A Psychological Review of Gananath Obeyesekere's book, Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience

 

 

Dr. Ruwan M Jayatunge M.D PhD 

In his book Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, Gananath Obeyesekere - Professor of anthropology at Princeton University, discusses profound anthropological and psychological themes. He uses religious symbolism to explain psychopathologies that impact people and their outer society. He applies his knowledge of anthropology to analyze human behavior, human biology, culture, and society. He scrutinizes social life, social change, and the social causes, presenting a number of case studies.

It’s an in-depth discussion about psychodrama and the relationship between public and private symbols. It’s a cultural, anthropological, and psychological analysis. It is one of the ethnographic studies, and he uses the symbol of Medusa’s hair to describe and appraise his case studies.

Medusa’s head is an apotropaic symbol. Medusa represents trauma. It signifies misogyny, sexism, and the extreme misrepresentation of women. The myth of Medusa has been viewed through two distinct lenses over time: the male gaze and that of early feminism. Ultimately, Medusa became a symbol of female empowerment.

In ancient mythology, Medusa is a symbol of protection and best known for having hair made of snakes. The story of Medusa comes from the Roman poet Ovid. Medusa was a beautiful woman with long, flowing hair, and she was cursed by Athena. After the horrific curse, she turned into a monster. Her ability to turn anyone she looked at to stone symbolizes a transformative force.  

Medusa represents a complex interplay between good and evil and having an astounding legacy. Medusa was killed by the Greek hero Perseus. Instead of looking directly at Medusa, Perseus used a reflective surface of the polished shield to see her without becoming Medusa’s victim.

Although Medusa was destroyed, Medusa will remain destined to be misunderstood. Medusa's story carries significant symbolism pertaining to guardianship and protection.   Freud’s 1923 essay “The infantile genital organization” explains the concept of infantile sexuality in relation to the sexual life of adults. His short essay Das Medusenhaupt—“The““Medusa’s Head (1922)—stated that Medusa’s head depicts a terror of castration, aka a reflection of the castration complex. To Freud, the female “castration complex” refers to the belief that women have an “envy for the penis.” Freud suggested that Medusa’s serpent hair is a metaphor for the hair surrounding a woman’s genital area (Sakulwattana, 2013).  Hence Freud viewed Medusa as the castration threat.

Carl Jung interpreted Medusa as the figure of the Great Mother. Jung viewed Medusa as Athena's shadow, an archetype that personifies the unconscious as a figure of the same gender. Medusa may be understood as a psychological archetype of a young and beautiful woman being abused by a powerful man. God Poseidon represents a lustful man who is abusing his position of power.

The attachment theory uses the Medusa Complex to refer to a self-destructive early state of inwardly directed aggression produced by a disruption of the mother/child mutual gaze. A Canadian analytical psychologist, Marion Woodman, saw the Medusa complex as a dissociated state produced by paralysis of the fight-or-flight response in a state of petrified fear.

Medusa is a symbol of female rage. Medusa is a large part of a symbolic system. Symbolic systems play a crucial role in anthropology by helping to describe and understand how different cultures interpret the world around them. Symbolic systems in anthropology are studied through ethnographic methods, examining cultural symbols, rituals, languages, and artifacts. People use language, art, and rituals to communicate, represent, and make sense of their social realities.

Medusa stands for the archetype of the so-called monstrous feminine, an exposé of patriarchal narratives that transform non-subservient women into monsters (Fremi, 2022). The Eastern European psychoanalyst Veronika Berkutova highlights that the Medusa myth unites psychoanalytic conceptions of castration anxiety with a feminist reflection on the topic of the female.

Professor Obeyesekere narrates the psychology of Medusa via real-life stories of the abused woman archetype. It’s mainly the victim archetype. A person with a strong victim archetype lives in fear. Fear that things are going to be taken away from them. Fear that people are going to take advantage of them. They have fear that they cannot survive. It’s not only the physical survival but the survival of their identity, their hopes and dreams, or their sense of self. They are forced to give up their own sense of independence and empowerment. 

Professor Obeyesekere explains, like Medusa, how an Indian woman with matted hair obtains her particular status in a society brimming with mythological images and tales very much pervading daily life. He indicates the conventional distinction between personal and cultural symbols is inadequate and naïve. He presents a number of women who lived through immense psychological trauma, later transformed, and then created a noxious safety net around them. Like Medusa, they reflected fear and angst. For Obeyesekere Medusa was an ongoing painful life experience of heavyhearted people who had no voice in their society. He was their anguish in an anthropological lens. 

In his book, the author analyzes the symbolism of guilt, the adaptational and integrative significance of belief in spirits, and a host of related issues concerning possession states and religiosity. He places an emphasis on the traditional anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of symbolism.  

Professor Obeyesekere provides exceptional case studies of a number of women who endured physical and sexual trauma. Most of the women reacted to their initial traumas with shock, fear, anxiety, confusion, and withdrawal. Most of them experienced depression, PTSD, and dissociation. They were transformed following their trauma. Professor Obeyesekere elucidates, like Medusa, that these women projected their anger onto society.

Medusa was sent to a faraway island and was cursed so that no man would want her.  She was roughened by Poseidon, and he rapes Medusa in Athena's temple. Finally, Perseus kills her. Even after Medusa's death, the course did not end. Perseus used her head as a weapon to eliminate his enemies. At the end, Perseus buried it in the marketplace of Argos. Medusa faced multiple victimizations.  

The story of Medusa is about sexual abuse and suffering. Snakes in her hair represent the knots of negative emotions and thoughts formed as a consequence of sexual abuse. Medusa is an image of evil to repel evil. The Medusa effect is a phenomenon in which people judge a person to be more mindful when they appear as a picture than as a picture within a picture.  

