fleeced: a perspective from antiquity on contemporary ... · the story of jason and the argonauts...

Fleeced: A Perspective from Antiquity on Contemporary Addictions

robert f. t yminski

The story of Jason and the Argonauts has been with Western civilization for at least 3,000 years. It entails a voyage by a young man and his crew to obtain the one thing that he believes will make his life right—make it golden and rich with power, status, wealth, and desire. The idea of being hapless, stupid, and mindless is important to understand-ing Jason and his dependence on Medea. Some classicists account for the character of Jason, who in many ways is an ill-fated hero, by viewing the myth as a tale of initiation. If not solely about initiation, what lessons are to be gleaned from this myth?

The driven pursuit of one thing or one type of experience is familiar to most ana-lysts and psychotherapists as pointing toward obsession, compulsion, and even addic-tion. A further parallel can be drawn between the Fleece and our national addiction in the United States to oil, which has become like the Golden Fleece. Our thirst for oil also entails a journey to the East, like Jason’s, to procure a valued substance that we des-perately need in order to maintain our authority and power.

The Argonautica, as the story is formally called, is complex and has been ren-dered into epic poetic form, chiefly by Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BCE (Hunter 1993; Green, 1997). Others have also done so as well, for example, Pindar in the fifth century BCE (Conway and Stoneman 1972/1997) and Valerius Flaccus in the first century CE (Slavitt 1999). There are important traces of the story and of Apollonius’ interpretation of it in Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the first century BCE (Knight 1956). Therefore, various forms of this tragedy span at least six centuries as a tale known and taught in the ancient world. The Argonautica unfolds against a back-ground of treacherous family politics, employs numerous mythological allusions, and ends with the filicidal Medea in Greece with her new husband Jason. Medea lives in

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 3, Number 3, pp. 52–68, ISSN 1934-2039, e-ISSN 1934-2047. © 2009 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI: 10.1525/jung.2009.3.3.52.

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Robert F. Tyminski, Fleeced: A Perspective from Antiquity 53

contemporary imagination as a witch who murdered her own children, whereas Jason has enjoyed a run of popularity as a daring hero adventuring into dark seas and return-ing with the trophy of a Golden Fleece. Many modern iterations of Jason’s side of the tale have appeared in movies, cartoons, and children’s books, for example, the illus-trated children’s book Jason and the Golden Fleece (Riordan & Cockcroft 2005) or the animated fantasy film Jason and the Argonauts (Sony Pictures 1963/1998).

A Tale of Quest and Betrayal

An internecine conflict begins the tale of the Golden Fleece:

Two children, Phrixos and Hellé, are in grave danger from their stepmother Ino, who is plotting to murder them. Their mother appeals to Hermes, who grants her a ram with a Golden Fleece, who can both talk and fly. It carries the children from Iolkos, in eastern Greece at the head of the Gulf of Pagasai and below Mount Pelion, over the Black Sea. Hellé falls off in flight: The body of water known as the Hellespont is named for her. Her brother Phrixos reaches the land of Aia at the easternmost part of the Black Sea, where he is given asylum by the powerful King Aietes. Phrixos then sacrifices the golden ram in tribute to the gods for saving him, hanging its Fleece in a grove sacred to Ares, where it is guarded by a powerful dragon.

Meanwhile, Phrixos’ cousin Pelias, a devious schemer, becomes king of Phrixos’ native Iolkos. Pelias’ mother had tried unsuccessfully to murder him as a child, and he later mur-dered his stepmother in Hera’s sanctuary, crudely violating the goddess’s altar and thereby earning her vengeance.

This background highlights both the divisive and violent political struggle within the family and the overt cruelty to which children can be exposed. Clinically, we encounter families beholden to greed and power, whose members have been profoundly wounded by maternal hatred and abandonment and paternal ruthlessness in the service of retaining power. This theme continues into the next generation with Jason.

Fearing that Jason’s uncle, Pelias, might mercilessly eliminate him, Jason’s parents give him to the centaur Chiron1 for care and upbringing. As a young man, Jason finally sets out for his home, and while crossing a stream, he loses one of his sandals. An oracle had proclaimed that a one-sandaled man would one day return to Iolkos and regain his birth-right as ruler, and Pelias is warned that the oracle’s prediction has come true. He devises a scheme to once more exile Jason by sending him on a quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece, promising that he will abdicate in favor of Jason should Jason succeed. With this maneu-ver, he is assured of Jason’s long, if not permanent, absence.

A ship, the Argo, is built, and Jason assembles a team of heroes, many stronger and more talented than himself. At the outset, Herakles is part of the crew. They have many adventures as they make their way across the Aegean Sea, through the Hellespont, and eventually into the Black Sea, which they traverse to the eastern shore, where the Fleece rests in the exotic, barbarian kingdom of Kolchis.2 Early on, Herakles leaves the crew to search for his companion Hylas on land. The crew waits for his return, but as time passes with no word from Herakles, Jason orders them to sail without him. (Many have

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54 jung journal: culture & psyche 3:3 / summer 2009

speculated that it was necessary to write him out of the story at this juncture because Herakles threatens to dwarf the character of Jason: Herakles is a true hero, whereas Jason is less clearly so.)

