One of the enthralling aspects of Goethe’s poem Erlkönig, the Erlking, is that it points to someone or something that has the mysterious power to come between the father and the son.
As you know the story goes thus. The father rides with his son through the windy night. He takes good care of the boy, holding him safe and warm in his arms. Yet he cannot keep the Erlking from taking the boy into his realm. In the end the father holds in his arms a dead child, because he failed to understand that in the seemingly innocuous language of imagery and symbols, the child was communicating to him matters of life and death. The father, because he is imprisoned in is own world, cannot reach the child. Consequently the son cannot cross the bridge into the world of his parents, and vanishes into the un-world of Erlkönig. The child is no match for the overpowering logic and realism of the adult world, he succumbs to it. The other side of the paradox is that the barrenly realistic world of the father succumbs, because it is no match for the superior power of the inner world of the child. ‘Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?’ ‘Father, don’t you see the Erlking there?’. All the child’s anxiety is crowded together and breaks forth explosively in this one appeal for understanding. How is it possible that the father misses this? Because between the father and the son there is a third factor at work. In the mytho-poetic language of Goethe this third factor is intimated in the figure of Erlkönig.
I shall try to trace the working of this third factor in the prosaic language of discursive thought. From my experience as a psychoanalyst I am biased towards this specific explanation of Goethe’s poem. I want to start with three brief clinical examples, which, to me, beautifully and horribly illustrate the story of Erlkönig. So I would ask you, in listening to these examples, to keep Erlkönig in mind, also when the connection is not immediately apparent. Further I want to analyse these examples and to extract from them the meaning of the third factor.
Here is my first example. Imagine the following exchange taking place between a man and his wife during a marital counselling hour. The man says: ‘If I could only work ten hours a day during a half year on my research project ...’ his wife flashingly interrupts him: ‘Then you’ll get a nervous breakdown.’ If one has an opportunity to analyse this exchange, one discovers that there are great gaps between expression and experience. The utterance of the man came out of an experience of not being valued enough by his colleagues and not getting the right chances, whereas his wife struck him so violently, because she interpreted his words as a reproach to her and that while she took already such a large share in her care of the children, letting her husband work in the weekends.
When we call the man A and his wife B, we can formalize five steps in their communication.
Without entering into details we note that there are gaps between the steps.
The first gap is seen in the fact that B does not perceive the inner world of A. The wife had no idea of what motivated her husband’s lamentation.
The fact that B by his or her interpretation distorts and misconstrues the meaning of A’s utterance forms a second gap.
The third gap consists in A’s ignorance of the experience he has unleashed in B. the man did not know that his wife felt herself deeply accused.
The fourth gap is that B is ignorant of the effect which is of her utterance has in the experience of A.
The fifth gap is that A distorts the meaning of B’s expression. Had A known that B’s outrageous words were a plea for loving attention he would have felt much less offended.
In parenthesis, if we have an idea of the gaps between the steps, we understand better, why any encounter between two people is such a mysterious event. When my face encounters yours, much more happens than each of us can encompass. The wife heard things which lay beyond the perceptual world of her husband and vice versa. This insight leads us to a phenomenon which is basic to any encounter between two people. The gaps in communication prove to be a manifestation of this underlying phenomenon, which I call the existential chasm. I use the word chasm to indicate something discontinuous, a gap, a deep cleavage or cleft, a hollow space, a break, a hiatus.
By existential chasm I mean the phenomenon that the inner world of the individual together with his outer world are separated from that large domain of external reality, which is not part of his own world. From external reality I as individual see a very small part which by this selection becomes my outer world. All the rest, which does not become part of my outer world, we shall call with a technical term ‘the-world- outside’.
While my inner and my outer world make up an indivisible whole, there does remain a separation, a chasm: namely the outer together with the inner world is forever divided from the world-outside. The world-outside precedes my outer world, is independent from it, and is determined by regularities different from those of my outer world.