Professor Obeyesekere narrates about the Hindu goddess Kali. Kali is the ultimate expression of nature, both destructive and benevolent, and the principal deity of the Tantric cult. Kali is the personification of sin and represents death and destruction, sexuality, violence, and doomsday. A fierce deity who destroys all the redundant and wasteful beings and matters for cleansing the society, paving the way for new creation, is adored by the strong and the great (Mukhopadhyay, 2022).  Although there is no significant evidence that directly links the mythological figure of Medusa and the Hindu goddess Kali, we can find some thematic and symbolic parallels. Both Medusa and Kali symbolize feminine rage with embodied aspects of power and fear. 

Professor Obeyesekere discusses the symbolic integration of personality. An integrated personality is the sum total of harmonious expression of physical, mental, intellectual, energetic, and blissful self. It is a process through which all mental qualities come together to form a person. Carl Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development. Jung believed that the human psyche had three parts: the ego, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. By enduring psychological trauma, symbolic integration of personality could be damaged.

Obeyesekere indicates the symbolization of guilt in his case studies. Guilt is a complex emotion. Guilt represents the emotional burden stemming from sin and past actions, impacting individuals across generations. The phenomenon of guilt contains certain elements of shame, aggression, and vagueness. Guilt may interact with dissociative tendencies to specifically predispose individuals to acute dissociative states. Dissociation is evident in victims who suffered long-term physical, sexual, or emotional abuse during childhood.

We see numerous dissociative reactions in Obeyesekere ’s case studies. The impact of shame and guilt also contributes to dissociation. Moreover, Obsekara writes about possession states, especially spirit possession. Possession is defined as an episode of alteration in the state of consciousness with the replacement of the customary sense of personal identity by a new identity, identified by the patient or his entourage as the spirit of an animal, a deceased individual, a deity, or a power. The affected individuals have delusions of control in which there is a false belief that one's thoughts, feelings, actions, or impulses are controlled or 'made' by an external agency. According to van Duijl and team (2010), the impact of potentially traumatizing events related to war, poverty, and societal disruption on the occurrence of dissociative and possessive trance disorders in developing countries.

Obeyesekere describes ghosts and demons. A demon is a malevolent supernatural entity. A ghost is the soul or spirit of a dead person or non-human animal that is believed by some people to be able to appear to the living. Although their existence is impossible to falsify, Obeyesekere‘s narrative has clinical significance in order to understand how these beliefs affect people and society.

Obeyesekere elegantly dealt with psychoanalysis and anthropology and indicated how personal symbolism is related to religious experience, symbolic meanings, personal mythology constructs, and psychological trauma and its transformation. The symbolic representation of mental images can be seen in traumatized individuals.  The symbolic function is central both to the fracturing of selfhood due to early trauma and to its resolution (Spermon et al., 2009). We can easily identify symbolic representation of mental images that were described in his case studies.

The distinction between symbolism and symbolization is important. A symbol might be an object, a mark, an image, a character, a name, or a place, whereas symbolism is a literary device that uses symbols to imbue meaning in a story. Symbols can be transformative.

Symbols are mediators between the pleasure principle and the reality principle (Bonomi, 2004). Trauma operates as a symbol; on the other hand, trauma destroys the capacity of symbolization. The ability to symbolize memories is of paramount importance during the process of coping with trauma (Na’ama et al., 2015).

As Wirtz (2009) specifies, the symbolic attitude is most essential for traumatized individuals because it reconnects the person with something beyond; it re-establishes a broken connection and facilitates a shift of attitude, a metanoia. We can find these features in the case studies that were presented in Professor Obeyesekere’s book. Furthermore, he provides a dichotomy between the symbolic and anti-symbolic reading of the traumatic experience that these people endured.

In phenomenological terms, trauma is an injury and manifestation of the lived body. Professor Obeyesekere highlights trauma reenactment or repetition compulsion, describing some of the case narratives.  We can easily identify reenacting relationships in his case studies. Most of them are trapped in the Karpman triangle. We see a lot of empathy in his writings, and indeed he viewed these victims with a compassionate eye.  

  

References

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Fremi S. Medusa, trauma-informed. Lancet Psychiatry. 2022 Jun;9(6):433-434. doi: 10.1016/S2215-0366(22)00143-2. PMID: 35569501.

Mukhopadhyay, A. (2022). Immortal Mahakali and Her Mortal Critics. International Journal online of Humanities 8(1):1-20 DOI:10.24113/ijohmn. v8i5.265.

Na’ama Eisenbach, Sharon Snir, Dafna Regev, Identification and characterization of symbols emanating from the spontaneous artwork of survivors of childhood trauma, The Arts in Psychotherapy, Volume 44, 2015, Pages 45-56, ISSN 0197-4556, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2014.12.002.

Obeyesekere , G (1984).Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. University of Chicago Press.

Spermon D, Gibney P, Darlington Y. Complex trauma, dissociation, and the use of symbolism in therapy. J Trauma Dissociation. 2009;10(4):436-50. doi: 10.1080/15299730903179083. PMID: 19821178.

Sakulwattana, J. (2013). Medusa Myth: Reflecting Human Collective Experiences of the Femaleness. JSEL.

van Duijl M, Nijenhuis E, Komproe IH, Gernaat HB, de Jong JT. Dissociative symptoms and reported trauma among patients with spirit possession and matched healthy controls in Uganda. Cult Med Psychiatry. 2010 Jun;34(2):380-400. doi: 10.1007/s11013-010-9171-1. PMID: 20401630; PMCID: PMC2878595.

Wirtz, U. (2009). The Symbolic Dimension of Trauma therapy. Published in: Symbolic Life, Spring Journal vol.82, p.31-52.