King Aietes sets preconditions for giving Jason the Fleece once he’s in Kolchis, pre-conditions that the king believes will result in Jason’s death: Jason must yoke two fire-breathing bulls, plough a huge field, and sow it with serpents’ teeth from which will spring fierce warriors attacking whomever ploughs. In his commitment to win back the Fleece, Jason bravely agrees to Aietes’ terms. Aietes’ daughter, Medea, bewitched by Eros at the urging of Aphrodite and Hera, spends an agonizing night before deciding to betray her father. She meets Jason and gives him a drug that makes him invincible for one day. When he appears for the contest, Jason is beautiful to behold, said to resemble both Ares and Apollo.

Jason withstands the fire-breathing bulls and the spear-throwing warriors, enraging Aietes. He plots to attack Jason and his crew rather than part with the Golden Fleece. Under Hera’s influence, Medea decides to warn Jason and then escape with him—but not before administering a potion to the dragon guarding the Fleece and stealing it. They are

Jason and Medea. Jason is seen taking down the Golden Fleece. Below Hecate, Goddess of the Underworld. Christian Daniel Rauch, ca. 1810–1820, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,

Berlin, Germany. © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

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pursued by Medea’s brother Apsyrtos, in command of Aietes’ army, which eventually traps Jason’s ship. Medea and Jason trick Apsyrtos by arranging a meeting for surrender, when Jason brutally stabs and kills Apsyrtos. Jason and Medea, along with his crew, again escape and begin a lengthy, dream-like voyage home. At one point, they are lost in the Libyan des-ert; at another, they encounter Kirké, who is Medea’s aunt. On the island known today as Corfu, Aietes’ army catches up with them, and the king of the island is inclined to the hon-orable remedy, which is to return Medea to her father. The only exception would be if she became someone’s wife: The wedding of Jason and Medea then takes place.

Apollonius’ telling of this story ends on the beach where the Argo was initially launched. We find Jason and Medea in a transitional zone, returning from a long, wind-ing voyage back to Iolkos after harrowing escapes time and again. Medea will decep-tively arrange for Pelias’ death at the hands of his own daughters, and instead of result-ing in Jason’s elevation to the throne, she and her husband will be banished from the kingdom. Destructiveness and betrayal seem to characterize this calamitous couple as they struggle with their fate.

The Characters of Jason and Medea

To understand the evolution of the characters of Jason and Medea, consider what clas-sicists have had to say about them. Jason has been described as an anti-hero, a villain, a schemer, and even a bit stupid. Theodore Klein, in an article about Jason as both hero and scoundrel, writes, “Apollonius’ Jason furnishes the paradigm of the compro-mised hero: it is true that he acquires the Golden Fleece—but only by recourse to a vir-gin-witch and her drugs” (1983, 115). He adds, “Jason is only amechanos. Suassez de-fines this word as ‘sans resource, sans moyen, sans invention’ [without resources, with-out skill, without inventiveness3] and goes on to enumerate Jason’s traits as embar-rassment and indecision” (116). Hunter notes that Jason “is marked by the absence of extraordinary intelligence and the supernatural skills enjoyed by some of the most prominent Argonauts” (1988, 441). Hunter, interestingly, places Jason within the con-text of someone passing through an initiation. I question whether Jason completes a successful initiation, for he is compelled to steal the Fleece out of a naïve assumption about power. He believes that ownership of the Fleece, which represents a forbidden material, will guarantee his destiny. Above all, he learns little on his quest, although he does at times rise to the occasion and act heroically, when he confronts Pelias, who fears Jason, and when he accepts the challenge from Aietes. Nonetheless, Beye (1969) speaks for perhaps a majority of classics scholars when he writes that Jason is “uniformly portrayed as passive” (48) and becomes “the perversion of the hero” (53).

Considering Jason’s obvious flaws, how does the questionable and hapless Jason obtain the Fleece? The short answer: only through Medea’s assistance. She is a beautiful witch, whom Eros—owing to the compact between his mother Aphrodite and Hera—forces to fall in love with Jason; she is skilled in the use of drugs, or in Greek pharmaka.

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Without Medea’s access to drugs, there would have been no chance of Jason’s obtain-ing the Fleece, which he desperately craves. The depth of his craving becomes clear when Jason implores Medea to give him the drugs he needs: “I beseech you . . . I have come here, both your suppliant and your guest, forced by necessity to clasp your knees” (Hunter 1993, 89). Hunter observes that Jason’s craving is unique: “The subordination of all else in this extremely rich poem to this single obsessive end [the Golden Fleece] is a striking departure from . . . Homeric poems” (1988, 440). I suggest that an inner pres-ence like Medea always accompanies the addict on his or her quest for magical fulfill-ment of his or her desires. When she is spurned, the addict pays a terrible price.