The gaps in the communication of the married couple, I mentioned are a manifestation of the existential chasm. Vital elements of the wife’s world were not part of the outer world of the man, but remained world-outside for him and vice versa. An in-depth exploration of the above mentioned exchange – into which I will not enter now – showed that underlying both the man’s and his wife’s expression was a specific childhood pattern of hurt and pain. The existential chasm becomes most intensely manifest, when the expression of the one person strikes an emotionally charged infantile pattern of the other.
This brings us to our next subject. Leaving many subtleties of the existential chasm aside I now want to concentrate on the gaps between the steps in the exchange between parents and children.
I start with two further clinical examples, one taken from the work of David Malan, the other from Margaret Mahler. Roberta, four years old, is visited in hospital by her mother the day after a tonsillectomy. Roberta refuses to respond to the presence of her mother. The disappointed mother goes to another part of the ward, ignoring her child, and there talks to some other parents. A sympathetic patient, who had already made friends with Roberta, comes up to her and says: ‘Yes, it is awful being in hospital without your mother.’ The little girl lets out a heard-rending sob. The mother comes over and reproaches the patient. Mother and daughter are reconciled.
Also in this example we notice a gap, namely between the child’s inner world and the meaning which the child’s expression has for the inner world of the mother. The mother, expecting an overjoyed child, is hurt by its non-responsiveness. The child experiences unmanageable grief and anger and protects itself by the expression of indifference. The mother is out of contact with the experience of the child and the child cannot know that in mother old feelings are reawakened, feelings of being abandoned and rejected when she was a child. Here Francis Thompson’s dictum is applicable: ‘We know not what each other says.’
How fortuitous events can complicate the existential chasm is illustrated in the case of Donna, my third example. About one and a half years old Donna experienced within a short time a penicillin injection (which shook her belief in her mother’s omnipotence), a minor surgery on her scalp, and she had the experience of mother a night away from home because of a tonsillectomy of her brother. There was no relationship between these three events as far as the world-outside is concerned, but in the inner world of Donna these events were organized into a coherent whole: the meaning of insecurity, anxiety provoking threat and loss. In many of such cases the parents do not know which seemingly unconnected elements of the world-outside are organized by the child into a coherent basic meaning. And even if the parents do have some knowledge of it, they cannot prevent these events from happening at a most unfortunate moment of time, in Donna’s case the vulnerable rapprochement period. Events and timing are beyond the parents’ control. They happen by mere chance.
From three clinical examples I have given, we can extract some general ideas.
First, there is a chasm between the outer world of one individual and the world- outside. The other person belongs to my outer world but also to the world-outside and a lot falls away in between the respective outer worlds of two individuals. Events happen that have been noticed by no one of the dramatis personae in their blind stumbling over each other.
Second in the context of the interaction there are events that happen by mere chance beyond anybody’s control. The context is thus a combination of social factors and inanimate forces of nature. Also in the social world, in as far as the other person remains for me world-outside, there is an unrelated coincidence between him and me. Now I want to point to something that is essential for understanding the whole thing. What I have in mind are factors that are unobserved by the participants in the drama, that are beyond their control. But at the same time these unseen factors act upon, and sometimes deeply affect the inner worlds of the participants. Something from outside the outer world, something in the world-outside has the power to penetrate the relationship and to come between a husband and a wife, between a parent and a child.
In a few catchwords we may now summarize what we have said. We have come upon a factor that has following six characteristics:
1. The unrelatedly co-incidental, and thereby irreconcilable, the discrepant, the gaping;
2. The inevitable;
3. The fortuitous, accidental, chance-like;
4. The collusive, the clashing;
5. The unseen and unsaid;
6. The uncontrollable.
I summarize these characteristics in the one word Anankè, as you know the Greek word for fate. By Anankè I do not mean the blind course of events in itself, but the inexplicable co-incidence, the senseless coming together of fate and mind. Anankè is there, where the senseless, blind course of things strikes at the heart of meaning and destroys what is meaningful in the life of a person. We are here concerned with the collision of heterogeneous elements. Cold fact collides with warm desire.
With the description of Anankè we have tracked down a third factor in the relationship between parents and children. The other two factors are respectively the child and the parent. These two factors are very familiar to us as central points of attention in psychoanalytic theory. Unconscious phantasy within the child has long been recognized as a power which is able to create the world in which the child lives. Alternatively in much theory the reality of the parent is seen as a centre of gravity determining the life of the child. In between falls this third factor which because of its nature is very hard to grasp.
