Mythology, sexuality, aggressiveness: Adolescence and creativity

Adolescent Psychiatry, 2008 by Krumer-Nevo, Michal

Abstract

This chapter presents a short story written by a 15-year old boy as a startling response to a regular class assignment. Its originality and the expressive emotional and experiential power of the writing make it an exceptional text, worthy of close analysis. The story, based on The Odyssey, follows the life of Cyclops Polyphemus*-from his childhood, through the recognition of the mature body and especially the "eye," the cannibalistic scene at the cave, and the blindness.

By choosing a story so distant from human reality and using the mythological giant-monster figure protagonist as a model for identification, the adolescent author succeeds in evoking the world of adolescent feelings and the power of its sexual fantasies, anxieties, desires, and frustrations. The analysis of the story is based on the following concepts: psychological birth, masturbation fantasy, primal scene, and castration fear. Through the analysis, the process of adolescence as the psychological birth of the sexual body is unfolded.

Introduction

Special difficulties face research that is focused upon adolescence. Anna Freud (1958) ascribed these difficulties to the extremely high level of emotional sensitivity to the world and the self characteristic of the stages of puberty. The adolescent experiences a very rich repertoire of intense emotions too powerful, and often too painful, to be easily dealt with in psychotherapy during adolescence or to be reconstructed in adult analysis. However, these emotions and experiences are sometimes expressed by gifted adolescents through artwork (Rakoff, 1993). These artworks serve as a mode of knowing, of self-expression and interpersonal communication, and are a rich source for the understanding of adolescent experiences. My intention in this article is to use a literary work-a short story written by a 15-year old boy-as an aid to understanding some aspects of the elusive occurrence in our lives that we call adolescence.

The story was written in response to a class assignment to write a story on any subject. After its return to the author, the story lay forgotten in a drawer for many years. More than 10 years later I became acquainted with the author, now a grown man, and in the course of the friendship that developed between us he showed me the story. He also approved of my publishing it together with the interpretation.

The story, which takes the form of a dream-narrative, is based on the Cyclops episode in The Odyssey. By choosing a story so distant from human reality and using the mythological giant-monster figure protagonist as a model for identification, the adolescent author succeeds in evoking, while distancing, the world of adolescent feelings and the power of its sexual fantasies, anxieties, desires, and frustrations. It is not my intention in this article to come to any predictive or clinical conclusions concerning the life experiences of the young writer, whose literary talent continued to develop through his adult life. My analysis refers to the narrative simply as a paradigmatic expression of certain adolescent state of mind.

The story, entitled "Cyclops Polyphemus", was written originally in Hebrew, and was translated for the purpose of this article, making every effort to keep the style and level of language usage.

The first part of the article contains the story. It is followed by a brief review of the literature and my interpretation, which makes use of the concepts of psychological birth, masturbation fantasy, and castration fear.

Cyclops Polyphemus-The Story

These are the generations of Cyclops Polyphemus. On the first day Cyclops Polyphemus was lying on the ground on the island of the sun, his feet buried in the sands of the sea, his head resting on the great plains.

On the second day, Cyclops Polyphemus was seated on the sand, his hands joyously sprinkling water about. Cyclops Polyphemus was rather plump.

On the third day Cyclops Polyphemus sat up and scratched his back against the mountains and read a nice story about a one-eyed monster who ate human beings. On the first day Cyclops Polyphemus was stretched out, breathing and steamy on the hot earth. The touch of the sun's rays was pleasant and the touch of the waves of the sea was pleasant. Cyclops lay and lay upon his back. His hand stretched out and fingered his forehead until something his fingers touched made them draw back. Cyclops smiled.

Again his hand stretched out and advanced slowly and cautiously over what he had touched-his eye. A tremor seized his body. The eye's cornea was smooth and very polished and shiny. The face of Cyclops Polyphemus was coarse and hot but his eye was smooth and cool. It was a large eye, the size of the palm of Cyclops Polyphemus's hand. It was an eye of a strange green-blue glittering color. It was round and big-and fixed in the forehead of proud Cyclops Polyphemus. It was a thick eye, prominent upon the forehead of Cyclops Polyphemus like a deep glass ball whose color shifted back and forth between dark green and light blue. A finger of Cyclops wandered over the jellied lump that was cold and rubbery. His member* stretched and enlarged and a stream of liquid pushed and poured out, its drops disappearing in the shining sky through which they fell.