From a literary and historical standpoint, Medea is credited with representing in new ways the psychological dimensions of conflict within a female character, for instance, conflict between soul and reason (Barkhuizen 1979) and conflict between fear and love (Hunter 1987). However, from an object-relations point of view, Medea is not merely a witch or sorceress, but rather an inner feminine object who becomes degraded through a lack of concern and an unwillingness to bear reasonable guilt. She begins as a good object for Jason and possesses many noble qualities, such as loyalty, faith, intelligence, and intimate knowledge of nature. Fate corrupts her into becoming a tool for insuring Jason’s success, sacrificing her own humanity.

Jason needs others and clings to their strength to get him through; he is not a typical classic Greek hero, who goes his own way in confronting fate. A few exam-ples from the text serve to demonstrate Jason’s fragile emotional state: He “pondered upon everything helpless and absorbed” (Hunter 1993, 14). Mulling his helplessness, he asks, “How can I accomplish this? . . . I have no experience” (45). In frustration, he says, “I should have immediately refused this expedition . . . As it is I am in constant ter-ror and my burdens are unendurable; I loathe sailing in our ship . . . , and I loathe our stops on dry land” (50). Once in Kolchis, he pleads with Medea, “. . . give me the drugs which will provide me with strength” (89). These examples illustrate his fragility and dependence on others. He is a consummate manager in getting others to join him and pitch in. He exerts leadership by convincing others rather than inspiring them.4

When Jason finally uses Medea’s drug for his contest, its effect on him is potent: “Then Jason sprinkled the drug over himself: a mighty force entered him, inexpressible, without fear, and his two arms moved freely as they swelled with bursting strength” (Hunter 1993, 95). These excerpts call to mind associations to addiction, craving, des-peration, and narcissistic inflation. Jason is not a Homeric hero who fights his enemies with respect and honor while abiding a deep love for his allies. His self-absorption and neediness at moments stand in stark contrast to the older tradition of heroic sacrifice.

Medea knows that she is supplying Jason the means to succeed: “The goddess Hekate has taught her extraordinary skills in handling all drugs which the dry land and the boundless waters produce” (Hunter 1993, 78). With her expertise in pharmaka,

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she further assists him by putting the dragon that guards the Fleece to sleep. With her in the lead, Jason enters the grove and steals the Fleece. In their subsequent long escape, Jason nearly abandons Medea on several occasions to what would have been her cer-tain death. Gradually, Medea realizes, with deep disturbance, that she has been used by him and by the goddesses who conspired to subvert her own better judgment. As she gradually awakens from her infatuation, one can sense her remorse: How could this hapless fellow—amechanos—have gotten her into such trouble? This corresponds to the addict’s experience of doubt when sobering up after a state of intoxication: Just as Medea is carrying Jason’s unconscious remorse, the recovering addict begins to feel remorse at the harm caused to those who were used as mere objects in quest of the addicting substance.

In the epic, there are moments when Medea can be seen as acting from the point of view of codependence: “Without hesitation she took the drug from her fragrant breast-band, and his hands grasped it quickly and joyfully. She would have drawn off her whole soul from her chest and granted it to him in the thrill of his need for her” (Hunter 1993, 89. Italics added for emphasis). In this more observably relational way, we are viewing Medea as a cooperative partner involved in an addict’s abuse. Because she is infatuated, she enjoys her part in gratifying his craving. Like someone enabling an addict, she tells Jason how truly powerful these drugs will make him: “Your body will possess boundless might and great strength, and you will think yourself the equal not of men, but of the immortal gods” (Hunter, 1993, 90). Later, she begins painfully to recognize the cost of helping him with her drugs and upbraids him: “Has your suc-cess made you completely forgetful? Do you care nothing for all you said when hard pressed by necessity? . . . Where have all the sweet promises gone?” (Hunter 1993, 107). By this point in the story, she has no way out. Her fate is now conjoined with Jason’s. Her resentment is familiar to those knowledgeable about 12-step programs.

In a different way, still congruent with the myth, Medea also provides us a detailed look at the inner world of an addict: She holds the strong feelings that the addict rejects and is persecuted as a result. The manic Jason part of the inner world becomes ego-identified and repeatedly attacks the vulnerable Medea part, which is mostly forced to stay in the unconscious, and is abandoned there as a good part of the person-ality. In Jungian terms, we might think of her as an anima that is refused entrance into consciousness except when she has something clever that is needed. Moreover, the refusal is carried out aggressively; this Medea-part of an addict’s psyche seeks relatedness, but her reaching out for connection is harshly prohibited. Whether internally or externally locat-ed—or both—we might then wonder: How does she react to her maltreatment?

