Le Quatrième Pentamètre

Betrayal

There is a Jewish story, an ordinary Jewish Joke. It runs like this: 

A father was teaching his little son to be less afraid, to have more courage, by having him jump down the stairs. He placed his boy on the second stair and said, "Jump, and I'll catch you." and the boy jumped. Then the father placed him on the third stair, saying "Jump, and I'll catch you." Though the boy was afraid, he trusted his father, did what he was told, and jumped into his father's arms. Then the father put him on the next step, and the next step, each time telling him, Jump, and I'll catch you, and each time the boy jumped and was caught by his father. And so this went on. Then the boy jumped from a very high step, just as before; but this time the father stepped back, and the boy fell flat on his face. As he picked himself up, bleeding and crying, the father said, "that will teach you: never trust a Jew, even if it's your own father."

This story–for all its questionable anti-Semitism–has more to it than that, especially since it's more likely a Jewish story. 

I believe has something to say to our theme–betrayal. 

For example: Why must a boy be taught not to trust? And not to trust a Jew? And not to trust his own father? What is it mean to be betrayed by one's father, or to be betrayed by someone close? What does it mean to a father, to a man, to betray someone who trusts him? To what end betrayal at all in psychological life? These are our questions.

We must try to make a beginning somewhere. I prefer in this case to make this beginning "In the beginning", with the Bible, even though as a psychologist I may be trespassing on the grounds of theology. But even though a psychologist, I do not want to begin at the usual beginnings of psychologists, with that other theology, that other Eden: the infant and its mother.

Trust and betrayal were no issues for Adam, walking with God in the evenings. The image of the garden as the beginning of the human condition shows what we might call "primal trust", or what Santayana has called "animal faith", a fundamental belief–despite worry, fear, and doubt– that the ground underfoot is really there, that it will not give away at the next step, that the Sun will rise tomorrow and the sky not fall on our heads, and that God did truly make the world for man. This situation of primal trust, presented as the archetypal image of Eden, is repeated in individual lives of child and parent. As Adam in animal faith at the beginning trusts God, so does the boy at the beginning trust his father. In both, God and father is the paternal image: reliable, firm, stable, just, that Rock of Ages whose word is binding. This paternal image can also be expressed by the Logos concept, by the immutable power and sacredness of the masculine word.

But we are no longer in that garden. Eve put an end to that naked dignity. Since the expulsion, the Bible records a history of the trails of many sorts: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Laban, Joseph sold by his brother's and their father deceived, Pharaoh's broken promises, calf worship behind Moses' back, Saul, Samson, Job, God's rages and the creation almost annulled–on and on, culminating in the central myth of our culture: the betrayal of Jesus.

Although we are no longer in that garden, we can return to it through any close relationship, for instance, love, friendship, analysis, where a situation of primal trust is reconstituted. This has been variously called the temenos, the analytical vessel, the mother-child symbiosis. Here, there is again the security of Eden. But the security–or at least the kind of temenos to which I refer–is masculine, given by the Logos, through the promise, the covenant, the word. It is not a primal trust of breasts, milk and skin warmth; it is similar but different, and I believe the point worth taking that we do not always have to go to mother for our models as the basics in human life.

In this security, based not on flesh but on word, primal trust has been reestablished and so the primal world can be exposed in safety–the weakness in darkness, the naked helplessness of Adam, the earliest man in ourselves. Here, we are somehow delivered over to our simplest nature, which contains the best and least in us, the million year old past and the seed ideas of the future. The need for security within which one can expose one's primal world, where one can deliver oneself up and not be destroyed, is basic and evident in analysis.