In marked contrast to the rejection and rage of Arcadia's king at Atalanta's birth, Meleager's birth is greeted with jubilation and celebration by all. In fact, Meleager's first accomplishment is to be born a boy. But the expectations placed upon Meleager from the moment of his birth also have consequences. As a first-born son with good lineage, position, and wealth, he enters a world of privilege and is expected to carry on the family tradition.
Assumptions about who a newborn will grow up to be are made by parents, extended family, religions, social classes, and cultures. These assumptions can be changed or challenged if there is social mobility, universal education, and democracy in the historical time and place in which the child is born. Most people in the world today do not have the opportunity to make their own choices based on their innate predispositions or talents, or for love of what they do, or love for a particular person. And while this is especially true for daughters raised in places and families where patriarchal and fundamentalist religious attitudes limit them, it also has an effect on sons that often is not appreciated. Boys may be greatly valued over daughters, they may be more likely to be educated and have more social freedom, yet they too must conform to societal norms. Physical punishment or shame enforces acceptable behavior in boys as well as girls.
Atalanta is physically abandoned and expected to die. The harsh reality is that many unwanted girls face a similar fate today. However, boys are often not free to grow up to be the men they want to be either, especially if they are princes—metaphorically or actually. Meleager, like Prince Charles and now Prince William of England, is expected to take on the role to which he is born, as are many of the sons of political or business leaders today. If that role isn't a good psychological fit, it can result in an emotionally abandoned child whose own dreams do not matter in the psyche of the man. This may also be true for the sons of immigrants who enjoy great opportunities and so must fulfill high expectations. And it may be true for the son whose purpose is to be the successful athlete that his father aspired to be. When sons who are drawn to create art, play music, or make things with their hands are born into families where intellectual and financial achievement is what matters, they often find themselves abandoning interests dear to them in order to be accepted and valued.
I developed the concept of the “abandoned child” when I wrote Ring of Power (1992). This inner child is an archetype when a son or daughter is expected to be an extension of a parent's needs, ambitions, or unfulfilled life. It arises when a child is not seen as an individual who comes into the world to live a unique life of his or her own. It is illustrated by the story of a three-generation dysfunctional family in Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, the four operas that comprise Der Ring des Nibelungen: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Sieg fried, and Gotterdammerung, and it appears in the lives of people who have similar family dynamics. In this powerful archetypal story set to magnificent music, Wotan is the counterpart of Zeus. He makes decisions about his children, prescribes their roles, and values them as tools through which they may acquire the ring of power after which he lusts.
In today's world, the ring of power can symbolize money, fame, political power, prestige, defeating a rival or triumphing over an enemy, or furthering an ambition for power and acceptance beyond wealth. This was the case for Joseph Kennedy, founding father of a family that was seen, for a time, as the equivalent of an American royal family.
Kennedy's sons were groomed to become presidents of the United States. By doing so, they would acquire power and respectability beyond that enjoyed by those who looked down upon their father's own immigrant, Irish Catholic beginnings. Eldest son Joe was the one expected to bring this prize to his father, but he was shot down in the Second World War. Then it was up to the next son, John F. Kennedy, whose natural bent was not in this direction, to take up this quest. When John was elected and then assassinated, it fell to his younger brother, Robert, to deliver the prize. In his bid to gain the presidential nomination, he, too, was assassinated.
In families ruled over by an ambitious parent, children learn that approval is conditional; it depends on conforming to expectations. This can be due to pressure from either a father or a mother. Success matters, whether demonstrated through friends, schools, sports, or grades. The impression the child makes must reflect well on the parent and further his or her ambitions. Getting into the right schools and clubs or marrying well are expectations. When children's psyches become focused on getting approval or fulfilling their parents' ambitions, they lose what might otherwise have mattered to them personally. What might otherwise have been a source of joy and satisfaction to them is forgotten or left undeveloped.
Something similar happens to children who learn not to grieve people or pets that disappear from their lives. It could have been a housekeeper or some other employee, who spent more love and time with the child than anyone else, or the child next door who moves away, or someone special who is now estranged from the parent and doesn't visit anymore. This was someone who did matter, that the youngster is not supposed to miss or mention. Later, as adolescents, they may be driven to give up a socially inappropriate friend and, by doing so, betray their own capacity for friendship as well as the other person. When signs of growing personhood are suppressed from fear of losing approval or being humiliated, children lose touch with their own ideas, interests, and preferences, and learn to silence voices to the contrary in themselves. As a result, an “abandoned child” may reside in the adults they become.