Our next question is: how do we encounter the workings of the third factor in daily psychoanalytic practice?
What we do in a psychoanalysis is to reconstruct what has taken place in the child and between child and parent. Schematically represented three processes have taken place, which have escaped the attention of the parents.
The first process starts with an initial event which can be described as a startling experience of fright, shock, terror, dismay. Considered from the world outside the event need not be impressive, it may seem very unimportant, but because the event strikes the child in an affectively charged basic pattern, he is overwhelmed by what happens. The crucial point is that in this experience the child is deserted by his parents. They have not noticed the event or even if they have, they are unable to make contact with the child’s experience.
Through the overwhelming fright the inner world is arrested, the feelings come to a standstill. The child is aghast. Now a second process steps in. The overwhelming experience cannot be integrated in the consciousness of the child. The feelings he cannot bear are split off, pushed into the unconscious, they are repressed. This process also is not observed by the parents.
There is yet a third process. What I have described as the initial event repeats itself in the ongoing life of the child. He has new experiences of fright and terror, in which he is deserted by his parents. Now a truly tragic thing happens. Escaping the attention of the parents the arrested and split-off experiences of the childe are slowly and irresistibly organized into an unconscious basis pattern of meaning this meaning may e.g. by: ‘my genitals are an evil place, which I have to fear’ or ‘I am a stranger in this world and forever alone’, or ‘it’s always mother whose welfare counts, never mine’, or ‘when I unleash my aggression everything will be destroyed’, or ‘father and mother are unreliable’. Although there are types of meaning every child has his own, highly individual pattern of meaning. It is amazing in an analysis to reconstruct how events in the second, the fourth and the seventh and the tenth year have coalesced into one basic meaning. Keeping these three processes in mind we become aware of the fortunate and even comfortable position in which the psychoanalyst finds himself. Detached and from a distance he surveys the complex context in which the parents and the child were caught. He understands why at that distant time no one could see certain events happening. The analysand discovers often for the first time what has happened and that no one noticed it. The analyst gets information which the parents and the child never got. In a certain sense reconstruction is creating something that did not exist before.
In the three processes I have described (the arrest, the repression and the organization), one further phenomenon is implicated, that I have to mention briefly, before I bring my story to a close.
In doing psychoanalysis we are struck by the paradoxical fact that parent and child are so close and intimate, so near – and yet so far and strangers to each other. As Thomas Wolfe has put it: ‘which of us has looked into his father’s heart?’
Goethe has already indicated this paradox in the image of the father, who holds his son safe and warm and yet is completely foreign to the inner world of the child.
The duality is that each, living in his own world, is unreachable for the other, while at the same time the one deeply penetrates the life of the other. A mother can get under the skin of her child, as a foreign object . For instance, a narcissistic mother, who unconsciously demands from her child, that it be completely subservient to the mother’s needs, and who refuses the child any possibility to be a person in his own right – such a mother is at once very near to and very far from the child. Mother is near because she makes the child fill her emptiness, she is far because she does not put herself in the child’s shoes. But also in normality long time intimacy implies the paradox of two lives forever separated and forever intertwined.
During an analysis patients, because of their neurotic suffering, are forced to delve deeply into the lives of their parents in order to reconstruct minutely the ways in which the personalities of the parents operated thirty of forty years ago. These analysands often have a more intimate knowledge of how father and mother really were, than the parents had about themselves at that distant time. Coming so near they also discover how far away from each other they were.
Ladies and gentlemen, with these considerations we close the circle, for the paradox of nearness and distance was already implied in the examples of the married couple, of Roberta and Donna and of the poem we started with.
I have tried to indicate how in the course of an analysis the strands of Goethe’s mystifying poem Erlkönig are disentangled, so that at moments we gaze at the gaps between the steps, the existential chasm, the genetic chasm, the paradoxes of inside and outside, the misfortunes of dis-related souls and in all this the power of Anankè.
