposite position, and to agree with the patient offhand, is also of no use, but estranges him as much as condemnation. Feeling comes only through unprejudiced objectivity. This sounds almost like a scientific precept, and it could be confused with a purely intellectual, abstract attitude of mind. But what I mean is something quite different. It is a human quality—a kind of deep respect for the facts, for the man who suffers from them, and for the riddle of such a man’s life.” ****

Both the phrase “unprejudiced objectivity” and the quote’s last sentence mirror the ideas of empathy and vicarious introspection as discussed above by Obama and Kohut. Professor and psychologist Lionel Corbett goes a step further by linking Jung’s “unprejudiced objectivity” with Kohut’s claim, made elsewhere, that empathy is “value neutral” and “in essence neutral and objective. . . . not in its essence subjection.”*****

Jung’s quote, then, points to both differences and similarities between thinking and feeling as psychological functions. Both thinking and feeling are “neutral and objective” — that is, unbiased — but whereas thinking is the psychological function that operates or judges according to “a purely intellectual or abstract attitude of mind” which most traditionalists prize as “scientific,” feeling, in contrast, judges according to more human concerns and qualities, foremost among them the suffering or plight of the other. Such an understanding of feeling contrasts quite sharply with the contention by critics of Obama and Sotomayor that empathy is tantamount to bias and personal subjective sentiment. As all of these above-quoted thinkers indicate, nothing could be further from the truth — which is why Mythfire has spent considerable time emphasizing and clarifying the point.

Finally, the “Myth and Justice” blog series was inspired in part by the Roman Polanski case, viewing it as an opportunity for discussing the several ideas that were then developed in consequent blogs. In the period of time that has elapsed since the first blog was written, Polanski has been freed from house arrest by the Swiss authorities. This resulted in no small part from the U.S.’s refusal to provide the Swiss with case-related information that could have shown that Polanski had already served his sentence and that “therefore both the proceedings on which the U.S. extradition request [was] founded and the request itself would have [had] no foundation.” Another, tempting, way of assessing this development is to suggest that the “neutral” Swiss, employing something akin to Jung’s (also a Swiss!) “unprejudiced objectivity,” attempted to exercise “a kind of deep respect for the facts, for the man who suffers from them, and for the riddle of such a man’s life.” However, they were rebuffed by the U.S. and its refusal to hand over such “facts.” ******

Perhaps this multi-part chapter of Polanski’s life is destined to always be read in a primarily critical way by the one side, i.e. the spirit soul or thinking type, and in another way by the heart soul or feeling type.

But then again, isn’t this ambiguity and ambivalence in the very spirit — at the very heart — of riddles?

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Next Thursday: Myth & Justice VI.3 (“In God/dess We Trust?”)

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*quoted in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/empathy-sotomayor-and-dem_b_209406.html

**Kohut, Heinz. How Does Analysis Cure?Ed. A. Goldberg & P. E. Stepansky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984: 175.

***—.The Analysis of the Self.New York: International Universities Press, 1971: 302.

****Jung, C.G. “Psychology and Religion: West and East.”The Collected Works of C. G. Jung:Vol. 11. Ed. H. Read, M. Fordham & G. Adler. Trans. R. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969: 338.

*****http://www.findingstone.com/professionals/monographs/kohutandjung.htm

******http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/movies/13polanski.html?_r=1

Posted in Culture, Depth Psychology, Justice, Typology | Leave a comment

Myth & Justice VI (“The Empathic Heart of Real Rationality”)

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Chris

One of journalist David Brooks’ New York Times columns will serve as segue between the last Mythfire entry and this much belated follow-up:

“As Dan Kahan of Yale Law School has pointed out, many disputes come about because two judges look at the same situation and they have different perceptions about what the most consequential facts are. One judge, with one set of internal models, may look at a case and perceive that the humiliation suffered by a 13-year-old girl during a strip search in a school or airport is the most consequential fact of the case. Another judge, with another set of internal models, may perceive that the security of the school or airport is the most consequential fact. People elevate and savor facts that conform to their pre-existing sensitivities.” *

This is about as clear as possible an example of the predicament Jung faced – described in the last blog entry – when he saw that he, Freud, and Adler could each look at the same patient’s psychological case history and somehow arrive at three differing opinions regarding what was “consequential.” As stated earlier, it was in no small part to make sense of this frustrating conundrum that Jung developed his theory of psychological types. Essentially Jung realized that each person possesses an innate psychological type, something that is quite in line with Brooks’ above “set of internal models” and “pre-existing sensitivities.”

