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Symbols: The Power of Myth, the Power of Art

2/26/2013

1 Comment

 
“A functioning mythological symbol I have defined as ‘an energy-evoking and –directing sign.’ . . . Their messages are addressed not to the brain, to be interpreted there and passed on; but directly to the nerves, the glands, the blood, and the sympathetic nervous system. . . . The living mythological symbol  . . . is an image that hits one where it counts. [It] talks directly to the feeling system and immediately elicits a response, after which the brain may come along with its interesting comments.” Myths To Live By, Joseph Campbell

The Sistine Chapel, T.S. Eliot, Manet, Thomas Mann, Bernini, Shakespeare—pick your own favorites. But anyone who has deeply experienced a great work of art understands the power of symbols to move us and even change the way we feel, the way we think, the way we live. Like many others, Joseph Campbell found a lot of similarities between how living mythological symbols work and how artistic symbols affect the  individual. He considered both myths and art as products of the imagination, producing symbols that arise from the unconscious and communicate their emotive power to the unconscious minds of others. Although he did not believe that our society
(in the latter decades of the twentieth century) had any powerful common mythology, I’m not sure he would believe the same to be true today. Things were changing too fast for a mythology to develop, he thought. Yet now it seems as though the very intense pace of change has become a common part of the story of our lives. Images such as the web itself and the multiprocessor have captured the imagination of many. Is it possible that we are in fact developing a new mythology for our time?

In order to see whether functional mythological symbols are in fact developing at all today, it seemed best to first understand fully what Campbell meant by a functioning myth and to see if today’s leading neuroscientists had been able to discover any new insights in the process through which a symbol affects the individual  mind. Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel’s latest book, entitled The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious, in Art, Mind, and Brain, seemed to be a promising place to start. 
 
Kandel chose to study the Viennese expressionist artists at the turn of the last century in order to explore the interplay of art, mind, and the unconscious. He does see a direct correlation between earlier art forms that tried to arouse religious emotions and more modern art that attempts to tap into the unconscious realm of emotions by using primitive (or universal) archetypes in a similar way. Kandel notes that since the earliest cave paintings thirty thousand years ago, virtually all groups of human beings have created images. So even though story-telling and the visual and musical arts do not seem to be necessary for survival, they have been persistently part of human life from the start. Art, Kandel argues, creates a process that can produce “an Aha! moment, the sudden recognition that we have seen  . . .  the truth underlying both the beauty and the ugliness depicted by the artist.” “A great work of art,” he continues, “enables us to experience a deep pleasure that is at once unconscious yet capable of triggering conscious feelings.”
Kandel admits that the real challenges of understanding how the mind works in biological terms remain the crucial goals for neuroscientists in the twenty-first century. The current science of mind cannot explain much about the aesthetic experience, although scientists do distinguish between how the unconscious mind responds to an image, which they say produces “emotions,” and how the conscious mind responds, which they say generates “feelings.” This distinction dovetails with how Campbell described the experience of a functioning mythological symbol, which is initially experienced viscerally and then perhaps later interpreted linguistically by the conscious brain and placed
within a cultural and historical context. The similarities in the processes of experiencing myths and art also helps us see why Campbell contended that in the future it would be the artists who would create the myths and keep them alive: “The function of the artist,” Campbell told Bill Moyers during their series of conversations known as The Power of Myth, “is the mythologization of the environment and the world,” for it is the artist “whose ears are open to the song of the universe.”

1 Comment
Brian Ott
3/3/2013 03:09:54 am


I was surprised to read Campbell’s description of symbols as evoking responses which, save a few neurological connections, mirror the conditioned physiological responses measured by Ivan Pavlov at the turn of the last century. Campbell is correct that human responses can occur without involvement of the brain proper. Physiologists would refer to these as reflexes. A tap of the patellar ligament, the quadriceps muscle snaps to attention tendon, and our body give a kick whether we want it to or not. A car backfires next to us and our hearts pound as if trying to match the intensity of the blast. And all this before the higher brain centers can say, “what was that?” no less “come along with its interesting comments” as Campbell writes.

Such reflexes, however, are few and innate. The response Campbell describes to an “energy-evoking and directing sign” is related but different. It is, in psychological terms, the classically conditioned response identified by Pavlov over a century ago. Give your Labrador a whiff of hamburger and the salivary glands prepare the mouth for that first bite. Ring the dinner bell before you present the meat, repeat the sequence enough times, and soon your pooch is licking his chops to just the bell. Other bells will do the trick too. The response intensity will simply drop as the sound differs from the original. This is Pavlov’s conditioned response. And it is a short hop to substitute the adrenal for the salivary glands at which point we can begin to talk about conditioned emotional responses.

So are Campbell and Pavlov on the same page? I would suggest an assertive maybe will be the best answer.

A small point to consider is Campbell’s equating of brain and the functions of “interpretation” and “comment.” Certainly such functions are localized there. But the brain’s repertoire extends beyond conscious thought. Some reflexes and all conditioned reflexes reside at least in part within the brain. The dog phobic’s conditioned anxiety response to, let’s say, a one month old puppy will involve some of the brain’s visual system in the thalamus, the mapping and memory aspects of the hippocampus, some probability generation in the prefrontal cortex and a signally of centers in the amygdala (the brain’s panic button).

If we put aside the anatomical issues, I believe Campbell is generally correct in suggesting an unconscious, physiologically conditioned (emotional) aspect to our reaction to symbols. And I would agree that such a reaction that precedes cognitive appraisal (through language and image centers), can be the first step in generating a feeling response. However, I would not equate this conditioned emotional response with a feeling state, but instead see it as a component of such states. Current definitions of feeling states include physiological/emotional, conscious cognitive and behavioral components. Change one of these can alter the feeling label that an individual ascribes to the cluster. It would be incorrect to suggest that present day psychologists and neuroscientists view feeling states as

Further, our physiological/emotional responses are easily generated by conscious cognitive function. Just think for a moment about about an object that gives you the creeps. Pull up that image. You will have the response even though the situation isn’t at hand. All feeling states do not originate in external stimulation of unconsciously triggered physiological processes which then become part of a feeling state. That is one way, but not the only way.

Are our responses to symbols entirely Pavlovian? I don’t think so. Certainly some aspects of some responses to art may indeed be of this nature. But I believe that the majority of our responses include as much cognitive influence as conditioned.

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