The threat of Jason’s abandonment changes her. Her animosity grows, and she becomes the brutal character known to many from the tragedy by Euripides (Warner 1955). Her conspiratorial role in her brother’s murder anticipates the later filicide. She

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and Jason become gangsters on the run. Their eventual marriage is a tactic to gain their passage back to Iolkos in Greece. Through many critical points in the latter part of the epic, Jason rarely acts like a hero. Impulsivity often follows indecision. Jason looks almost stupid at times, unable to reflect or develop a plan. Instead, he takes action that spells calamity and ruin for others. Once he has the Fleece, he does not redeem him-self. There is no initiatory transformation into a better self.

Clinical Considerations

The Golden Fleece is the object, the telos, which is sought in the myth. It has a history of ritual sacrifice, which endows it with a sacred aspect. Jason believes it will restore his birthright, and he aspires to possess it. There is an implicit paradox in his quest: He is tangling with the sacred for mundane purposes. Jung writes: “The Golden Fleece is the coveted goal of the argosy, the perilous quest that is one of the numerous synonyms for attaining the unattainable” (CW 12, ¶206). An addict similarly strives to create an otherwise unattainable experience. Like an addict, Jason pursues the Fleece without much thought to what his actions will unleash. Jason believes that he is entitled to this forbidden treasure and its magical powers. He is completely unaware of the Fleece’s symbolic significance, which can be seen from an object-relations standpoint as con-nected to a failure to achieve the depressive position. Jason obtains Medea’s love and the Golden Fleece without adequate personal struggle, yet ruthlessly, and he does not know how to value them. Here, Jason is no longer the wondrous hero whom Pindar portrayed. In Apollonius’ version, Jason has lost an idealized glow and become not only human, not only flawed, but also emotionally crippled.

Jung remarks on the dangers of compulsively seeking a perfect object:

The unconscious is always the fly in the ointment, the skeleton in the cupboard of perfec-tion, the painful lie given to all idealistic pronouncements, the earthliness that clings to our human nature and sadly clouds the crystal clarity we long for. (CW 12, ¶207)

Not surprisingly, Jung discusses Faust in this context as an example of a seeker who cannot help himself, cannot stop himself, and will give anything in his quest for thrill-seeking immortality. Near-total unconsciousness afflicts conditions of addiction and compulsion, resulting in a loss of ego as a person mindlessly pursues a “substance” that is golden, powerful, and irresistible. The illusion of such a perfect object seduces the addict into darkness, where he or she hopes to forget some awful pain. Defensive omnipotence and splitting help to maintain the false belief that the perfect object can be concretely—physically—held and turned into a form of manic reparation for feel-ings of helplessness and limitation.

How does this process, this fleecing of the psyche with an illusory perfect object, appear clinically? Does a Golden Fleece show up in a way that is associated with addiction and compulsion? Do examples demonstrate the effects of pharmaka, of

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pharmacy, in numbing the psyche, and of amechanie (a state of being amechanos), which is the loss of resource, as a symptom? Three examples of addiction and compul-sion show how the psyche can be sidetracked into a quest for the Golden Fleece—a search for the unattainable. The following examples come from patients in my practice5 who have worked hard over years to face the power of the Fleece’s touch, to struggle against an addiction or a compulsion, and to find some other way to integrate a vul-nerable part of their psyche.

Example (1)George is in his forties and has struggled with cocaine and amphetamine addiction for much of his adult life. He has been severely depressed with a sense of wasting his life. He has been in analysis for five years and recently decided to try a 12-step program to help him quit abusing these substances. He is highly ambivalent about this decision, however, because of the positive effects that he feels he obtains from using the drugs. At times, he has described intoxication as a near-religious experience; he has followed a Buddhist tra-dition for many years, though inconsistently. He speaks about his cocaine use:

George: It is a fantastic experience. Everything is heightened, amazing. My perceptions are awesome. My senses are amplified in ways that are impossible without the drug. My body is charged with energy, and I feel like I’m glowing.

RT: In what way?

George: Because of the light. I’m enveloped by it. It feels like it’s coming from me. Light is pouring out of my chest and surrounding me. I’m wearing a coat of light.”

Example (2)Mary is a woman in her fifties, who has also been depressed and was originally feeling hopeless about her professional life. She thinks that her parents might have been al-coholic, though never defined themselves as such. Mary attends Al-Anon, which she feels has helped her to identify many self-defeating patterns in relationships. She of-ten holds herself to impossibly high standards, obsessively criticizes herself, and grades how she thinks others are perceiving her. After six years in analysis, Mary tells me the following dream:

I bike across a field and on the front of the bike there is a basket with a small glass beaker in it. It’s filled with crystal clear liquid. The beaker could break if I’m not very careful.

She speaks about her dream as follows: “The liquid is an ideal of perfection. I carry around this thing inside that tells me I have to be perfect. But it could shatter if I don’t pay constant attention. The liquid is pure, doubly clear, a flawless compound.” We talk about this perfect liquid as both an aspiration and a burden. It raises the question of how much imperfection Mary feels she can accept in herself and in others.

