A month ago, a friend sent me three books to choose, and I saw this "Steppenwolf" at the first sight.
First of all, the wasteland appealed to me because I used to wander alone in the wilderness. Although this may seem a bit out of the ordinary for a woman, it is a character that has been formed since childhood, and it is not intentional on my part. Moreover, I often feel like a lone wolf, out of place with the real world and the crowd. This is my illness.
Secondly, a sentence on the cover appealed to me: to cure the anxiety of a social fear, you only need to read Steppenwolf once. That's great! There is a friend who needs to be healed more than I am. He was an outspoken social terrorist, more like a lone wolf than I was.
Finally, Hermann Hesse, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a masterpiece, and these are also a big reason for me.
In addition, I have wanted to write such a book for a long time, and this book may give me some inspiration and inspiration!
When I took the package from the courier, couldn't wait to tear it off, and turned two or three pages as I walked, the joy in my heart was indescribable—but when I got home, I put it on the table for a week before I read it hungrily. I don't know if others have such a mood as me - good things, don't dare to enjoy too quickly, for fear of enjoying it all at once, so grinding and rubbing, slowly approaching, slowly entering, slowly enjoying...
Back to the point. Steppenwolf is one of the representative works of the famous German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse in the middle and late period of the 20th century. Hesse's autobiographical novel, at the time of writing this book, he was suffering from rheumatism, sciatica, economic crisis, divorce of his second wife and so on. More importantly, he has relapsed mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety and is being treated by Jungian psychologists. This book can be seen as a healing journey sought by Hesse, and at the same time, it can also be said to subtly reveal the redemption of social fear and multiple personalities.
A person may have a thousand souls
The novel takes the portrayal of the spiritual crisis of the civic elite and middle-aged intellectual Harry Haller, the "Steppenwolf", as the starting point, and through the guidance of Hermina, Maria, Pablo, and the "immortals" such as Goethe and Mozart, the novel is gradually healed, and the "true realm" of faith and exploration of eternal values is the end and creative goal.
The novel is avant-garde, but the beginning is very traditional. The beginning is in the form of a "publisher's order", through the perspective of others, narrating the image of steppenwolf in the eyes of others- a scholar of nearly fifty years old, with a decent identity and life, a kind and elegant demeanor, extraordinary conversation, brilliant talent, and looks very wise, but there is always an indelible sadness, sentimentality and inexplicable pain in his eyes.
The "Publisher's Preface" introduces the protagonist Harry, but also sets up a suspense for the reader - what kind of person is this person? What is his true situation, what is his true disposition? You know, in most cases, we are seen by others as a hundred and eighteen thousand miles away from our own real situation.
Next, through the "Autobiography of Harry Haller", he describes his life and feelings in the small town - he was born into a decent middle-class civic class, and because of the experiences and influences of his childhood life, he enjoyed living in a clean, friendly, and orderly civic class. Yet his heart was full of disgust and hatred for this class. He "would rather feel an extremely evil pain burning in his body than endure the warmth of this grace and satisfaction", and he was "extremely angry at this harmonious and orderly, bland, mediocre, conformist, as if soaked in disinfectant water", and he hated this class, and therefore hated himself.
Interspersed with the "Steppenwolf Research - For Madmen Only" brochure, the essential attributes of the Steppenwolf community and the characteristics that distinguish ordinary people - "These people all have two souls and two lives; In them flowed the blood of divinity and magic, motherhood and fatherhood at the same time, and in them, there was the instinct to pursue happiness and gather pain, just like the two-sided wolf and man in Harry's body, hostile to each other, entangled with each other, no one could do without the other.
As for harry, he is not a combination of two elements, but a combination of hundreds or thousands of elements. "Each human self is a highly differentiated little world, a whole small nebula, a chaotic mass of countless forms, stages, and states, endless lineages and possibilities."
Seeing this, I couldn't help but think of myself and my friends. For a long time, I have had this strong feeling that a person cannot be just a soul, but at least two, or even many. In my case, I feel like I have at least two souls living inside me—a man and a woman.
When I am with my petite and weak girlfriend, I can't help but become strong and brave, and I am very rough and spontaneous, and when I encounter difficulties, I will even be very strong and have a strong desire to protect. And when I am with a very masculine male friend, I will become very gentle and shy, even as if I am weak and unwind, this is not a disguise, this is a natural change.
In addition, sometimes I am very introverted and silent, I don't want to say a word, and sometimes I am very extroverted and lively, as if I can talk to anyone. Sometimes, like a fire, hate can not take out their hearts to the people they love, and sometimes like a piece of ice, cold and numb, keep a certain distance from everyone, as if no one can melt me...
Pushing myself and others, I guess probably everyone is similar to me. Everyone changes according to different times, different occasions, different people interacting with. Everyone uses their part to build different relationships with different people. For example, if you are with optimistic people, you will become optimistic; Being with people who are negative and pessimistic will become negative and pessimistic; With those who are intellectually elegant, you have to show the intellectual elegance side; And with people who are thick and simple, thick and leafy, you can't be intellectually elegant, that seems very unsociable, and it is not easy to integrate into it.
I say this, some people will not feel that this is a chameleon way of survival. But if one deals with all the different people in an unchanging way, I guess there will be a lot of difficulties.
In fact, this is not a kind of unseemly "see people talk about people, see ghosts talk about ghosts", psychology has long given the answer - this is a natural development of people in the process of survival, personality mask, in order to better integrate into society, get along with people, and form a personality.