As a boy and a young man, Meleager is well-suited to his position, his culture, and his time. He is a physically active boy whose all-consuming interest lies in hunting. His proud father has miniature bow and arrows and spear made for him with which he practices hour after hour, honing his skills. As a prince, he joins his father's men on hunts and, at an early age, becomes an expert hunter. This obsessive fascination with mastery seems to arise in some boys who have an innate aptitude for a sport (or today, it could be a videogame) and an ability not to be distracted. Some sports—golf, tennis, skiing, surfing, mountain biking, high diving—require both intensity on the part of the boy and access to facilities. Some sports entail risking physical harm with each increment in difficulty or complexity—skateboarding stunts, for instance. Taking risks requires courage (or foolhardiness), something young men who identify with the hero and who have no sense of their own mortality have in abundance. Boys and young men who have been singled out as special may be further motivated by their fathers' or father figures' approval.
In ancient Greece—as in some parts of the non-industrial, patriarchal developing world, and in competitive sports—approval and fame came from physical achievement. By the time he is a young man, Meleager is known as the best hunter in ancient Greece. His trophies are the pelts of animals, enough to cover the floors of the huge castle. His natural abilities, his bravery, and his skill as a hunter are admired. He answers Jason's invitation to sail as an Argonaut on the quest for the Golden Fleece, a quest that attracted the heroes, demigods, and nobles of all Greece. The lure was glory and adventure. The Argo was the largest and most elaborate ship that had yet been designed. The goddess Athena fitted a beam into the prow made from the speaking oaks of the grove at Dodona where Zeus had his oracle. Though the lists differ as to who the fifty heroes were who went on this mythological expedition, which took place a generation before the Trojan War, some of the names included are familiar as the fathers of the heroes in the Iliad.
When Atropos tied the fate of Meleager to the smoldering end of a burning log, she gave the queen the power to control her son's destiny. The biology and psychology of infancy similarly gives to a mere mortal woman—often a young one—the power of life or death over her child. In the beginning of a newborn's life, its survival depends upon basic maternal care. In the early weeks and months of life, survival can depend upon loving maternal contact. In medical school, I learned that babies separated from their mothers to protect them from the London Blitzkrieg suffered from anaclitic depression and died, even though they got good basic physical care. They were kept warm and fed, and had their diapers changed, but many didn't survive. It seems that infants who are not held and cherished, who do not hear their mother's voice or feel her body or her breath may die for lack of maternal loving care. One could perhaps say that they die of a broken heart.
Failure to thrive is a common diagnosis for older babies and toddlers who are underweight or listless. Many of these children have been neglected by their birth mothers, who are often practically children themselves, or who are suffering from extended post-partum depression, or who have had too many children to look after another. Likewise, there are children (most often girls) who are not vaccinated against common diseases or brought to a doctor when they are sick. Many of these die of readily treated illnesses or suffer from malnutrition, especially in instances where poverty and patriarchy decide who in the family gets the food.
Whatever the circumstances, to a baby, the mother is the environment. Mother either provides or does not. Her size relative to the baby is enormous. She is all-powerful, all-providing, or all-withholding. She is the embodiment of the Great Mother in a pre-verbal world—an archetype in the unconscious of men that helps explain the efforts that men make to control women and their irrational fear of them. Thus, the power over Meleager's life that Atropos gives to his mother has a reality in human infancy and early childhood.
However, as boys grow up, their mothers' life-or-death power becomes metaphoric rather than real, relating primarily to the development of their emotional lives. Alice Miller, in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child (Basic Books, 1981), describes how boys can learn to pay attention to their mothers' emotional needs and to respond in ways that will soothe them, at the expense of their own feelings. They learn to attend to their mothers' moods and needs. A narcissistically wounded mother wants her little man to be her mirror, not to express his own feelings or challenge her. The emotionally absent or distant father who is not available to either his wife or his son may be complicit in fostering an emotionally incestuous relationship that takes on the metaphoric configuration of Great Mother/Son Lover, which was a phase in pre-patriarchal religions and is an archetypal relationship.
It is important that some mothers and some sons recognize this pattern in order to change it. This may not have been necessary for Meleager, who, from the beginning, “hung out” among men and emulated them. Boys like him are outer-oriented, interested in things rather than people, and competitive. If physically coordinated and athletic, they compete in sports. The Apollo archetype fits Meleager—God of the Sun who is the favorite son of Zeus and twin to Artemis; the embodiment of a masculine attitude that observes, favors thinking over feeling, competes with his intelligence, and strives for excellence; a person with an innate discipline to practice at whatever he needs to master to reach a goal or win. While Meleager will not be a “mother's son”—overly close to her and sensitive to her feelings more than his own—he may become an extension of her social ambitions through the plans she makes for him.
By the time Meleager reaches manhood, he has easily met the expectations of his father. But his mother has expectations and needs for him to fulfill as well. He must marry someone appropriate in her eyes, and she expects him to make a choice from among the young women she selects. In a patriarchy, women live through their relationships with men. They have status by virtue of being someone's daughter, until they become wives and then the mothers of sons. When they are widowed, they are immediately diminished in importance, although, at least in ancient Greece, they were not expected to join their dead husbands on the funeral pyre. In a system like this, it is the relationship of a mother to her son that matters. And to this end, it is important that the son's wife be respectful, if not indebted, to her mother-in-law.