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Example (3)Gavin is a gay man in his thirties who has a severe depression that he describes as “suck-ing the life out of him.” He feels that he cannot sustain any forward momentum and often talks about himself as beset by inertia and a leadenness. Gavin has been addicted to Internet pornography for several years and often has spent hours daily feeding his hab-it. He has been in analysis for four years and recently has spoken about trying to curtail his Internet viewing time. Gavin talks about his most intimate adult relationship:

Gavin: The intensity was very high. It felt like magic. I lost myself in my desire. Our first night together, we had sex all night long. I couldn’t wait for the next time. It hurt to be apart. It was like an addiction.

RT: What would you say now about that idea of addiction?

Gavin: The sex was like getting high, intoxicating, what I imagine heroin would be like. Time just stopped. I still think about him as a sexual fantasy. I’ve never had sex like that since—it’s been fourteen years. That was a golden moment. I had something precious and never wanted it to end.

Following this conversation, Gavin is able to link “the golden moment” to his addic-tion to pornography and thinks that the latter is fueled by a search to find an experi-ence that matches the sexual intoxication.

For George, Mary, and Gavin, a glowing light, a flawless compound, and a golden moment, respectively, evoke representations of the Golden Fleece. George suffers from an addiction to a drug; Mary feels enslaved by an inner compulsion for perfection that has drug-like qualities; and Gavin has fled from real intimacy and instead substituted com-pulsive viewing of pornography. A similar belief in making their life right through dogged pursuit of one type of experience has made each of them, from time to time, unconscious of their capabilities and unable to make use of their internal resources. They each suc-cumb to significant periods of immobilizing depression, which is frequently associated with addiction. Ironically, the one thing that each is striving for disables them. Their pur-suits do not make their life better, satisfying, right, or more whole. In two instances, the pharmacy is clear: cocaine and pornography. In Mary’s case, it is subtler: Her drug derives from a perfect compound that always leaves her feeling flawed, defective, and inadequate. She feels enslaved by an impossible-to-hold image of perfection that sedates her mind.

It is important to note that each example also brings the individual a taste of hope and salvation. If George could turn his considerable energies toward his spiritual devel-opment, then the glowing light might take on new meaning as something transforma-tive and transcendent rather than a material substance that he ingests. Mary’s ideal com-pound could be viewed as pointing the way to other less ideal compounds that she would not have to fear as she bikes through the world. She might be able to gain perspective on the purity that is in front of her: The placement of the beaker in the basket seems

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to indicate she is in the process of doing that. Gavin is attempting to mourn his golden moment and thereby put that relationship into context with others in which he had something golden that was lost. He makes the connection to addictive behaviors and realizes that the pornography is a distraction depleting his capacity to be with himself. These are all promising signs, just as the attainment of the Golden Fleece offered a prom-ise for Jason to develop more fully into a man of integrity, honor, and heroic endeavor.

The compulsive aspect of addiction has baffled many researchers in this field. Although there are emerging neurobiological explanations about hijacking the reward system of the mid-brain that depends upon dopamine, consider also the psychologi-cal aspects of repetitive behavior that lead to a narrow focus on reenacting one kind of experience. Jung writes in Mysterium Coniunctionis:

This arcane substance (sulfur) has provided occasion for some general reflections, which are not altogether fortuitous in that sulphur represents the active substance of the sun or, in psychological language, the “motive factor in consciousness”: on the one hand the will, which can best be regarded as a dynamism subordinate to consciousness, and on the other hand compulsion, an involuntary motivation or impulse ranging from mere inter-est to possession proper. The unconscious dynamism would correspond to sulphur, for compulsion is the great mystery of human life. It is the thwarting of our conscious will and of our reason by an inflammable element within us, appearing now as a consuming fire and now as life-giving warmth. (CW 14, ¶151)

In this dense quotation, Jung recognizes that, through this alchemical formulation, sul-fur represents a duality. On the one hand, it can warmly support the force of our will; on the other, it demonstrates a compulsive quality that like fire can spread contagiously. In this way, sulfurous compulsion can overwhelm our consciousness and dangerously reduce us to the realm of shadow, complex, and possession.

With my patients, much therapeutic work revolves around discovering what each of them craves from an experience that is analogous to finding the Golden Fleece—where the warmth turns into fire. Together, we try to illuminate the dark territory in which each treasured Fleece is located and to explore the source of the compul-sion to have it. In this darkened area, a drug or analogous possession has achieved full potency to subvert not only the patient’s will, but also his or her ability to draw on inner resources. Compulsion and addiction consume vast amounts of psychological energy like “an inflammable element,” and they lead to mental states of being amecha-nos like Jason: without resource and without means. Yet it is crucial to remember that the dual aspect of sulfur also applies to George, Mary, and Gavin. Their “motive factor in consciousness” is contained in their symptoms, too: a longing for spiritual develop-ment, a forward movement to gain perspective on what is truly pure, and a desire for meaningful, loving partnership.

