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Life Arts    H4'ed 3/20/15

The Pursuit of Happiness (REVIEW ESSAY)

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As a result of the catastrophic ways her life in her twenties and thirties unfolded, what is the remainder of Christine Hassler's life going to be like? Will it be filled with more catastrophic events in each further decade of her life?

In the hope of preventing further catastrophic events in her life, Christine Hassler decided that the time had come for her to take stock of how she was approaching life and work out a new approach. Her book sets forth her new approach to life, which sounds promising.

As I read her account of her life in her twenties and thirties, I couldn't help but think of Cervantes's famous novel DON QUIXOTE. No doubt Cervantes created the imaginary character Don Quixote as a way to poke fun at himself and his own quixotic expectations in life. However, even though Don Qixote's quixotic expectations do not lead him to have successful adventures, he does not appear to suffer from the kind of Expectation Hangovers that Christine Hassler describes in her book.

But the alchemists that Dr. Jung studied in his book MYSTERIUM CONJUNCTIONIS no doubt experienced the kind of Expectation Hangovers that she writes about in her book. You see, all of those alchemists set to work expecting to make gold, as they at times expressed their goal. But not one of them ever claimed to have attained the stated goal. Their way of expressing their Expectation Hangovers was to discuss melancholia (see esp. pages 229, 320, 350, 422, 432, 497, 510, 515, 521). Evidently, melancholia just came with the territory, so to speak, of being an alchemist trying to make gold. So they reported their sense of melancholia, but they did not dwell on it or let it stop their work. In effect, they saw their work of trying to make gold as a kind of spiritual quest. Dr. Jung interprets their various ways of expressing what was emerging in their psyches as they continued their work in the quests to make gold, as ways we might use to express certain parallel or analogous psychological experiences in our own psycho-spiritual journeys through life. So Dr. Jung's big book is a treasure trove of terminology and imagery that Christine Hassler might want to explore as she continues on her life of recovering from Expectation Hangovers.

Dr. Jung was also familiar with the medieval Grail legends. For a scholarly study of the Grail legends, see Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz's book THE GRAIL LEGEND, translated by Andrea Dykes, 2nd ed. (1970).

As the story goes, the medieval quest for the Holy Grail symbolically represented the highest goal that Christian knights could seek. The Holy Grail is imagined as a chalice filled with Christ's blood. If a knight were to attain the Holy Grail, then the blood of Christ could be used to heal the wounded Fisher King and thereby restore and renew his kingdom that has become the waste lands.

In his famous poem "The Waste Land" (1922), T. S. Eliot borrows the imagery of the waste land and the character of the wounded Fisher King from the medieval Grail legends.

You see, none of the Grail legends shows a knight attaining the Holy Grail and bringing it back to revivify the wounded Fisher King and the waste lands. So in a sense, Mr. Eliot is hammering this point home in his poem that was written after the end of World War I. In plain English, contemporary Western culture still stands in need of having the wounded Fisher King and the waste lands revivified.

So will Christine Hassler perhaps emerge as the knight who attains the Holy Grail and brings it back to revivify the wounded Fisher King and the waste lands of Western culture today? She appears to have launched herself on a psycho-spiritual quest. It remains to be seen if she will now dream the dream of the knights in the Grail legends and set out to attain the Holy Grail. What the Holy Grail symbolizes is attainable. Attaining what it symbolizes is not dreaming the impossible dream that Julie Andrews sang about in her famous song.

In the book WOMAN'S MYSTERIES (1971), mentioned above, Dr. Harding perceptively discusses Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" (pages 204-209).

In English literature, the medieval work known as SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT (SGGK) is related to the Grail legends because Sir Gawain is one of the knights in the Grail legends, but the Holy Grail is not mentioned in SGGK.

In the book RETURN OF THE GODDESS (1982), the Jungian psychotherapist Edward C. Whitmont, M.D., discusses SGGK (pages xiv, 154, 156, 167-172, 174-175, 177-178, 186, 192, 229, 248). With Christine Hassler's catastrophic adventures in her twenties and thirties in mind, I want to quote a lengthy statement that Dr. Whitmont makes about Gawain's being tested in SGGK:

"Gawain is tested: can he receive and give love and empathy in a disciplined, responsible, and self-transcending fashion; can he respect social mores, yet not use them to avoid an honest, personal response and commitment based on affirmation of need and feeling, rather than impersonal rule and code? This entails personal risk -- voluntary self-exposure to crucifixion or beheading -- for the sake of progress, growth, and initiatory experience. It eschews the assignment of guilt and blame to a scapegoat, person or group, in a holier-than-thou fashion. It calls for mutual support, a sharing of responsibility, and a playful trying, as well as individual self-confrontation. . . . The conditions of [Gawain's] trial apply not only to desire but to all affect expressions" (pages 177-178).

No doubt Gawain's tests in SGGK are symbolic. Christine Hassler's tests in life in her twenties and thirties were undoubtedly real. However, the lessons she has learned from her tests in life appear to me to be congruent to the lessons that Dr. Whitmont attributes to Gawain in SGGK.

Lissa Rankin's Book THE FEAR CURE (2015)

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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