The Transition from Anger to Love

An Applicaton of Bions Theory of Thinking to the Myth of the Noah Story

by Gisela Ermann

Myths and legends, stories,fairy-tales and folk-tales come from various times and various places as attempts at solving universal human problems. They are, as Bion says, primitive and pictorial, therefore vital but inexact (Bion, 1963). Nevertheless, occupying ourselves with them enables us to gain insights which can be both fascinating and pleasurable.

In my view the Noah story contains at an universal level of experiences the model for mental growth, namely, the process of development which leads from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position as described by Bion in his theory of thinking (Bion, 1970).

In my interpretation I will deliberately confine myself to the mythological aspects of the Noah story, leaving its religious content to one side. My aim thereby is to achieve psycho-analytical insights into the inner world and the internal processes of mankind, particularly in regard to the solution of the conflicts inherent in the development of the paranoid-schizoid position, that is, the solving of the conflict between love and hate, good and evil, friendliness and enmity, between creation and destruction. I will present this process in several steps in order to illustrate the various stages of the relationship between God and Noah as expressed in the Noah Story.

The story begins with the description of God's meeting up with the independent power of his creations, and His reaction to it. The text is in Genesis 6, Verse 1-7.

When men began to increase in numbers on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, 'My spirit will not contend with man forever, for they are mortal; Their days shall be numbered a hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were on earth in those days - and also afterwards - when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

What kind of relationship experienced by mankind is expressed in this portrayal of God's relationship to his creations?

The story assumes that, in the beginning, everything happened according to God's Will and people behaved as He had imagined. They increased and populated the earth. Then, however, His Will was brought into question. This questioning came about through the sons of God, who were creations descended directly from God and not born of mankind. These sons of God, who were something different from human beings and who were closer to God, we meet only in this part of the Old Testament. It is these sons of God, then, who offend Him by causing Him to experience the limits of his omnipotence. This they do by choosing women who were daughters of mankind as their wives, and by making their choice according to their own will and their own taste. Another thing which offended Gods omnipotence were the children who resulted from this intercourse, for they were tyrants, that is, powerful and independent rulers and men of fame. For God they were a new sort of creature, who were independently powerful and separate from his Spirit and who diminished both His omnipotence and his glory.

The experience which stands at the beginning of the Noah story, then, is the wounding of omnipotence and the experience of limitations. The picture given here is of the anger which this wound calls forth and its working-through in the paranoid-schizoid position. The wounding of omnipotent phantasies awakens the persecutory anger which is to follow. In the Noah story God reacts to the unsanctioned use of independence by the sons of God - and the daughters of men - by reducing the life expectancy of mankind. Adam and Cain had lived to a great age, and, at the time of the flood, Noah himself was several hundred years old. But now God limited the life of men to one hundred and twenty years.

Why is this offence to one's omnipotence and the becoming aware of one's own limitations answered with persecutory, destructive violence? The Noah story gives us the answer that the experience of the independent power of others and the limitations of one's own power is a new experience and that this newness cannot be assimilated if one can give it no meaning. In the Noah text, God cannot tolerate the phenomenon of the independent power of His creations without becoming angry and violent because He cannot understand and assimilate the meaning of this phenomenon. According to Bion (1963), a meaningful encounter with this new reality is not possible for Him at this point because no pre-conception of such an experience exists in Him previous to having had the experience itself. This means that He cannot face the new reality easily because for Him it is a primary experience for which He has no pre-existing model.

Therefore the omnipotent God reacts in a preconceived manner contained in the idea of His using power. For at that moment in time the ability to interest Himself openly and easily in the unknown was not available to Him. This new idea, the self-empowerment of His sons and the existence of powers outside His own, namely the tyrants, precipitated a catastrophe in him which completely confused His ability to think. For this reason He was unable to accept and affirm the existence of the new, the unknown, that, which had never been before. There could be no integration and no new experience in relation to mankind, which, had it been possible, would have brought emotional growth along with it.