As you know the story goes thus. The father rides with his son through the windy night. He takes good care of the boy, holding him safe and warm in his arms. Yet he cannot keep the Erlking from taking the boy into his realm. In the end the father holds in his arms a dead child, because he failed to understand that in the seemingly innocuous language of imagery and symbols, the child was communicating to him matters of life and death. The father, because he is imprisoned in is own world, cannot reach the child. Consequently the son cannot cross the bridge into the world of his parents, and vanishes into the un-world of Erlkönig. The child is no match for the overpowering logic and realism of the adult world, he succumbs to it. The other side of the paradox is that the barrenly realistic world of the father succumbs, because it is no match for the superior power of the inner world of the child. ‘Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?’ ‘Father, don’t you see the Erlking there?’. All the child’s anxiety is crowded together and breaks forth explosively in this one appeal for understanding. How is it possible that the father misses this? Because between the father and the son there is a third factor at work. In the mytho-poetic language of Goethe this third factor is intimated in the figure of Erlkönig.
I shall try to trace the working of this third factor in the prosaic language of discursive thought. From my experience as a psychoanalyst I am biased towards this specific explanation of Goethe’s poem. I want to start with three brief clinical examples, which, to me, beautifully and horribly illustrate the story of Erlkönig. So I would ask you, in listening to these examples, to keep Erlkönig in mind, also when the connection is not immediately apparent. Further I want to analyse these examples and to extract from them the meaning of the third factor.
Here is my first example. Imagine the following exchange taking place between a man and his wife during a marital counselling hour. The man says: ‘If I could only work ten hours a day during a half year on my research project ...’ his wife flashingly interrupts him: ‘Then you’ll get a nervous breakdown.’ If one has an opportunity to analyse this exchange, one discovers that there are great gaps between expression and experience. The utterance of the man came out of an experience of not being valued enough by his colleagues and not getting the right chances, whereas his wife struck him so violently, because she interpreted his words as a reproach to her and that while she took already such a large share in her care of the children, letting her husband work in the weekends.
When we call the man A and his wife B, we can formalize five steps in their communication.
- A’s experience before expression;
- A’s expression;
- B’s experience after A’s expression;
- B’s expression;
- A’s experience after B’s expression.
Without entering into details we note that there are gaps between the steps.
The first gap is seen in the fact that B does not perceive the inner world of A. The wife had no idea of what motivated her husband’s lamentation.
The fact that B by his or her interpretation distorts and misconstrues the meaning of A’s utterance forms a second gap.
The third gap consists in A’s ignorance of the experience he has unleashed in B. the man did not know that his wife felt herself deeply accused.
The fourth gap is that B is ignorant of the effect which is of her utterance has in the experience of A.
The fifth gap is that A distorts the meaning of B’s expression. Had A known that B’s outrageous words were a plea for loving attention he would have felt much less offended.
In parenthesis, if we have an idea of the gaps between the steps, we understand better, why any encounter between two people is such a mysterious event. When my face encounters yours, much more happens than each of us can encompass. The wife heard things which lay beyond the perceptual world of her husband and vice versa. This insight leads us to a phenomenon which is basic to any encounter between two people. The gaps in communication prove to be a manifestation of this underlying phenomenon, which I call the existential chasm. I use the word chasm to indicate something discontinuous, a gap, a deep cleavage or cleft, a hollow space, a break, a hiatus.
By existential chasm I mean the phenomenon that the inner world of the individual together with his outer world are separated from that large domain of external reality, which is not part of his own world. From external reality I as individual see a very small part which by this selection becomes my outer world. All the rest, which does not become part of my outer world, we shall call with a technical term ‘the-world- outside’.
While my inner and my outer world make up an indivisible whole, there does remain a separation, a chasm: namely the outer together with the inner world is forever divided from the world-outside. The world-outside precedes my outer world, is independent from it, and is determined by regularities different from those of my outer world.
