Free The Cry for Myth by Rollo May Page B

charm in his election was partly that he represented new ideas, a youth leaving the old behind. The real question, namely, the quality of the new, is rarely asked. It is assumed in this New World tobe better because it is new. This is the myth of change, where we put on the new self, where we follow the belief in Cuéism, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”
    This mood is allied to the fact that we assume that history, even the little of it that we have in this country, is not significant; we cast off European history with a sense of relief. Many Americans secretly believe Henry Ford was right when he said, “History is bunk!” For him history began with the invention of the Ford flivver. Concerned only with the present and the future, our myth omits the actual richness of American history; for the very love of the new, the expectation of all kinds of change in psychotherapy, works against real progress. The patient in therapy, in his expectancy for a new life, misses the greater values of deep inner poise and serenity.
    But all the while—to follow this myth to our present state—we have the underlying suspicion that we are simply running away by our New Age methods. When we talk about changing personalities, we need a more mystical term. The term that was born was “transforming”: we say we are engaged in “transforming persons.” In the 1970s Werner Erhard in California founded the EST seminars, and the movement spread like a prairie fire across the country.
    About half a million mostly young, mostly affluent, mostly white persons, … paid Erhard and his fellow trainers between $300 and $500 to be transformed in a weekend from confused underachievers into self-assured, take-charge types who “got it”—accepted responsibility for their own lives. *
    But it was a short-lived myth. Half a decade later this fountain of transformation began to dry up and soon nobody heard anything about EST, as it was called. Not surprisingly, however, Erhard himself had been transformed. He had now developed a system of “breakthrough” for transforming businessescalled Transformational Technologies. Money was now to be made in the corporations. As the reporter of this new form of change puts it,
    In our born-again, discard and replace culture, where conversation has replaced correction, fast transformation has become as easy for a self as fast food. It no longer seems to matter what you become in the process of transformation, just so long as you are transformed . And if you’re still the same imperfect animal despite your funny new vocabulary, simply transform yourself again. *
    THE MYTH OF PROTEUS
    The Greek god Proteus represents the myth of change. Whenever Proteus was in any dangerous or difficult situation, he could change himself into some new form which promised security, whether animal or tree or insect. The American psychiatrist Robert Lifton has brilliantly described this personality which is always in the process of change, Protean . To a considerable extent in America the myth of change, the unending quest for the new, the yearning for transformation, is for us a fleeing from anxiety as it was for Proteus. Homer describes Proteus when, in the Odyssey , Odysseus and his men encounter the wily one and must ring from him the directions home, and it was absolutely necessary:
    When Proteus at last slept
    We gave a battle cry and plunged
    for him,
    locking our hands behind him.
    But the old one’s
    tricks were not knocked out of
    him; far from it.
    First he took on a whiskered
    lion’s shape,
    a serpent then; a leopard; a
    great boar;
    Then sausing water; then a tall
    green tree.
    Still we clung on, by hook
    or crook, through every
    thing.
    Until the Ancient saw defeat,
    and grimly
    opened his lips to ask me. *
    But this addiction to change can lead to superficiality and psychological emptiness, and like Peer Gynt, we never pause long enough to listen to our own deeper insights. Lifton uses