At the beginning of the Noah story there stands the experience that we react to injuries to our original infantile omnipotent phantasies with destructive withdrawal. We react in this way because we have not as yet internalised the experience of accepting the new without feeling ourselves to be destroyed by it. We have, speaking again in Bion's (1970) terms, as yet not gone through such a "catastrophic change", and as such haven't been able to have the experience of surviving such a transformation unharmed. As we go through the text, however, we will, by following the myth further, discover how this process of change does succeed in the end.

The next step is the projection of one's own badness, one's own destructive phantasies and impulses towards the human race. The Bible text ( Genesis 6 Verse 5) states:

When God saw that man had done much evil and that his thoughts and inclinations were always evil, He was sorry He had made man on earth and He was grieved at heart.

Mankind now appears as evil. But the projection alone appears to bring no relief. To it is added the generalisation that God now recognizes that mankind has always been evil.

What function do these projections and generalisations serve? They make limit setting possible. In the Bible text, it is the necessity to set limits to the evil which results from anger over being rendered powerless, and from the destructiveness always associated with primary narcissistic disappointment which needs to be dealt with. By attributing the evil to mankind, God needn't admit to not being omnipotent and totally experienced. Through this the relationship between man and God changes. From now on all the good is in God, all evil in mankind. The new experience of the limitation of His power will be assimilated into the idea of the relationship. This idea serves as a first try at encompassing the new, that is God's loss of omnipotence, and of finding a new way of conceiving of it.

Here the Bible text describes how the realization of dependency and the primary narcissistic pain which go hand in hand with one another, can be better dealt with by the use of a helpful idea. According to Bion (1962) we tend to meet new and unknown emotional experiences by employing ideas, thus capturing that unknown within a conceptualisation. In the Bible, it is the idea of Man's evil which develops into the idea that evil lies beyond the bounds of one's own person. This idea is an original thought, a first step in giving meaning to the painfully new. And that is the first step to an emotional experience.

However, this first step in solving the problem brings with it a dilemma because nothing less than the value of the entire creation itself is called into question. On this the Bible says:

and He was grieved in his heart and He said, 'this race of men whom I have created, I will wipe them off the face of the earth - man and beast, reptiles and birds. I am sorry that I ever made them. (6,7)

Here God is not distressed about the doings of mankind, but rather about Himself. It is not mourning for the object which matters here, but anger in the raw. If we again examine the parallel to the dynamics of development we find ourselves still in the realm of the paranoid-schizoid position.

In this state of emotional development each and every encounter with outside reality brings with it emotional experiences which touch upon the basic conflicts of life, such as the conflict between unchanging stasis and dynamic change, or between joy and pain. Meltzer (1988) describes this experience as an "aesthetic conflict". He concludes that splitting and idealisation are introduced in order to protect oneself against feelings of insecurity and pain, and against the intolerable impact of the diversity of the beauties of and the beauty in the world. (Meltzer, 1988) Here only mother's empathic understanding and giving meaning to experience let splitting and idealisation overcome.

Knowledge of this can be found again in the Noah text. The God of the Bible finds no containment, no containing object for His experience of the aesthetic conflict, for there is no one to think empathically about Him. Thus complete destruction is threatened, destruction that would cast both Creation and its Creator into existential catastrophe. At this moment splitting and idealisation become discernible as a further step in coping with this dilemma. For it is then, in the midst of this catastrophic situation, that He thinks of at least one good man - Noah!

But Noah won the Lord's favour...He was a righteous man, the one blameless man of his time. (6,9)

So, in the Bible nothing malicious at all is said about Noah. Instead he is idealized, "chosen" as the one man capable of creating a safe place for the preservation of the good aspects of Creation. This safe place is symbolised, of course, by the Ark. For the moment it is only important to note here that the plan stems from God Himself. Noah is nothing more than his workman.