While it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss each patient’s history, the genesis of a perfect object often relates to maternal abandonment. These three patients

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have in common an experience of maternal deprivation that sent each of them on a life-long quest for that most perfect of objects—a mother’s unconditional love. George’s mother was depressed and emotionally absent for long periods of his early life. Mary’s mother was more emotionally invested in her three sons, and Mary was forgotten. Gavin’s mother abandoned him and a younger sister when he was four, because she could not control her own desires and ran away with another man. The premature, shattering loss of maternal love creates an ongoing hunger and craving that the child within erroneously believes will be soothed only by finding a perfect object. This pre-disposes the addict to search for the Golden Fleece. Jason too was separated from his mother at a very young age, and although the Fleece represents a way to restore his birthright, it also pairs him with Medea. Jason enacts his early history of being cast aside by his mother in the episodes when he is ready to cast Medea aside.

Jason was swallowed by the monster that guarded the Fleece, which is seen hanging from the branch of an oak tree. Here, Jason is saved by Athena in what is clearly a different version of

the tale. Attic red-figure kylix by Duris, ca. 480 BCE, Georgian Etruscan Museum, Vatican Museums, Vatican City, © Photo Vatican Museums.

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If the Fleece refers to the maternal relationship that went painfully awry early in life, then this quest is a journey that can never be accomplished. The Fleece might also remind us of Winnicott’s transitional object—a soft blanket that comforts dur-ing unwanted, temporary separations. Permanent separation, occurring early in life, can leave a person like Jason amechanos—without enough inner resources to provide comfort during times of distress. Of course, there are ways to repair such tragedy sym-bolically and relationally, but imagining that the unconditional mother can be actu-alized only supports a fantasy that the terrible pain from childhood can be success-fully avoided. Psychologically, the pursuit of the Fleece in physical reality becomes an omnipotent method to circumvent experiences of helplessness and depression. There-fore, from a Kleinian standpoint, it leads to continued activity from the paranoid-schizoid position.

National Addiction as Collective Madness

The idea of fleecing the psyche can also be applied to the national problem of the United States’ addiction to black gold, or oil. The United States’ addiction to oil was named in President Bush’s 2006 State of the Union address, in which he used those exact words, full of unintended irony given his administration’s energy policies. However, our addiction to oil has also been written about in the New York Times and The Economist, as well as in two recent books, Paul Roberts’ The End of Oil (2004) and Ian Rutledge’s Addicted to Oil (2005). Curiously, the word oil is frequently associated with drugs: weed oil or honey oil for marijuana, oil burner for methamphetamine, and snake oil for a useless drug. To say someone is oiled also means he or she is drunk or intoxicated.

America’s problem with oil dependency mimics a chase for the Golden Fleece. The history of our country’s appetite for oil is filled with cruel, self-interested lead-ers. Heroic, ill-conceived missions try to secure the prize through great expeditions to the East, as in the myth. Yet sadly, a startling lack of resourcefulness characterizes our entire nation when confronted with the problem of energy use. We as a society are amechanos like Jason, and we have also tended to choose leaders who reflect this trait. They have shown a lack of talent, a lack of forethought, and a lack of compassion for the havoc that we have created in the world. These leaders at times dispute the science around climate change, maintain that drilling for more oil is an easy solution, and dis-regard the environmental consequences.

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population and consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s energy. We are responsible for almost half of the industrialized world’s carbon dioxide emissions; the bulk of this pollution comes from overly large—even huge—and grossly inefficient motor vehicles that crowd every inhabited area in the country. Rutledge characterizes America’s problem as “a motori-sation-driven addiction to oil” (2005, 143). Americans are convinced that our way of

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life, to which we feel entitled, depends on access to these cars, trucks, and enormous sport utility vehicles, which rarely travel into “wilderness.” Like Jason, we do not think about the consequences of our actions on the greater community around us.

We desperately require oil to maintain a collective state that is absent of reflec-tion, a state in which there are four motor vehicles for every five people, a total of over 240 million. Rutledge points out that motor gasoline and diesel consumption per cap-ita in the United States is 2.5 to 3 times greater than in Japan, Germany, France, or the United Kingdom (Rutledge 2005, 10–11). Roberts makes an argument that the Bush administration was indeed on a Fleece-like quest for oil; the key to this adventure was being able to bypass OPEC production. The war in Iraq had that as a goal. Roberts writes, “In the eyes of the Bush administration, unlocking OPEC oil, combined with being a decade ahead of everybody else in military technology, will guarantee Amer-ican supremacy for the next 50 to 100 years” (2004, 112). Likewise, Rutledge states, “The invasion of Iraq was indeed for the oil” (Rutledge 2005, xix). Like a reckless Jason, the United States set out to steal something that it craved.