Another example, taken from Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type by Isabel Briggs Myers, involves two naval officer candidates who were asked what their primary concern would be if their ship was torpedoed: controlling the damage or the crew’s welfare. The officer with a more prominent thinking function answered “controlling the damage” whereas the officer with a stronger feeling function said “the crew’s welfare.” (In Myers-Briggs lingo, the former was INTJ; the latter INFJ.**). It is important to note that neither response/approach is necessarily right or wrong. The point is that, as stated in the previous “Myth and Justice” entries, both thinking and feeling are rational functions used to make evaluations and decisions. The former, thinking, is logic and systems-oriented and generally relies on dualistic categories of black and white, right and wrong, yes or no when making its somewhat mechanical decisions. In contrast, feeling makes its judgments according to a carefully chosen value or values schema dependent on the particular situation at hand.

Why is this important for us to acknowledge? The Brooks’ quote above comes from an Op-Ed piece he wrote entitled “The Empathy Issue.” It concerned President Obama’s controversial use of the term “empathy” when putting forward Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for Supreme Court Justice. This one word caused much consternation, particularly among some conservatives, and served as the theme for numerous discussions both on- and off-line. It is not surprising then, if Mythfire’s research is accurate, that Sotomayor eventually distanced herself from the term “empathy” when being questioned by the congressional panel. Nor does it seem to have been much in evidence in the more recent vetting/questioning of the newest addition to the court: Associate Justice Elena Kagan.

The primarily conservative complaint against the notion of empathy playing a role in judicial decision-making is that in their minds empathy is not dissimilar from personal bias and, when enforced, judicial activism. All three of these terms – empathy, bias, and judicial activism – are so emotionally loaded that it is difficult to know how best to approach them. One tact would be to suggest that the emotions expressed say more about the people expressing the emotions in terms of personal often hidden fears and desires than they do about the energies or ideas contained within the words themselves.

Another tact would be to argue outright that all Supreme Court Justices, like all humans, are not immune to a values system resulting from their upbringing, life experiences, and individual reflection. These values include, of course, or at least are influenced by one’s political leanings, and who among us is going to deny that some of the justices are more to the right and others to the left? More media time is devoted to this fact every time a nominee is put forth than was ever given to the “problem” of empathy.

James Hillman offers this quote in his essay “The Feeling Function”:

“Sometimes we forget that the application of law by a judge is an operation of feeling, and that laws were invented not merely to protect property or assure the priesthood and ruling-class of their power, but also to evaluate difficult human problems and to do justice in human affairs. Judging is a matter of feeling, just as in the temples of Saturn a balance was displayed, or as Saturn in a horoscope is said to be well-placed when in the sign of Libra. A Solomonic decision is not one brilliant stroke through the Gordian knot of complexities, but rather a judgment made by feeling. Law concerns ‘cases,’ considers ‘claims’ and ‘obligations,’ and by means of it one can make ‘appeals.’ The Bill of Rights is a document of the feeling function at its abstract best. We erroneously believe that feeling must always be personal and that law is always cut and dried, forgetting the impersonal feeling values of law, of its ideas and its general application.” ***

What’s provocative for many people is the idea that feeling can be or is “abstract” and “impersonal.” What’s equally important here is the return of the balancing scales discussed in earlier blogs. A vital image/idea to the judicial process, then, is the weighing of impersonal, abstract feeling values. (It is in a similar vein that distinguished professor George Lakoff says in his editorial contribution to the Obama-Sotomayor debate that empathy “is at the heart of real rationality.” Feeling, as Jung originally claimed and Lakoff confirms here, is a rational function.****)

One perhaps unpopular example involving empathy as a feeling value is the not-so-hypothetical case involving a death penalty verdict against a defendant claiming psychological trauma as a child leading up to his killing of x number of victims. It is conceivable is it not that the degree of empathy felt for the defendant, in this case in the form of leniency, is weighed against the quantitative, i.e. number, and/or qualitative, i.e. cruelty, characteristics of crimes committed. Put more succinctly, empathy for the defendant is weighed against empathy for the victims and their families. Certainly, for some people (predominantly thinking types?) the death penalty should always be off the table as an option. For others it should always be on. However, while it remains an option, it is worthwhile to consider that values, and empathy as a primary value, are the very tool used to decide the convicted criminal’s fate which hangs in the balance.