So God says to Noah:

Make yourself an Ark with ribs of cypress and three decks...... I intend to bring the waters of the flood over the earth to destroy every human being under heaven that has the spirit of life; everything on earth shall perish. You shall go into the Ark, you and your sons, your wife and your sons' wives with you. And you shall bring living creatures of every kind into the Ark to keep them alive with you, two of each kind, a male amd a female. (6,14-19)

To realise His plans, God chooses Noah and his family. In so doing, however, He uses them as part-objects who have only to fulfill the function of carrying out His plan for reparation. These part-objects have neither will nor ideas or concepts of their own.

Noah's obedience serves the purpose of God's being able to fulfil his plan to allow the good to survive in the psychological, emotional sense as well as in the physical sense. Generally speaking, one can say that without a live object which is prepared to allow itself to be used as such, we cannot experience our need to preserve the good and to repair what we have destroyed. This is a fundamental pre-condition for reaching the depressive position.

One could now examine, the details of the Ark's colourful world more precisely from the mythological point of view. In passing, however, I only want to mention briefly two motifs: the connection between clean and unclean, and the motif of the pair.

Take with you seven pairs, male and female, of all beasts that are ritually clean, and one pair, male and female, of all beasts that are not clean. (Genesis 7,2)

The instruction to bring both clean and unclean animals into the same container is an integrating idea. Just as in God's alliance with Noah, the Ark becomes a container for opposites. And it is that which is the progressive aspect. With God having given Noah instructions to choose male and female pairs and this choice having the clear aim of repopulating the earth after the flood, the Ark also becomes a container which ensures that God's conception of pairing, already to be found in the Act of Creation, will again find expression. Here one finds demonstrated a particular aspect of learning from experience, in which an original conception is returned to in order to survive the uncertainties of the process of integration. For integration which is to lead to the ability to have a new experience needs a tried and tested concept as its base, as its starting point.

Finally, I would like to emphasize a motif which points far into the future, namely the constellation of the Oedipus motif in the colonising of the Ark.

Those which came were one male and one female of all living things; they came in as God had commanded Noah, and the Lord closed the door on him. (7, 16)

Here God creates an Oedipal situation. As He closes the door behind the pairs of animals with His own Hands, He makes Himself into an outsider. At the same time He provokes them into fulfilling the task of development. Apparently, this is the beginning of a new experience in which God brings into play the experience of being excluded from the sexual act. Viewed in this way, the Ark is not only a container for the food and the pairs, but also becomes a symbol of the oral-genital primal scene. With this the story expresses the experience of the awareness of a life-giving pair existing outside the self as being a precondition for the survival of the internal good object in the face of destructive impulses. Speaking more generally, the security of the life-giving pair is a precondition of psychic survival. This experience once again indicates a turning in the direction of the depressive position.

According to Bion (1963), the idea of the primal scene makes new thought possible and leads to the ability to recognise "newness" as such. The existence of a pre-concept of the Oedipal constellation makes it possible for primitive elemental experiences to be joined together into meaningful thoughts and images which will then promote the interchange between psychic reality and external reality.

If this interchange is disturbed, the emotional experience remains without meaning, without answer, and without relatedness. No new concepts and no sense, no meaning can come into being. Experience then remains at the level of taking orders and being obedient. No autonomy comes into being, rather, the mental state remains under the sway of violence, a violence which merely simulates autonomy. The area of experience remains two-dimensional while the meaning-giving mutual experience as a third dimension fails to appear. Britton (1989) describes it this way: "The ability to imagine a friendly parental relationship influences the development of an area outside the self which is observable and which can be reflected upon. It will become the basis for the belief in a safer and more durable world. "

The description of the flood now expresses not only the immediate, immeasurable destructive anger symbolised in the ruination and the flood waters, but also the limitless grief in the endless rain. The text says that the skies opened and the waters rose until everything was covered.

Everything died that had the breath of life in its nostrils; everything on dry land. (7,22)

The particularity of this passage in the text is that it is a description in which no relationship and no dialogue to be found. God, the initiator of the ruination is not mentioned. This absence of God expresses a specific kind of withdrawal -psychic retreat- at the turning point from the paranoid- schizoid to the depressive position. It is clearly described by Steiner (1993). He illustrates how in the face of this change, expression is given to a deep grievance which has its roots in the defence against all-encompassing anxieties. These anxieties, the paranoid, persecutory anxieties and those accompanying the depressive fear of loss, now meet one another at this point.