If we consider the degradation caused by these actions, the list includes loss of human life, a repudiation of diplomacy, damage to the earth, and staggering finan-cial costs. When viewed in the context of our oil addiction, these offenses lend fur-ther weight to the hypothesis of dishonoring the feminine as part of the fleecing pro-cess. Thousands of mothers have had to grieve the loss of their children in the two Iraq wars; a major thread in the myth is that the children finally die at Medea’s hands. The failure of diplomacy was occasioned by our government’s rejection of what diplomacy is, namely, relatedness. This parallels Jason’s rejection of diplomacy when dealing with Aietes as well as his ultimate failure to stay related to Medea.

The damage to the environment caused both by these wars and by relentless car-bon emissions certainly informs how we treat Mother Earth as polar ice melts, seasons become warmer, and species disappear. We act with abandonment toward the environ-ment and leave the results for future generations. Jason, of course, could not foresee that Medea would kill their children, yet this looms as a disastrous result of obtaining his trophy, the Golden Fleece. A succeeding generation is eliminated.

Finally, the costs of war, pollution, and international strife are not counted, never catalogued, and never truly admitted. We do not monitor our spent resources, and we remain largely unaware of what our drug actually costs. This ignorance seems dis-respectful of feminine principles of nourishing our society and of not living waste-fully with the resources that we have. If there is a deeper meaning to our oil addiction, some telos to it, then perhaps this rests in the substance itself, which consists in large part of carbon—so basic to our life on this planet, a substance that chemically does create light. If we can begin to focus on this elemental truth, then we can see that car-bon belongs to a mega-cycle of which humans are just one part. We might then accept

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responsibility for what has already occurred through our pursuit of oil, gain collective insight, and open to other alternatives. This may translate into mourning aspects of the accepted American way of life.

Reflections on Medea and Deprivation

Upon his return to Iolkos, Jason learns that his parents are dead. Seeking vengeance, he persuades Medea to help him again. She tricks Pelias’ naïve daughters into the belief that they can rejuvenate their aged father by chopping him up and boiling him with herbs in a cauldron. Upon Pelias’ death, his son expels Jason and Medea from the kingdom. They seek refuge in Corinth, the setting for Euripides’ play (fifth century BCE), in which Jason betrays Medea by becoming engaged to King Creon’s daughter. Medea sends the bride a poisoned bridal gown that bursts into flames when she puts it on; Creon too per-ishes in the ensuing fire. After these murders, Medea kills their children.

Medea is a difficult character with whom to empathize or to hold in balance, especially considering her history. Eros bewitched her into becoming infatuated with Jason at the goddesses’ urging. Hera was the goddess of marriage, and she favored Jason throughout the myth. Aphrodite, referred to in the myth as Kypris because of her cult on Cyprus, was the goddess of sexual passion. Consequently, archetypal forces of mat-ing, sex, and love overwhelmed Medea. She lost her family, her home, and her cul-ture, all of which constituted a considerable legacy for a woman whose grandfather was Helios, the sun god.

Medea is a good example of how the inner world of an addict falls apart. The unrav-eling of reality and the possession by archetypal energies compel an addict into partic-ipating in a quest for an exalted, though uncontained, experience. Medea exists in the inner and outer worlds of the addict as an abused, dishonored, and neglected feminine object. She begins as a primarily good object who gets trampled and deformed along the way. Medea’s mistreatment in the myth reminds us that something essential is miss-ing: adequate concern and reasonable guilt. These are created in us through maternal functions that are typically lacking in cases of childhood deprivation and abandon-ment. Winnicott writes eloquently about how we as individuals come to develop a capacity for concern and learn to tolerate guilt (Winnicott 1984). He notes that depri-vation in this area often results in antisocial behaviors.

A person—or country—blithely acting without a sense of responsibility can cause destruction through a series of extreme antisocial choices. Selfish pursuit of a perfect object does not solve the problem, nor does it avoid pain. The allure of the Golden Fleece can be found in a drug like cocaine, in a flawless compound of perfection, in a sexual fan-tasy of an ideal couple, and in a nation’s thoughtless pursuit of a wasteful, inflated life-style. These lead to addictive behaviors that stem from overriding both the concern for

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oneself (or one’s society) and the guilt over the consequences to others. Viewed in Winn-icottian terms, Medea represents the part of the addict who is deprived early in life. This part is robbed of experiences that lead to developing abilities to consciously worry about another’s wellbeing and to admit wrongdoing. Essentially abandoned, this uncared-for part festers, grows, and acts externally to claim what it feels it has dearly lost. Jason per-sonifies the subsequent lack of restraint that is directed outward. Because of Jason’s own early abandonment, it is no accident that he is paired with Medea. Psychologically, they form two complementary sides of addiction (or compulsion).