That is to say that as with any other defendant the criminal’s fate hangs in the balancing scales frequently appearing in front of courthouses around the world – scales held by none other than Themis, the Goddess of Justice.

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Next entry: Myth, Justice and “The Riddle of a Human Life”

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*http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/opinion/29brooks.html

** Myers, Isabel Briggs with Peter B. Myers. Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. Palo Alto, CA: CPP Books, 1980, p. 110.

***Hillman, James.“The Feeling Function.” Lectures on Jung’s Typology. Woodstock, Conn.: Spring Pub, 1971, p. 119.

****http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/empathy-sotomayor-and-dem_b_209406.html

Posted in Culture, Depth Psychology, Justice, Typology | 2 Comments

Myth & Justice V (“The Birth of the Hours”)

Posted on December 6, 2009 by Chris

This penultimate entry in the “Myth & Justice” series begins with an ancient yet still relevant mythic marriage. As mentioned in prior entries, the Greek Goddess Themis, a Titaness and thus associated with the passions of what has been called the heart- or blood-soul, was brought up to Mt. Olympus to sit alongside her new husband, the Greek God Zeus. Together they had three daughters, Eunomia (Good Order), Eirene (Peace), and Dike (Just Retribution, Justice). Collectively, these three daughters are known as the Horai, or Hours.

Lawyer By Day, She-Hulk By Night

Authors Donleavy and Shearer point out in their book on Themis that the Horai, or Hours, “are constant in their attention to human activities: their special charge is to guard the gates of Olympus and roll away the heavy cloud that settles over it, so dispelling the fog that may obscure the gods from human hearts and minds.” (37)* In no small part Mythfire has attempted in its earlier “Myth & Justice” entries to dispel some of the fog that lingers over the Roman Polanski case presently in the news so that a clearer picture of human hearts and minds, here termed heart- and spirit-souls, may be had.

A second related notion in these entries – and throughout Mythfire as a whole – is that the images in myth, such as Zeus, Themis, and the Horai arise out of the personal and collective unconscious of a people to give expression to eternal energies and ideas clamoring for recognition. That the Horai, or Hours, were also called “the Seasons” and “the correct moment” suggests, according to Donleavy and Shearer, that good order, peace, and justice “come at their due time into human consciousness, and are embedded in it as part of its own cycles.” (37) Just as the blindfold was added to Themis’s mythological kit hundreds of years after the sword and scales mentioned in the last entry, and, arguably, just as the ideas contained in the Magna Carta influenced and engendered further rights and freedoms expressed in the U.S. Constitution (which itself has been changed with amendments and may someday yield to yet newer “more correct and timely” documents), the Horai or Hours embody the idea that good order, peace, and justice are regularly born anew, emerging as a natural result of the not always easy union of spirit-soul (Zeus) and blood-soul (Themis). This new birth depends on the needs or requirements of a given time and, in keeping with the analogy, is fraught with no shortage of birthing pains. Each amendment to the U.S. Constitution is reflective of just such a new birth of the Hours.

Mythfire would like to address two justice-related themes whose time may have come for consideration and implementation. The first concerns the long-held notion, expressed in the last entry, that there is any such thing as “pure reason.” Donleavy and Shearer show that Themis’s blindfold was initially understood to symbolize a specific truth needed by and thus correct for its time, the truth being that “nothing but pure reason, not the often misleading evidence of the senses, should be used in making judgements.” (93)** However, “pure reason’s” correctness for our own present time has been attacked from many sides, especially psychological and philosophical ones, over the last hundred years or more to the point that it is most difficult indeed to even believe in such a thing as “pure reason” at all.

C.G. Jung faced a very much related quandary when, in the early part of the 20^th century, he noticed that he and two other respected psychoanalysts (Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler) analyzed the same psychological case and came up with three varying interpretations. If there was such a thing as “pure reason” then these psychoanalysts should not have arrived at such different understandings of the case at hand. How was Jung to resolve this seeming discrepancy?

He did so with the formulation of his theory of psychological types which is perhaps best known today in the form of the Myers-Briggs personality/typology exams. Jung found that people have a dominant attitude or way of being in the world, either introverted or extraverted. Just as the latter way of being could be called out-going and focused on the objects, objectives and people in the outer world, the former introverted attitude is “in-going,” preferring instead to invest greater amounts of energy in one’s inner subjective world and the world of ideas.

