The Instinct For the Mysteries: Two episodes with a child

After Reading Kerényi's paper, ‘The mysteries of the Kabeiroi’ (KERÉNYI 8), I found myself returning many times in thought to the therapy of a five-and-a-half-year-old boy, with whom I worked for two-and-a-half years. I began to recall details of two specific hours which seemed crucial in the therapeutic process and which, when linked to each other, though separated in time by at least a year, formed nodal episodes in the treatment.

The case had been a difficult one for me; and although Joel, the child, was doing well in school and at home at the time I left the agency and the case, there was more about it that I wanted to understand. The accident of reading Kerényi's paper spontaneously provided a metaphor within which to pursue my thoughts and feelings. To think in metaphor or mythic terms is natural to me, and it becomes helpful at that point at which I can go no farther with clinical observation or intellectual structure. The ‘as if’ of metaphor becomes a bridge to further understanding. The meaning of bits and pieces of our work together was clear to me, but I still needed a larger frame of reference for my own satisfaction. It is in the effort to provide this for myself that I have written this paper.

What caught my attention to begin with in the article was the contrast between the initiation rites of the Kabeiroi, ultimately concerned with behaviour which had been criminal, and that of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were an expression of the highest values in Hellenic culture. The theme of dealing with antisocial behaviour related to my case.

The mysteries of the Kabeiroi in the Greece of the fifth century B.C. represented a survival of a far more ancient cult belonging to the Great Mother, rooted in Asia Minor reaching back to the ninth or eighth millennium B.C. (MELLAART 10). They seemed to represent a cultural response to a wilder, cruder, more aggressive and primitive aspect of masculinity, alluding