The gaps in the communication of the married couple, I mentioned are a manifestation of the existential chasm. Vital elements of the wife’s world were not part of the outer world of the man, but remained world-outside for him and vice versa. An in-depth exploration of the above mentioned exchange – into which I will not enter now – showed that underlying both the man’s and his wife’s expression was a specific childhood pattern of hurt and pain. The existential chasm becomes most intensely manifest, when the expression of the one person strikes an emotionally charged infantile pattern of the other.
This brings us to our next subject. Leaving many subtleties of the existential chasm aside I now want to concentrate on the gaps between the steps in the exchange between parents and children.
I start with two further clinical examples, one taken from the work of David Malan, the other from Margaret Mahler. Roberta, four years old, is visited in hospital by her mother the day after a tonsillectomy. Roberta refuses to respond to the presence of her mother. The disappointed mother goes to another part of the ward, ignoring her child, and there talks to some other parents. A sympathetic patient, who had already made friends with Roberta, comes up to her and says: ‘Yes, it is awful being in hospital without your mother.’ The little girl lets out a heard-rending sob. The mother comes over and reproaches the patient. Mother and daughter are reconciled.
Also in this example we notice a gap, namely between the child’s inner world and the meaning which the child’s expression has for the inner world of the mother. The mother, expecting an overjoyed child, is hurt by its non-responsiveness. The child experiences unmanageable grief and anger and protects itself by the expression of indifference. The mother is out of contact with the experience of the child and the child cannot know that in mother old feelings are reawakened, feelings of being abandoned and rejected when she was a child. Here Francis Thompson’s dictum is applicable: ‘We know not what each other says.’
How fortuitous events can complicate the existential chasm is illustrated in the case of Donna, my third example. About one and a half years old Donna experienced within a short time a penicillin injection (which shook her belief in her mother’s omnipotence), a minor surgery on her scalp, and she had the experience of mother a night away from home because of a tonsillectomy of her brother. There was no relationship between these three events as far as the world-outside is concerned, but in the inner world of Donna these events were organized into a coherent whole: the meaning of insecurity, anxiety provoking threat and loss. In many of such cases the parents do not know which seemingly unconnected elements of the world-outside are organized by the child into a coherent basic meaning. And even if the parents do have some knowledge of it, they cannot prevent these events from happening at a most unfortunate moment of time, in Donna’s case the vulnerable rapprochement period. Events and timing are beyond the parents’ control. They happen by mere chance.
From three clinical examples I have given, we can extract some general ideas.
First, there is a chasm between the outer world of one individual and the world- outside. The other person belongs to my outer world but also to the world-outside and a lot falls away in between the respective outer worlds of two individuals. Events happen that have been noticed by no one of the dramatis personae in their blind stumbling over each other.
Second in the context of the interaction there are events that happen by mere chance beyond anybody’s control. The context is thus a combination of social factors and inanimate forces of nature. Also in the social world, in as far as the other person remains for me world-outside, there is an unrelated coincidence between him and me. Now I want to point to something that is essential for understanding the whole thing. What I have in mind are factors that are unobserved by the participants in the drama, that are beyond their control. But at the same time these unseen factors act upon, and sometimes deeply affect the inner worlds of the participants. Something from outside the outer world, something in the world-outside has the power to penetrate the relationship and to come between a husband and a wife, between a parent and a child.
In a few catchwords we may now summarize what we have said. We have come upon a factor that has following six characteristics:
1. The unrelatedly co-incidental, and thereby irreconcilable, the discrepant, the gaping;
2. The inevitable;
3. The fortuitous, accidental, chance-like;
4. The collusive, the clashing;
5. The unseen and unsaid;
6. The uncontrollable.
I summarize these characteristics in the one word Anankè, as you know the Greek word for fate. By Anankè I do not mean the blind course of events in itself, but the inexplicable co-incidence, the senseless coming together of fate and mind. Anankè is there, where the senseless, blind course of things strikes at the heart of meaning and destroys what is meaningful in the life of a person. We are here concerned with the collision of heterogeneous elements. Cold fact collides with warm desire.
With the description of Anankè we have tracked down a third factor in the relationship between parents and children. The other two factors are respectively the child and the parent. These two factors are very familiar to us as central points of attention in psychoanalytic theory. Unconscious phantasy within the child has long been recognized as a power which is able to create the world in which the child lives. Alternatively in much theory the reality of the parent is seen as a centre of gravity determining the life of the child. In between falls this third factor which because of its nature is very hard to grasp.