Four Psychological Functions

In addition to the two attitudes, each person’s psyche has four functions which operate along two poles and again vary as to which function predominates. The sensation and intuitive functions comprise the irrational pole; the thinking and feeling functions make up the rational pole. A good primer on this subject is Daryl Sharp’s Personality Types: Jung’s Model of Typology. In it, Sharp includes this quote from Jung:

“For complete orientation all four functions should contribute equally: thinking should facilitate cognition and judgment, feeling should tell us how and to what extent a thing is important or unimportant to us, sensation should convey concrete reality to us through seeing, hearing, tasting, etc., and intuition should enable us to divine the hidden possibilities in the background, since these too belong to the complete picture of a given situation.” (Psychological Types, CW 6, para. 900)

This entry focuses on the rational pole of thinking and feeling which is not to say that the irrational pole of sensation and intuition cannot also be brought to bear on the idea of justice. It is quite easy to imagine – as an admittedly simplistic example – the hypothetical judge or juror from the last entry within his or her chambers / deliberation room using all four functions: sensation to read the facts at hand, thinking to organize and analyze the same material, intuition to divine other factors influencing the case, and feeling to evaluate and prioritize the various elements in the case.

Interestingly, Jung also called the rational pole of feeling and thinking the “judging” pole. Angelo Spoto elucidates the reasoning behind these labels in a quote that is highly reminiscent of the warring heart- and spirit-souls that have been front and center in the “Myth & Justice” series:

“By referring to thinking-feeling as the rational or judging function-types, Jung is intending to call attention to general similarities within the glaring differences of the pair of opposites at hand. Thinking and feeling are similar because they both operate according to discriminating and evaluative principles. However, one function’s evaluative principles are most easily associated with the head, and the other function’s evaluative principles are most often connected with the heart; one with ordering and judging to reach an objective and logical conclusion, the other with attaching a proper and personal value.” (43-4)***

Importantly, the feeling function, and for that matter no doubt the heart-soul, are not limited to or defined by emotion. Rather, feeling is “a kind of judgment, different from intellectual judgment in that its aim is not to establish conceptual relations but to set up a subjective criterion of acceptance or rejection” (CW 6, para. 724). This subjective criterion often emphasize the personal values of harmony and human relationship over the impersonal and abstract conceptual ideas of right and wrong held by the thinking function. However, as Sharp points out, “Thinking and feeling are called rational because both are based on a reflective, linear process that coalesces into a particular judgment.” (16)

To do the idea of typology (and its application to justice) justice [!] would require a much longer series of blog entries. What Mythfire has attempted to do with this brief entree to the topic is bring into sharpened relief the ideas of spirit- and heart-souls by introducing the ideas of the thinking and feeling functions. In psychological parlance, this sharpening of relief is called differentiation and, along with the consequent step of integration, is the sine qua non of becoming more conscious of who we are as human beings and why we do the things we do.

In mythological parlance, Mythfire has attempted to bring together and more clearly understand the union of Zeus (spirit-soul) and Themis (heart-soul) as well as the product of that union, the Horai or Hours, a.k.a. the timely re-birth of good order, peace, and justice. Mythfire would love to observe a panel discussion on how thinking and feeling as well as the other typological functions and attitudes could learn to contribute equally to the idea of justice as we – i.e., judges, jurors, legislators, executives, and citizens – experience and implement it. Perhaps typology is a psychological contribution, like the Horai, whose time has come to the fields of justice and jurisprudence.

The next – and last – entry in the “Myth & Justice” series will draw further from the notion of typology as applied to controversial comments made this past year by President Obama and new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

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*Donleavy, Pamela and Ann Shearer. From Ancient Myth to Modern Healing: Themis, Goddess of Heart-Soul, Justice and Reconciliation. London: Routledge, 2008.

**quoting Cesar Ripa

***Spoto, Angelo. Jung’s Typology in Perspective. Rev. Ed. Foreword Robert A. Johnson. Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron P, 1995.

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Myth & Justice IV (“Will Polanski Get Symbolic Justice?”)

