ABSTRACT
In my clinical case, I will illustrate the theories of emergence (Cambray 2002, 2006), national identity (Dimock 1989: 5), cultural complexes (Singer and Kimbles 2004), and cultural symbols (Jung 1961: para. 579) through a child’s dreams and sandplays.1 I have to assume you are all familiar with Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick (Melville 1988 [1851]). Melville’s aim was to get outside of the cultural and national complexes (Jung 1952: para. 45) of Europe in an effort to create a tragic, trans-national epic for the world in the nineteenth century.2 In his efforts to attempt this, he painted a host of fictional characters that are unmistakably American: Ahab, Pip, Starbuck, Ishmael, Queequeg, Dagoo and the White Whale. These characters are all portraits of trans-cultural symbols. They express ‘eternal truths’ and they are alive as numinous factors in American society. As Dimock has argued, Melville displayed a cultural identity within historical process and sought, by way of corrective and compensatory social symbols, to confront the worldwide epidemic of ‘empire building’ (Dimock 1989: 5). As I have myself shown in an earlier essay, moreover, Melville attempted to heal the cultural complexes within nations and actually provide through his imaginative writings solutions for problems of war and violence between ethnic, political and religious groups (Herrmann 2003). Within Moby-Dick, from the famous opening line ‘Call me Ishmael’ (Melville 1988 [1851]: 3), there is a focus on authorship, which refers readers back to the hidden relational matrix beneath the poet’s own American identity and the Middle Eastern, even Islamic, standpoint implied by his narrator’s chosen name. Throughout Moby-Dick, a shadow side of Judeo-Christian culture, i.e. what had remained hidden and submerged within Near Eastern and Western civilizations, culminating in ‘America’, emerges with a tremendous upsurge of revelatory force. Melville’s ultimate metaphor for this emergent force is captured in the immortal symbol of Moby Dick, the Great White Whale. Given a more archetypal reading, Moby Dick can be seen as an incarnation of Rahab, the Hebrew name for Tiamat, the old Babylonian sea-dragon, mother of the gods and possessor of the table of fate. This is a myth whose origins can be traced to the southern tip of the Persian Gulf, the very place where the current
religious, political and economic tensions in the postmodern world have taken up residence.
