The Children of Tantalus E-Book

Rüdiger Opelt

• Herausgeber: Czernin
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 231

Beschreibung

Tantalus, a king in ancient Greece, kills his son and is condemned to torture and punishment. All his family are damned to repeat his deed and kill each other, until his great grandson Orestes finds a way out of the endless repetition of violence. Violence and suffering are inseparably interconnected. That's common sense told by this old myth. To explain mental illness can we not trace suffering back to violence? Yes we can. In WWII millions of men were slaughtered, tortured, imprisoned or expelled from their home. Even today the children and grandchildren of these victims are haunted by the nightmares of the past, get ill and emotionally disturbed by unprocessed traumatic experiences of their families. This new theory has a revolutionary impact on clinical psychology.

Leseprobe

Rüdiger Opelt

The Children of Tantalus

Breaking the cycle of psychological wounds

ISBN: 978-3-7076-0538-9

Copyright:

All rights reserved by Czernin Verlags GmbH, Vienna, Austria Proofreading: Aiofe Loy, Saskia ReadCover Painting: “Tantalu”s by Giacchino Assereto (1630–1940), wikimedia commons (Auckland Art Gallery, Newzealand)www.czernin-verlag.com

Table of contents

I. Suffering and violence

The MythThe Tantalus-family-pattern

II. Tantalus the perpetrator

III. Pelops the suppressor

IV. Atreus the psychopath

V. Agamemnon the hero at any cost

VI. Clytemnestra the avenger

VII. Electra, or the idealisation of a lost father

VIII. Iphigenia, or the legal escape from madness

IX. Chrysothemis, the fearful adapter

X. Orestes, or mother love/hate

XI. The breakthrough of feelings

XII. The rescue

The realityTrauma of violence and contemporary history

XIII. Experience of violence as a family problem

XIV. The Tantalus-experience: violence and guilt

XV. The Pelops-experience: death and loss

XVI. The Atreus-experience: entanglement and increase

XVII. The Agamemnon-experience: the production of the fall

XVIII. The Clytemnestra-experience: sexual violence

XIX. The Electra-experience: loss of the native country

XX. The Iphigenia-experience: sacrificed and kidnapped children

XXI. The Chrysothemis-experience: depreciation of one’s own self

XXII. The Orestes-experience: die, bad dead mother

XXIII. The Erinyes-experience: despised ancestors

The solutionGetting out of the world of terror

XXIV.The ancestor-redemption: the jouney of self-experience

XXV. The Tantalus-solution: revealing the truth

XXVI. The Pelops-solution: preserving the message

XXVII. The Atreus-solution: deciphering the entanglement

XXVIII. The Agamemnon-solution: the fall of false heroism

XXIX. The Clytemnestra-solution: demanding respect and tolerance

XXX. The Iphigenia-solution: protection against a repeat incident

XXXI. The Chrysothemis-solution: rehabilitation

XXXII. The Orestes-solution: experiencing the past

XXXIII. The Electra-solution: work hard and find your roots

XXXIV. The Ore-genia-solution: healing

XXXV. The redemption of the goddesses: the training of positive patterns

Epilogue

Bibliography

To my father,whose greatest achievement wasto survive the warwithout losing his humanity.

I. Suffering and violence

Violence and suffering are inseparably interconnected. It’s common sense – indeed, the victims of violence are so keenly aware of it that its denial would mean mocking their fate. Yet the connection between violence and suffering has been ignored over and over again: „a strong man knows no pain“. Generations of sons have been educated to think in this way, and therefore, in spite of all this talk about the strong having no weaknesses, it is no surprise that people feel helpless as soon as grief wells up inside them. The helplessness of being faced with psychological problems without any obvious explanation for them, leads to the refusal to deal with them at all: whoever has problems must be sick or crazy and that is that. All one can do is hope that one’s problems will never be made known to the general public.

When the integrity of man, as described in the declaration of human rights, is visibly damaged and this is picked up by the media, then the connection between violence and grief can no longer be denied. At least then we have the chance to demand protection and reparation. Yet the apparently unfounded suffering is explained away as hysteria or weakness. People such as these are considered weak or possibly even born with bad genes – in any case they stand little chance in our society, which is based on competition and rivalry.

If violence leads to suffering can we not by the same reasoning trace suffering back to violence? This hypothesis has not been a popular one, especially as far as those with mental health problems are concerned. However, looking back at the history of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, all kinds of indications could be found to confirm this thesis. In most cases psychological suffering can be traced back to violence or to patterns that are similar to violence. This is the thesis that can and will be tested in this book.

The first part of the book explains how since thousands of years the historic myth of Tantalus and his descendants has described how violence spreads out over generations and how children and grandchildren are captured by a pattern of violence and cannot get rid of it.

The second part shows how many generations of a family hold on to this kind of destructive pattern and how it is subconsciously transferred generation to generation through learned behaviour. Family therapy provides us with many case studies to confirm this idea. A negative pattern such as this can be attributed to historical events that deal with suffering and violence. These events are a reality and not a fantasy of people with psychological problems. If the psychologists cannot find a recent cause for a psychological illness, then the illness may be traced back to an violent event that was experienced by the patient`s family in the past.

In the third part we look at the salutary consequences which arise when we identify a pattern of violence as the cause of a psychic problem: rehabilitation of the victim, tackling destructivity and preventing the repetition of the misfortune. The aim of which is to give patients back their dignity and activate strategies of self-healing.

And finally, a disclaimer: As the author lives and works in Austria the examples in this book are taken from an Austrian and Middle European context, in particular those related to WW II. Nevertheless, the theory depicted in this book, as well as its consequences, may be applied to all cultures and societies. Cultural variants of violence and suffering in different countries will be dealt with in our / my next book.

The MythThe Tantalus-family-pattern

II. Tantalus the perpetrator

Tantalus was rich and famous, and being the son of Zeus, and thus of noble birth, he was permitted to dine at the banquet of the gods and listen in to their discussions. His vain human spirit, however, was unable to bear this good fortune, and he began to defy them. One day, in an audacious test of the gods’ omniscience, he slaughtered his own son Pelops and served him to them as a meal. The gods, however, realising what he had done, tossed the body parts of the boy into a cauldron, only to then extract him from it unharmed.

Tantalus, however, was condemned to the underworld, where he was subjected to terrible suffering. Made to stand in the middle of a lake with water up to his chin, he endured tormenting thirst; whenever he bent to drink, the water receded. Likewise, he was made to endure excruciating hunger whilst being ‘tantalized’ by luscious fruit on trees by the shore; each time he reached for the fruit, the wind blew the branches out of his reach. Furthermore, he lived in continuous fear for his life – a large boulder hung over his head, threatening to fall on him. Thus the gods subjected Tantalus to perpetual threefold torture in order to punish him for his transgression.