According to the text of the Noah story, God persists his grievance for one hundred and fifty days. Then, however, He overcomes this crisis of change, remembers, and then does everything He can to make the Flood subside.

God thought of Noah and all the wild animals and the cattle with him in the Ark and he made a wind pass over the earth, and the waters began to subside. (Genesis 8,1)

Here the story shows us not only how painful the maturational step from one developmental position to the other is, but also how much time is needed; time for letting go, and time to make room for, and to create a place for the new. It shows us that, without grievance, we cannot manage to advance from one level of development to the next. Indeed a truly catastrophic crisis, to be found in the mythical image of the flooding over of the old, was required out of which, in the end, the "new" appears. And this "new" is the memory which is linked to compassion, compassion in which God, remembering Noah and his companions, decides to end the catastrophe.

Now the change between God and Noah is also discernable: God meets Noah again with instructions. In the text the instructions are:

Come out of the Ark ... So Noah came out... (8,18)

Then, however, comes the new:

Then Noah built an altar to the Lord...and offered whole offerings on the altar. (8, 20)

Here the text suggests that, for the first time, Noah acts without God's ideas or instructions, and faces Him as an autonomous creature. With that, the story shows the main gain of this step in development, it is the ability to acknowledge the autonomy of the other, that is to release the other from its function as a part-object. To the extent that the level of part-object relationship is left behind and the other can be perceived as a separate, whole and autonomous object in its own right, so must the phantasy of one's own omnipotence be abandoned. This produces a fundamental change in the inner, the mental world. The catastrophic change is "suffered through". And it is just this letting go which causes the boundless grievance with which this step is connected. God no longer needs Noah simply as a workman who carries out His plan. He can let him go so that he may bring Him a sacrifice.

What meaning does this sacrifice have? What does it express in the relationship between God and Noah? With the sacrifice Noah lights, at the same time, the fire of the relationship anew. The grievance of the developmental crisis has been overcome, and pleasure and happiness return.

...the Lord smelt the soothing odour. (8, 21)

The pre-condition for such a change is that one is also prepared to take on the care expressed through the burnt sacrifice; to absorb, as the myth describes, the odour within oneself.

The sacrifice is, however, also a ritualised destruction. In its reflection, God finds the possibility to confront the results of his own destructiveness, and to endure and repent it. Here the myth teaches us that we can first face sorrow and loss through the acknowledgment of the injury done to the object. Only when we see and acknowledge the destruction wreaked upon the other do we realise that they are, for us, good objects, and only then can we forgive them their mistakes (see Steiner, 1993). Only then is our love set free. The Bible text states:

...Never again will I curse the ground because of man; however his evil inclination may be from his youth upwards. I will never again kill every living creature, as I have just done. While the earth lasts, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall never cease. (8,21, 22)

On that Steiner (1993) writes:

"But such reparation requires belief in goodness somewhere, in ourselves and in what objects remain to help us in the task. If this cannot be found, the destructiveness leads to despair. If it can be found it leads to forgiveness:"

Through the survival of good in the Ark, God has now, in His emotional world, acquired a changed conception of mankind. He can observe more realistically mankind's growing independence. Now, care of the object can find its place in Him, so that He can now promise mankind in future never again to curse the earth.