Jung too gives us a hint of the role that Medea might represent in this convo-luted quest. She strikes from the unconscious like “the fly in the ointment, the skeleton in the cupboard of perfection, the painful lie given to all idealistic pronouncements” (CW 12, ¶207). Medea, full of contradiction as a character, changes the quest for the Golden Fleece into a fleecing of the psyche, whereby mindless compulsion overtakes the addict’s capacity to maintain perspective on life. Fleecing leads to a loss of con-sciousness, a disrespect for wholeness, and a stunning inability to think. The person in the throes of this process becomes amechanos—without resource and without means. Medea represents, both in the Argonautica and in addiction, the loss of an internally good feminine figure that demonstrates caring and love through a delicate mix of worry and responsibility—knowing when to be troubled and when to accept fault.

By murdering their children, Medea both takes revenge on Jason and kills all capacity for growth. Development stops. For this reason alone, we hope that individ-uals will find their way into treatment when caught by this fleecing process. In anal-ysis, individual patients can work through the seductive power of Fleece-like experi-ences so they can begin to consciously feel anxiety for others, as well as for themselves, and to face the guilt and shame residing in shadow. In the United States, our addic-tion to oil will likely be remedied by some combination of destabilizing economic, political, and environmental forces. As with addiction, things may have to get worse before the denial finally breaks. Nonetheless, we can hope that sufficient collective anx-iety emerges in order for the portents of Medea to be heeded before opportunities for growth are lost. The increasing awareness for developing green environmental technol-ogies is one important reason for optimism.

In conclusion, I propose that seeking the Golden Fleece can be viewed as a psy-chological process of addiction and compulsion that, when unchecked, leads to a fleec-ing of the psyche itself in which consciousness is lost to a vain hope of foregoing nat-ural and necessary suffering. Alarm at destructive consequences and responsibility for things gone wrong are cast aside. The addict behaves with a mindless compulsion to find the one thing that he or she believes will make his or her life right. This drug-like state, or even drug-induced state, results in the addict becoming amechanos and unable to fully function in the world. Medea—out of agony over inconsolable loss—viciously

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draws blood to remind the addict that there is no sustainable way to truly circumvent experiences of concern and of guilt. In continuing to ignore this message, the addict surely invites disaster.

noteAn earlier version of this material was presented at the IAAP-IAJS-ETH conference in Zürich

in 2008.

endnotes1. Chiron is also well known for having raised Achilles.2. Probably modern day Georgia.3. “Without resource, without means, without invention”—author’s translation.4. Apollonius’ portrayal is different from that of Pindar, who made Jason into a typical, virtuous

hero in his fourth Pythian. Jason’s father rejoices in this ode: “To see his son [ Jason] a man most excellent, fairest of all mankind” (lines 124–125).

5. Summary information is modified and disguised for reasons of confidentiality.

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tica). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Jung, C. G. 1944/1952. “The Symbolism of the Mandala,” CW 12, ¶¶206, 207.———. 1963. Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, ¶151.Klein, Theodore. 1983. “Apollonius’ Jason: Hero and Scoundrel.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura

Classica 42: 115–126.Knight, W. F. Jackson (trans.). 1956. Virgil: The Aeneid. London, UK: Penguin Books.Roberts, Paul. 2004. The End of Oil. Boston, UK: Houghton Mifflin.Rutledge, Ian. 2005. Addicted to Oil: America’s Relentless Drive for Energy Security. London,

UK: I.B. Tauris & Co.Slavitt, David R. (trans.). 1999. The Voyage of the Argo: The Argonautica of Gaius Valerius Flaccus.

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Warner, Rex. 1955. The Medea, in Euripides I. Eds. David Grene and Richard Lattimore, Chi-

cago, IL and London, UK: University of Chicago Press.Winnicott, D. W. 1984. Deprivation and Delinquency. Eds. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd,

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robert tyminski, d.m.h. is an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and an assistant editor of this journal. He has a private practice in San Francisco, where he sees both adults and children. He is also a Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of California at San Francisco. Contact information: 3529 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, CA 94118. E-mail: [email protected].

abstractThe story of Jason and the Argonauts begins against a background of family treachery, describes a quest to resolve this betrayal, and ends with the filicidal Medea back in Greece. For Jason, the Golden Fleece symbolizes a perfect object that will complete his life. The pursuit of perfection suggests parallels to problems of addiction and compulsion. This journey for the Golden Fleece mirrors an addict’s craving for the perfect experience. Jason, acting like an addict, gets the Fleece only through the assistance of Medea. Without her drugs, Jason would have failed. However, Medea, initially a good object, is degraded in the process. This paper argues that an inner presence like Medea is part of an addict’s illness. In addition to clinical examples, the author draws a comparison between the quest for the Golden Fleece and the United States’ addiction to oil.

key wordsaddiction, Aphrodite, Apollonius, Argonauts, drugs, filicide, Golden Fleece, Greek myth, Hera, hero, infanticide, Jason, maternal abandonment, Medea, object relations, oil, perfection

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