Prior to the main text of the book, the editors drew a detailed mind map for the reader of "Jungian Psychoanalytic Interpretation of the Characters of the Book," as well as the four personality archetypes of Jungian psychology—the personality mask, the shadow, the Anima and the Animus, and the self-nature.
Through mind maps and four archetypes, we can better understand the relationship between the characters presented in this book and Harry.
From this point of view, in fact, whether it is Harry or me, it seems that it is not a social phobia patient. Because we are able to handle interpersonal and social issues well according to different situations. Our real problem is that we cannot live in harmony and friendliness with our different souls, resulting in irrepressible suffering.
So, how to get along with yourself, reconcile with yourself, so as to achieve the purpose of self-redemption and self-healing, no longer so painful, the answer is in the final "magic theater".
The fundamental way to solve the spiritual crisis: to go to the heart, internalize and cultivate the body
This chapter is full of fantasy and even a little weird.
If the book does not have the phrase "Exploring the Journey of Spiritual Healing through Magic Realism" on the cover, the reader may mistakenly think that Hesse's old man has really entered a state of paranoia and schizophrenia.
When night came, Harry escaped from his "generally satisfied, generally painless, painless and joyful, not daring to shout out loud, but to whisper, be cautious, and even walk on tiptoe, little by little" middle-class citizens, and flee to a place where he could breathe the air freely—some old-fashioned tavern or coffee shop to spend time.
From this passage, it can be seen that under the mask of Harry's gentle and elegant, polite, restrained personality, there is a fanatical, fierce, rebellious soul that wants to break through all the shackles of freedom.
It was this wolf-like soul that haunted him all day and made him restless. His two souls cannot get along and merge well, and often enter a state of fighting and glue.
The Steppenwolf Study – Madmen Only brochure is actually a Harry's psychoanalytic manual. Through this manual, Harry learned about the common attributes and traits of the Steppenwolf community, laying the groundwork for his later encounters and guidance with Hermina.
In this booklet, the "man" is disassembled in detail—"people's understanding of the word man is always limited by a fleeting citizenship agreement." Within the framework of this agreement, the most primitive and crude instincts were forcibly rejected and opposed. It requires that the so-called man should have at least a little self-consciousness, a little moral conception, a little self-consciousness to get rid of the animal nature, and that a little spiritual pursuit is not only permissible, but even encouraged. ”
The so-called man here, in fact, from Freud's theory of personality, is a kind of "superego" level of people, social people who have undergone acquired learning and social indoctrination, and people under the "personality mask" that Jung called. In our opinion, how correct is this, shouldn't people be like this? Is there anything else wrong with that? As human beings, have we ever suspected the error or one-sidedness of "people"?
But apparently, Harry disagreed with this forced division of man, and he believed that man should be pluralistic, full of primitive instincts and desires, rich in three-dimensionality and personality. Therefore, he wants to escape from the cage of that social man all the time, he wants to live a real person, a real person, a wolf-like person. But the armor of social attributes was too strong for him to know how to take him off.
Harry stumbles into the Black Hawk Bar after a late-night drink and meets Hermina, his first spiritual mentor. Hermina was actually Harry's Anima, the female soul. She guided him on the path to healing.
The first way of liberation that Hermina taught Harry was to liberate herself.
Yes, Harry, born in the civic class and raised in the civic class, was raised to be educated on the basis of "breaking the will of the individual", which was based on the destruction of the individual personality and the destruction of the will of the individual, in an attempt to "mass-produce" devout Christians, complete martyrs. Under this kind of education, Harry gradually became an excellent child in the eyes of others, successfully teaching scholars. However, as the saying goes, "the nature of the country is easy to change and difficult to move", this kind of education only seriously suppressed Harry's personality, so that he spent his whole life trying to break the five-fingered mountain that was pressed on his body and release the wolf that was crushed under the mountain.
Therefore, Harry, who was tormented by pain and irrational, met Hermina and decided to "obey" her unconditionally, allowing her to lead him to liberation.
Hermina was well aware of Harry's predicament, so she taught him foxtrot, taught him to appreciate jazz, and gave him a beautiful lover to enjoy sex to the fullest. These things that Harry had once scoffed at were the "moral" shackles that bound him, and only by breaking them could he approach the wolf in the depths of his soul and live peacefully with it.
But simply breaking these shackles was not enough to cure Harry's illness, not enough to complete the redemption. Hermina knew that in the end, she would be able to redeem herself. Only by completely killing the hypocritical "superego" of "moral supremacy", only by living out the true self and entering the real state can we be completely healed and redeemed.
So, Hermina led Harry into the "Magic Theater" through the "Masquerade Ball". In fact, if you think about it, this is a kind of hypnotherapy, through hypnosis, to awaken those desires, those unfulfilled wishes, those unprocessed "complexes" hidden in Harry's heart, so as to achieve the purpose of healing.
In the "Magic Theater", Harry, led by his male soul Pablo, meets his own repressed souls in the depths of the subconscious, and unravels previously repressed complexes —evil belligerence, lustful, dancing with wolves, and then touching the true desire of the heart — to become immortal. In the end, under the guidance of the immortal Mozart, go to the realm of reality, complete the sublimation of the soul, reconcile with a thousand souls, reconcile with yourself, bravely face life, and laugh at life.
Through this book, Hesse gives a way of redemption for all patients with multiple personalities and social phobias — the fundamental way to solve the spiritual crisis is to go to the heart and internalize self-cultivation. The prerequisite for self-cultivation is to know oneself, accept oneself, understand oneself, and tolerate oneself.
(Author: An Lan)