With that the myth comes to the conclusion that the increasingly realistic perception of the object allows for the appearance of the depressive position, and that the growth of the ability to recognise injury done makes increased contact with depressive feelings possible. And only then, as the myth tells us, does a well established, sound relationship between self and others become possible. The symbol of this in the Old Testament text is the rainbow:

...God said; My bow I set in the cloud, sign of the Covenant between myself and earth. When I cloud the sky over the earth, the bow shall be seen in the cloud. Then will I remember the Covenant which I have made between Myself and you and living things of every kind. Never again shall the waters become a flood to destroy all living creatures. (Genesis 9, 12-18)

Finally we come to the main aspect of the depressive position, forgiveness, which, along with caring about the fate of the object, forms an important aspect of reparation. Rey (1994) writes: "for nobody who has not forgiven can be expected to feel forgiven. Lack of forgiveness means the desire for revenge on the object remains active, and therefore the feeling that the object still seeks revenge and has not forgiven, only when this Superego becomes less cruel, less demanding of perfection, is the Ego capable of accepting an internal object which is not perfectly repaired, can accept compromise, forgive and be forgiven, and experience hope and gratitude. Perhaps it is then that love has won the day and a good working through of the depressive position has been achieved."

With that, we have now come to the end of the Noah story. Looking back, and reading it as myth, we ask ourselves what it wants to convey to us. It is, so comprehended, the report of the overwhelming power of primitive narcissistic anger and of the neccessity to bring the good into safety, so that it can survive violent grievance - grievance which must then be worked through in order to reach a new level of relationship, and in order to achieve the ability to assume care for others and hence to achieve reconciliation. Thus, the path which this myth attempts to redraw is that which leads from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position.

Throughout our own lives, however, we oscillate continually between these two positions. We know this, both from our own personal experience, from our experience with our patients and, as we have seen, also from the myth of the relationship between God and Noah. The depressive position, with its ability to feel compassion for others and to take on the burden of their care, is never finally to be attained. In crisis and under stress it can always disappear. Again we will be shadowed by the destructive side of our beings, and thus again exposed to the persecutory fears connected with it. At that point we need consolation and trust. For this consolation and trust, the God of the Bible presents a new Covenant, symbolised by the rainbow. This is meant as a colourful sign of life's variety, a variety which is both possible and necessary, in order that our internal worlds as well as the world outside may be guaranteed survival.

Summary

To applicate Bions Theory of Thinking to a myth of the Old Testament is not a new approach. Bion himself does it with the myths of Babel and Eden. Now the author tries to discover the process of development which leads fom the paranoid-schizoid positon to the depressive position as expressed in the story of Noah. The process was presented in several steps in order to illustrate the various stages of the relationship between God and Noah. It is the report of the overwhelming power of primitive narcissistic anger when being confronted by newness and of the necessity to bring the good into safe, so that it can survive violent grievance. This grievance then must be worked through in order to reach a new level of relationship and in order to achieve the ability to assume care for others and hence to achieve reconcialation.

This myth of the story of Noah attemps to redraw the path which leads from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position. It is a myth which gives us a picture for processes in our dayly mental lives. Throughout our lives we oscillate continually between these two positions and we will be shadowed by the destructive side of our beings in times of crisis and under stress. Therefore the symbol of the rainbow is seen as symbol for hope, consolation and trust in order that our internal world as well as the world outside may be guaranteed survival.

References:

The Bible: (1970) A New English Translation. Oxford Univ. Press/ Cambridge Univ. Press.

The Life Application Bible: (1991) Wheaton,Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers Inc.

Bion,W.R.: (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann

Bion,W.R.: (1963) Elements of Psychoanalysis. London: Heinemann

Bion,W.R.: (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Karnac Books.

Britton,R.S.: (1989) `The missing link: parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex',in: The Oedipus Complex Today, R.S. Britton, M.Feldman and E.O'Shaughnessy, London: Karnac Books.

Meltzer, D.,M.H. Williams : (1988) The Apprehension of Beauty. The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Violence and Art. Worcester: The Clunie Press.

Rey,J. H.: (1986) Reparation, Journal of the Melanie Klein Society, 4: 5-35.

Steiner, J.:(1993) Psychic Retreats. London: Routledge.

-----------:(1993) Revenge, Resentment, Remorse and Reparation. Paper presented in Munich 1993.

Stern,D.: (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books

Winnicott,D.W.:(1958) Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. London: Tavistock.

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