How Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational Changed My Life

“The development of the psyche is the paradigm for the development of society and culture.” When I wrote that sentence 30 years ago, I held a firm belief that it was true. And I still do. What had been lacking for some time before then, in my mind, was an historical situation of exact duplication between a particular developmental advance in society and an equivalent one in the development of the psyche. Or, at least, a striking correspondence. Certain very general correspondences were worth noting. Society and culture had developed in the direction of Weber’s “legal-rational,” gradually liberating themselves from paleological and magical ways of thought, because the development of the ego and the cognitive function of the psyche lie precisely in that direction, as Piaget and others had demonstrated at length. As example, the religious history of Western Europe (Catholicism to Protestantism) demonstrates such a movement towards a more rational, less magical religious view. Protestantism abandoned the notion of purgatory and its corollary belief that, if one said masses for the dead, one would speed the passage of dead souls to heaven. At least ten other examples are available from Reformation history.

What was still lacking for me was a more specific, more exact example of correspondence. In E. R. Dodds’ great book, The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), and its brilliant theoretical chapter, “From Shame-Culture to Guilt-Culture,” he demonstrates that the development in ancient Greek culture from the world of Homer and heroic epic (Iliad, Odyssey, etc.) to a world that also includes the tragic view and tragic drama was a movement from a culture almost totally committed to the voice of shame for purposes of

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moral judgment to one that also included a large dimension of guilt. This was an historically momentous movement: until that time, no other culture had made that journey. The warrior hero is prodded on incessantly by the voice of shame: “Be a man, don’t be a woman, don’t back down from a fight, go out and kill someone.” The tragic hero, for whatever particular reason, commits an act of moral trespass and brings misery and death to himself and those about him. Shame is about inadequacy and impotence; guilt is about trespass. The tragic view has a much more complex vision of what morality is. It is important to note that in the process of social and psychological development, though one stage replaces a previous one, that doesn’t mean that the values of the previous stage disappear. Nothing of importance is ever totally lost or repressed. Shame still lives after the birth of tragedy, but there is no importance of guilt in a shame-culture.

What Eric Robertson Dodds (1893-1979) did not do, but what I could do for myself, was to elaborate on the movement of the individual psyche—and its development—from shame to guilt. From everything we know, the three-year-old child lives not at all in a world touched by feelings of guilt. Shame, and the threat of the denial of love, are the chief modes for morally disciplining such a child. Guilt—and the strong possibility of remorse—arrives only at four to five-years-old. And, of great significance, as an essential element of the Oedipus complex, which enjoys the exact time-table. Allowing, again, for the persistence of shame throughout life, there is a profound truth in the notion that shame is a pre-Oedipal psychic mechanism, and guilt an Oedipal and post-Oedipal one.

So, does that mean we can say Homeric Greece was a pre-Oedipal, pre-genital society? In the literal, 100% sense, of course not. No society has been such; no society believed you could produce by oral or anal sex. However, in the study of the evolution of religion, for instance, there seems no

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question that the religions of primitive society—those preliterate, kinship ones that were the main subject of anthropology—could be described, with knowing reservations, as pre-Oedipal. Especially in contrast to later developments of religion. Certainly, it seems accurate to say that monotheism is an Oedipal religion par excellence, in contrast to a religion of multiple spirits, taboos, complex magical practices, and human sacrifice.

The reason that Dodds’ book and, most especially, that chapter was earth-shaking for me was that it opened up a whole world of theoretical understanding of other crucial events in the evolution of society, culture, and, most especially, religion. There is no psychological development from one stage to the next without a new set of contradictions, resistances, anxieties, ambivalences, defenses, and compromise formations. Could it be that when society and culture take the same, analogous developmental advance to a new stage, new equivalent ambivalences, defenses, and compromise formations appear on the level of society? My answer was an unequivocal “Yes!”

The proof was in the analysis of the great historical movement from that stage when society is held together overwhelmingly by kinship forms of social cohesion to a stage of society where non-kinship, political, monarchical forms are the primary ones of social cohesion. All human society began as a kinship society: non-literate with no authoritarian monarch, no politics, no state. The first great developmental advance is the creation of non-kinship forms of social cohesion, most importantly monarchy and state politics. This second stage, in contrast to “primitive society,” I designated “complex society.”

The new stage demonstrated a whole new set of contradictions and compromise formations. Pervasive human sacrifice, which did not exist in kinship society and ceased to

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exist when complex society gave way to the archaic, was one crucial new manifestation of the human religious impulse. How do we understand these new forms of social and cultural existence? By recourse, I decided, to the analogous situation of psychic development. The movement from kinship to state society corresponded very closely to—and was possibly even caused by—the psychic developmental propulsion away from complete dependency on the nurturing of the mother towards separation and individuation: towards autonomy. That movement is fraught with anxiety, ambivalence, and defenses against these same, which are then resolved in satisfactory or unsatisfactory compromise formations. Indeed, all that could readily explain the absolute necessity of an authoritarian monarch—an omnipotent father figure—for the creation of the new stage of complex society. For the psyche, no going beyond maternal symbiosis without the assistance (and the tyranny) of an omnipotent monarchy. Elegant and with a more than vague ring of truth.

Could we, then, begin to understand all developmental movements in society with a similar theoretical approach? For me, the answer was clear and loud. Such was the exciting journey that Dodds and others had given me the courage to undertake.

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