Our next question is: how do we encounter the workings of the third factor in daily psychoanalytic practice?
What we do in a psychoanalysis is to reconstruct what has taken place in the child and between child and parent. Schematically represented three processes have taken place, which have escaped the attention of the parents.
The first process starts with an initial event which can be described as a startling experience of fright, shock, terror, dismay. Considered from the world outside the event need not be impressive, it may seem very unimportant, but because the event strikes the child in an affectively charged basic pattern, he is overwhelmed by what happens. The crucial point is that in this experience the child is deserted by his parents. They have not noticed the event or even if they have, they are unable to make contact with the child’s experience.
Through the overwhelming fright the inner world is arrested, the feelings come to a standstill. The child is aghast. Now a second process steps in. The overwhelming experience cannot be integrated in the consciousness of the child. The feelings he cannot bear are split off, pushed into the unconscious, they are repressed. This process also is not observed by the parents.
There is yet a third process. What I have described as the initial event repeats itself in the ongoing life of the child. He has new experiences of fright and terror, in which he is deserted by his parents. Now a truly tragic thing happens. Escaping the attention of the parents the arrested and split-off experiences of the childe are slowly and irresistibly organized into an unconscious basis pattern of meaning this meaning may e.g. by: ‘my genitals are an evil place, which I have to fear’ or ‘I am a stranger in this world and forever alone’, or ‘it’s always mother whose welfare counts, never mine’, or ‘when I unleash my aggression everything will be destroyed’, or ‘father and mother are unreliable’. Although there are types of meaning every child has his own, highly individual pattern of meaning. It is amazing in an analysis to reconstruct how events in the second, the fourth and the seventh and the tenth year have coalesced into one basic meaning. Keeping these three processes in mind we become aware of the fortunate and even comfortable position in which the psychoanalyst finds himself. Detached and from a distance he surveys the complex context in which the parents and the child were caught. He understands why at that distant time no one could see certain events happening. The analysand discovers often for the first time what has happened and that no one noticed it. The analyst gets information which the parents and the child never got. In a certain sense reconstruction is creating something that did not exist before.
In the three processes I have described (the arrest, the repression and the organization), one further phenomenon is implicated, that I have to mention briefly, before I bring my story to a close.
In doing psychoanalysis we are struck by the paradoxical fact that parent and child are so close and intimate, so near – and yet so far and strangers to each other. As Thomas Wolfe has put it: ‘which of us has looked into his father’s heart?’
Goethe has already indicated this paradox in the image of the father, who holds his son safe and warm and yet is completely foreign to the inner world of the child.
The duality is that each, living in his own world, is unreachable for the other, while at the same time the one deeply penetrates the life of the other. A mother can get under the skin of her child, as a foreign object . For instance, a narcissistic mother, who unconsciously demands from her child, that it be completely subservient to the mother’s needs, and who refuses the child any possibility to be a person in his own right – such a mother is at once very near to and very far from the child. Mother is near because she makes the child fill her emptiness, she is far because she does not put herself in the child’s shoes. But also in normality long time intimacy implies the paradox of two lives forever separated and forever intertwined.
During an analysis patients, because of their neurotic suffering, are forced to delve deeply into the lives of their parents in order to reconstruct minutely the ways in which the personalities of the parents operated thirty of forty years ago. These analysands often have a more intimate knowledge of how father and mother really were, than the parents had about themselves at that distant time. Coming so near they also discover how far away from each other they were.
Ladies and gentlemen, with these considerations we close the circle, for the paradox of nearness and distance was already implied in the examples of the married couple, of Roberta and Donna and of the poem we started with.
I have tried to indicate how in the course of an analysis the strands of Goethe’s mystifying poem Erlkönig are disentangled, so that at moments we gaze at the gaps between the steps, the existential chasm, the genetic chasm, the paradoxes of inside and outside, the misfortunes of dis-related souls and in all this the power of Anankè.