Ambition takes many forms. Where women cannot themselves aspire to power or prestige, they live their ambitions out through their sons or husbands. Sons may be molded to become the men their mothers wanted to be. Since the Women's Movement, it is possible for women to succeed in almost any field or profession. This reality recalls Gloria Steinem's famous comment: “We are becoming the men we were supposed to marry.”
That mothers live through their sons is, however, still true. While this happens across the social spectrum, it is often more pronounced in immigrant families and among those at the top of the social ladder. Social class and inherited wealth make it likely that a married woman will be a full-time wife and mother, even if she is brighter and more able than her husband. Such women can be frustrated by thwarted ambitions of their own, especially if their husbands turn out to be failures in contrast to their wives' more successful fathers. Now that women are able to rise to the top of corporations, professions, elected offices, and even the armed services, this is changing. Women no longer have to live through the accomplishments of others. A woman no longer has to be “the woman behind the throne” if she has what it takes herself.
Of all the versions of the story of Atalanta, I find Bernard Evslin's narrative (Heroes, Gods, and Monsters, 1968) about how Meleager and Atalanta met not only the most vivid, but also the most psychologically true explanation of their attraction. In my own telling, I borrow the situation that brought them together from him and then interpret the story so that it makes internal psychological sense. In classical Greek and Roman versions, the circumstances given differ greatly; but in all of them, Meleager falls in love with Atalanta at first sight. She evokes an image, a yearning for a feminine counterpart—his dream girl or anima figure, in Jung's psychological model. When men talk about attractive women, their first comment usually focuses on their appearance or on particular physical attributes.
Atalanta and Meleager are a standout matched set—a striking couple, both archers and hunters at home in the wilderness. Atalanta evokes Artemis, twin sister to Apollo. She has her silver bow, he his golden one. This twinning is a characteristic of many young relationships that become marriages. In high school, the football captain and the head cheerleader or prom queen are the classic couple. In colleges where “the Greeks” dominate social life, sorority sisters find their match in fraternity brothers—and back in the days before couples lived together, this often led to marriage after graduation.
Even now, when couples marry late, after both have put career or higher education before marriage, “twinning” can be seen in the look-alike couples in the engagement photographs in the Sunday New York Times. These couples are brought together by shared interests and values, and by friends they have in common. They meet at conferences or other venues that provide opportunities for people in the same fields to foster relationships based on friendships and comraderie built during those early career years following college. Online dating websites encourage people who have affinities to meet; social networking gives information on background, education, and friends held in common, although living in many other locations. Men and women increasingly form couples in which each describes the other as “best friend.” They share passions and can be competitive—in sports, or as cooks and foodies. They may take on a shared spiritual practice or work out together. They may be entrepreneurs. In other words—especially if they are successful at what they do—they may become a Meleager/Atalanta couple, an Artemis/Apollo couple. As such, they take on the next phase of adulthood together, often along with others in their age cohort. Romance and mystery are often missing when each seems so familiar to the other—like a brother or sister with whom one has sex and children.
Romance—falling head over heels in love—is a phase of attraction in which there is a magnetic pull to a stranger who embodies an unconscious dream of merger, completeness, or wholeness with a goddess. When a man like Meleager sees his dream girl, beauty is in the eye and heart of the beholder. His initial response is echoed in the words to “Some Enchanted Evening”—something about “seeing a stranger across a crowded room” and somehow knowing to “never let her go.” The woman who is the recipient of this infatuation, especially if she is an Atalanta, is not initially impressed and may be annoyed, thinking: “He doesn't know me; how can he say he loves me!” However, if a relationship grows past this initial impression, the two may marvel at how each is a reverse-gender version of the other. Often it is the male who cares more.
In the long-running television series Bones, the protagonist, Dr. Temperance Brennan, is a brilliant forensic anthropologist. With her knowledge of and fascination for bones and the information she can glean from them, she helps solve how people died and hunts for their murderers with her partner, Seeley Booth, an FBI agent with a strong sense of people. Physically, Booth is a Meleager to Brennan's Atalanta. Brennan is often unaware of the feelings of those around her and inept at appropriate emotional responses. She is fearless and excels in self-defense. She was abandoned when her parents disappeared and she entered the system as a foster child. Making her way in that wilderness, she learned not to trust what could not be verified scientifically.
Booth and Brennan are partners on the hunt. Each is best at what they do. Like Atalanta and Meleager, they are a remarkable pair. Like them, they are a couple that mutually admires what each excels at and can do. For men and women who relate as colleagues—as competitors and equals in the workplace, in universities, in explorations and challenges—these relationships are based on personal affinities. Family ties, ethnicity, and social class often cease to be important to them. Parental expectations go by the wayside. They are not doing what they were expected to do. Meleager's mother was especially vexed by this, and parents with high expectations of couples who form similar relationships may be as well.