Posted on November 30, 2009 by Chris

Lady Justice This last month the New York Times published an op-ed piece stating that President Obama’s “administration and the Senate leadership should pick up the pace of nominations and confirmations in order to restore some balance to a federal judiciary that was pushed sharply to the right by former President George W. Bush.” * A few days prior to this National Public Radio (NPR) had an unrelated piece about a newly published book on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The title of the NPR article was “Scalia Book Explores the Man Behind The Justice” and one glance at included excerpts of the book’s Prologue reveals that his judicial spirit is very much also the jousting spirit mentioned in Mythfire‘s last blog:

“With his biting humor, Scalia has been advancing the legal theory known as “originalism” — insisting that judges should render constitutional decisions based on the eighteenth-century understanding of the text. “It’s a fight worth making,” he says in remarks that are part battle cry, part assertion of victory.” **

The Prologue also observes how Justices Alito and Roberts “have long admired Scalia and the way he wages the good conservative fight.” Scalia sounds like he’s part court justice and part court jouster. (And, yes, the excerpts also exhibit elements of the court jester in Scalia as well).

It is, of course, no revelation that judges are biased human beings like the rest of us. Every time a new Supreme Court Justice must be nominated and appointed, the question most prominently on people’s minds is “will she or he move the court in its entirety to the left or to the right?” The recognition of personal bias, of “the man behind the justice,” has no doubt made itself known in harmful as well as relatively harmless ways over the centuries. The tension between eternal ideals (what is called “the spirit soul” in previous blog entries) and the emotional exigencies of specific real-life situations (“the blood soul”) plays out in “the men and women behind the justices” just as they do within and between other individuals and the cultures they inhabit.

The last blog entry suggested that in such states of opposition a symbol often emerges and takes its place in the cultural imagination or psyche in such a way that is meant to transform and thus resolve the previously existing tension. In terms of the idea of justice and its inherent tensions (i.e. spirit vs. blood soul, good vs. evil, truth vs. falsehood, etc.), the symbol that arose and furthermore has retained its symbolic power up to the present day is that of the Goddess Themis. The present entry takes a quick & closer look at several aspects of the imagistic power of Themis and her accoutrements: blindfold, sword, and scales. At the same time, Mythfire looks at how these images might apply to the Roman Polanski case that is currently in the news.

Lady Justice - Bexar County Courthouse First, a symbolic primer:

Blindfold: the impartiality of the law (justice as blind to differences between opposing parties); the idea that “nothing but pure reason, not the often misleading evidence of the senses, should be used in making judgements”***; inner withdrawal and contemplation; insight

Sword: that which, using the power of discrimination, separates true from false, good from evil, and in so doing
(re-)establishes right order; the power of creation as well as destruction; the instrument of decision and active truth

Scales: the capacity to hold opposite ideas and energies in balance; justice, moderation, prudence, and balance resulting from the weighing of actions and activities; when imaged with the sword, scales symbolize Justice in double harness with Truth

A proper analysis of these symbols along with their application to the subject at hand would include multiple examples both verbal (i.e. myths, fairy tales, folk tales, legends, etc.) and visual (like that to the right) in which these images are on display in a manner that supports the primary symbolic descriptions just bullet-pointed. However, for the sake of blogging brevity, this evidentiary stage of academic argumentation will be put to the side in this entry.

On to the next disclaimer: Mythfire will put questions to the reader below, asking readers to act as if they are the judge or the jurors in the Polanski case. (Indeed, it does seem that as of this writing, Polanski may end up before either a judge or both a judge and jury****). Regardless, the idea is that whether as a judge or a juror, we begin by imaginally retreating into the jury deliberation room, the judge’s chambers within our mind and put around our own eyes the blindfold of impartiality.

The jury deliberation room and judge’s chambers symbolize a container in which the opposites of spirit-soul and blood-soul can be held (or contained) until a resolution is found. Whether physical or psychical (i.e., the jury/judge’s room in our mind’s eye), it is in this space that the “weighing of actions or activities” – represented by the scales – and the process of separation and discrimination (the sword) can take place.

However (and herein lies the second disclaimer), can we truly be sure that we know exactly all of the actions and activities pertaining to the Polanski case? At present, the case is being tried in the court of public opinion, a hole-filled sieve-like container if ever there was one. Mightn’t there be more in the way of actions and activities regarding the various aspects of the Polanski case than have been disclosed up to now? Isn’t it possible that the documentary film as well as the various news reports have either unintentionally or even intentionally left out details that concern Polanski’s culpability, the original judge’s impropriety, or other relevant matters?

