is not what mother bears do. Girls in the mold of Atalanta are often very independent, but not very good at intimacy with friends or partners. The forging of emotional bonds becomes challenging to them and to those who love them. Intimacy grows through mirroring, reciprocity, empathy, compassion, and thoughtfulness. Atalanta the adult may be a woman who did not learn how to look after the feelings of others and who may not know her own emotional needs or feelings. She can not learn this from bear mother/Mother Nature or the Artemis archetype. This she can only learn from other human beings.
Chapter Three
Atalanta and Meleager
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.
Psychological Abandonment
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.
Meleager As a Greek Hero
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
