Despite our postmodern, polysemiotic, ironic, avant-garde, deconstructed, psychoanalytical sophistication, it is still so damned difficult for us to shed our historical monotheism. I once heard Karl Kerényi, who taught me mythology in Zurich almost fifty years ago, say it was impossible to return to the Greek style of mind. We cannot escape two thousand years of Christianity and its pervasive monotheistic psychology, which favors an abstracting, cohesive, unifying, and centrally organizing viewpoint—or what psychology has baptized as “ego.” We seem unable to escape obeisance to “one-sidedness” (Jung’s definition of neurosis, by the way), which raises one or another perspective above all others. Thus it is not Hermes who has caught the psychology of our times, but the perdurance of monotheism. Hermes and his computer is merely the fashionable frontman.
The shifts in gods influencing twentieth-century psychology do not indicate a true displacement of the monotheistic model in favor of a polytheistic consciousness. One god rises to the foreground to vanquish all others and then subsides. For a while it was the Great Mother. Neumann, Bowlby, the Kleinians took over the entire pantheon. Earlier there was the dominance of the heroic ego: “where id was there ego shall be,” draining the Zuider Zee like Hercules cleaning the stables, resisting the regressive monsters and sirens of the id, like Ulysses tied to the mast, a good-enough husband heading home. We have also had a monocular focus on Artemis and on the Amazons with anti-phallic combative feminism. And, we have had, or been had by, a one-sided identification with the abandoned child, victimized, abused, and sentimentalized.
These vagaries in the patterns of myth influencing psychological theory are merely slight twists in the same kaleidoscope of monocular vision. Each is a point of view, interpreting phenomena in terms of one god or goddess only. Changing the gods, their names, or their locations (from Judah to Attica), or gender (from upward phallic arrow to descending pubic cross) does nothing to the unifying insistence of Western Christianized consciousness (our cultural psyche) and its faith in singleness. The shift to Hermes is one more such turn, as if the contemporary psyche were desperately trying to writhe free from the ouroboros of Western History that swallows every emerging potential back into the same unifying loop. Remember what the patristic thought-police said in their debates with the ancient polytheistic texts: “We take prisoner every thought for Christ” (Gregory of Nazianus).
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The Classical and Renaissance solution to identification with one god, i.e., the monotheistic affliction, was not resolved in syncretism, or “getting it all together” by worshipping all the gods, as if standing in a circle and bowing to each in turn. This keeps the old “I” in the center, apportioning attention according to the principle of equity (Apollo? Saturn and his scales? Athene and justice? …). A pantheon is a Roman idea, appearing in a culture that still today gives home to the One True Universal Church (i.e., Catholic). No, the Greek and Renaissance solution to identification with any single god was the profound realization that never does one god appear alone.
The gods are not so much distinct units as interwoven patterns implicating one another. May I refer you here to my Re-Visioning Psychology, Part 3, but even more to one of its sources, Edgar Wind’s chapter chapter “Pan and Proteus” in his masterful work Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance. There he lays emphasis upon the duplicity of the gods and their inherent involvement with one another. He writes: “The mutual entailment of the gods was a genuine Platonic lesson.” [2] He recalls Schiller’s verse: “Nimmer, das glaube mir, erscheinen die Götter, / Nimmer allein” (Never, believe me, never do the gods appear alone.)
Hillman, James. Mythic Figures (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman Book 6) (p. 272). Spring Publications.
Do you see “parts work” or Internal Family Systems as a step towards what you are suggesting?