In keeping with the symbol of the scales, it would seem quite imprudent and even unjust, then, for Mythfire to “weigh in” with its own final-sounding verdict. Instead, a hopefully more balanced approach is offered, namely that once we have retreated into the jury room/judge’s chambers and placed over our eyes the blindfold of impartiality, we listen for questions we might hear the goddess Themis posing to us in the form of her mythic accoutrements:

Blindfold: “What prejudice or bias am I bringing to this case? Is this prejudice/bias favoring one side in this case over another? How is this bias influencing my openness to the case facts as presented? How is my bias influencing how I interpret these facts? Is there maybe another valid interpretation that I should at least consider or be open to? In what ways and/or to what degree is this other interpretation potentially valid?”

Sword: “Considering the charges and the facts as presented, what specific injustices have occurred here? What questions remain if any that must be addressed? What arguments do I believe and accept as factual and/or legitimate and which ones do I discount? What specific decisions/judgments do I need to make? Keeping in mind that what the sword destroys is injustice and, furthermore, that all individuals and organizations, including the judicial system, are imperfect, i.e. potentially unjust, might I have to right a past wrong enacted by the very judicial system I am now enlisted to protect and preserve?”

Scales: “As I weigh the arguments from the prosecution and the defense, which arguments or claims seem lop-sided or far-fetched in terms of believability and pertinence to the case at hand? What extenuating circumstances should be taken into consideration as their absence would leave an unbalanced, incomplete picture of the case? If I am the judge, does the punishment I am thinking about levying fit the crime? Is it possible that the defendant has already been punished and levying further punishment will create imbalance, not balance? How, then, does the verdict (re-)establish a right balance in terms of the harmony and well-being of the parties involved as well as the community in which they live?”

In the symbolic primer above, the blindfold was described as representing the idea that “nothing but pure reason, not the often misleading evidence of the senses, should be used in making judgements.” Today, it is more difficult than several centuries ago (when the blindfold first joined Themis’s mythological kit) to believe in something called “pure reason.” This theme is taken up in the next entry.

Nevertheless, it is hoped that a questioning process such as that offered above might lead to “symbolic justice” in the best sense of the term, i.e., an impartial, balanced and prudent decision / verdict. Perhaps this decision will occupy the middle ground between what is considered the “letter” and what is called the “spirit” of the law. The very existence in our lexicon of the phrases “the letter of the law” and “the spirit of the law” serves as yet another example of the spirit- and blood-souls at work in our lives.

Old Bailey - Lady Justice Finally, Mythfire does believe the following: no matter how much we would like to play out the Polanski case in the media and other forums / courts of public opinion, the case simply and ultimately won’t be played out there. Polanski must return to the U.S. and once again – hard as it may be – stand before the judicial system, the judges and/or jurors who will hear his case. Whether or not Polanski initially gets the verdict he wants, he does have recourse to an appeals system designed to give defendants protection from unjust judicial decisions.

As sure as Lady Justice stands atop the Old Bailey, the central criminal court in the U.K., and atop other courthouses around the world, Polanski does not live in a vacuum. His return to the U.S. is best for the idea of justice not only in the immediate community in which the alleged crimes occurred but also in the community-at-large as testified by Themis’ global presence. Of course this works both ways: if it is determined that Polanski was the victim of injustice back when the case was originally heard, then this injustice must be righted both in the form of some recompense and/or apology to Polanski as well as in adjustments made to the judicial system – so that such miscarriages of justice do not re-occur in the future.

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* http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/opinion/17tue1.html

** http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120350132

*** Donleavy, Pamela and Ann Shearer. From Ancient Myth to Modern Healing: Themis, Goddess of Heart-Soul, Justice and Reconciliation. London: Routledge, 2008.

****http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-polanski-legal1-2009oct01,0,6930903,full.story

Jean Chevalier’s The Penguin Dictonary of Symbols (Trans. John Buchanan-Brown. London: Penguin, 1994) was also used in the above “symbolic primer.”

Posted in Culture, Depth Psychology, Justice, Symbols | Leave a comment

Myth & Justice III (“Modern Day Jousting”)

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Chris

Bexar County Courthouse - Lady Justice The last entry discussed the Roman Polanski case in the context of the spirit- and heart- (or blood-) souls dueling within and between both individuals and cultures. Mythfire has had conversations with readers/friends whose very different “takes” on the Polanski case demonstrate these two souls in a most striking fashion. Each side, or soul, is unequivocally and passionately convinced that his/her side is the correct one. Again, the line of argument goes something like this:

Spirit Soul: “I don’t care what Polanski has done since he was arrested in terms of his contributions to society and cinema. And I don’t care about the loss of his parents in the Holocaust or Sharon Tate to the Manson murders. That is all tragic, no question, and it is great that he’s made those contributions to art and society. However, this is all secondary to the fact that he raped a girl – or at the very least had unlawful sexual intercourse with her as a minor – AND then he illegally fled the country! He must be held accountable for his violations just like anyone else! No one is above the law!!”

Heart/Blood Soul: “Polanski only fled because the judge in the case kept adding more hoops for him to jump through. And that ‘unlawful sex with a minor’ charge, come on! She had had sex before. On some level she knew what she was getting into when she allowed herself to be alone with Polanski and things transpired the way they did. Anyway, can we ever know for certain what went on in that room between the two of them? No! And we shouldn’t crucify Polanski when it’s equally possible, even likely, that it wasn’t rape at all. Finally, the girl, now a woman, has time and again said she doesn’t want this case back in the public eye. She has forgiven Polanski and even settled out of court with him. That should be all that matters. If you don’t question what really happened between them and you don’t have a heart for Polanski considering everything he’s gone through in life, at least have a heart for the girl. Have a heart for this woman.”

Even though we might not fully identify with either side as summarized above, perhaps we can identify with enough of it to see that there are indeed two primary warring sides or souls. Unfortunately, the tension and frustration only increase when we realize that each side or soul has read the same articles, news reports, court transcripts, etc., and yet they’ve somehow arrived at completely opposite convictions! Clearly, more information is not the key to resolving this matter. So – how is one to ever hope for a positive resolution much less the “greater restraint and civility” spoken of at the end of the last entry?!!?

Here is another question: after considering the Polanski case, can we at all be surprised to learn that the word justice is etymologically linked through its Middle English forms (justen, jousten) to the word joust? Ironically, justice means law and order, but it also means the jousting that must take place between opposing sides if that law and order is to occur.

As this entry moves forward, perhaps it is necessary to first state the obvious: some sort of law and order, some system of justice is needed for society to function in a healthy cohesive manner. This need was recognized early on, no doubt as humans struggled, or jousted, with their warring spirit- and heart-souls in ancient cases similar to the Polanski one today. In psychological parlance, this judicial jousting is called holding the tension of the opposites. The idea, according to Jung, is to hold the tension between the two conflicting energies until a symbolic image of a third thing arises from within the psyche’s unconscious to unite, transform, and resolve the matter at hand.

Fortunately, an image, or symbol, did arise from within the psyche to unite, transform, and resolve the jousting inherent in our quest for justice: the Goddess Themis. As mentioned in the last entry, Themis was a Titan who was given a place at Zeus’s side on Mt. Olympus. Donleavy and Shearer provide a psychological understanding of this mythic marriage:

“What did Themis bring to this marriage between Titans and Olympians? The root of her name is the verb tithemi, which means to place, to set and lay down, and also to fix and determine. So Themis brings the boundaries and right order set not by human rules or laws, but by that which underlies them – an archetypal order which is both natural and divine.” (34) *

Future entries will undoubtedly shed further light on the psychological understanding of archetypes. For the moment what’s important is the idea that the boundaries and right order established and maintained by today’s judicial system is the product not of the rational mind but of eternal energies (archetypes) which have come up out of the psyche and taken symbolic/imagistic form thus resolving and transforming a previously existing state of tense opposition. Hopefully, this proposed move from mind and rationality to psyche and the non-rational as originating source of ideas will free up some space in readers’ minds for a more psychological, less combative discussion to follow.

Whether this move happens or not, there is no denying that, as stated in the previous entry, the global prevalence of the Themis image strongly suggests the embodiment of energies still alive in and important to the human psyche – especially when it comes to the idea of justice. Furthermore, this embodiment is made all the more powerful by the physical presence not only of the Goddess but also of her characteristic accoutrements, i.e. sword, scales, and blindfold. Each of these images packs a meaning of great import to the psyche’s notion of justice.

Mythfire takes up this meaning in the next entry: “Will Polanski Get Symbolic Justice?”

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