The Quest For The Grail, Masculine Psychology And Transforming Your Deepest Wounds Into Your Deepest Purpose
In his book He, Jungian psychotherapist Robert Johnson tells the story of Percival a 12th century French myth also known as The Story of the Grail. Johnson uses this myth as a backdrop before which to address the plight of modern young men. In working with younger male patients, I’ve found that, while He was written in 1974, it is more applicable to young men now than ever.
The story of Percival (a name which means “innocent fool”) is one of a young man; stunted, aimless, and fatherless—conditions which seem to be increasingly characteristic of young men in the West.
Percival is completely uneducated, untutored, and has received no masculine guidance in his life.
“The Grail myth speaks of masculine psychology,” writes Johnson, interpreting the figures in the myth as symbols of the male psyche.
Percival doesn’t remain in this state—but first, he must brave a series of challenges: conquering knights, rescuing damsels, and slaying dragons. Yet it isn’t any of these traditionally masculine feats which actually bring Percival’s maturity to completion, but his ability to ask the right question.
His journey to doing so begins chiefly with an encounter with the paralyzed Fisher King, who it is said will be healed when an innocent fool enters the Grail Castle and asks the right question. Just as most every man suffers his deepest wounds in childhood, The Fisher King was wounded as a young boy. A young boy must inevitably take on more than he can handle. He must learn to adapt to some suffering, to endure a certain pain: academic struggle, peer rejection, some health issue, parental separation, and sometimes even neglect or outright abuse.
The emotional wounds that we develop from these pains persist with us into adulthood, often serving to paralyze us, rendering us unable to walk purposefully through our lives. A man who swears off any aggression in rebellion against his violent father, for instance, is often sabotaged in his career and his relationships by his own passivity.
“Most western men are Fisher Kings. Every boy has naively blundered into something that is too big for him. He proceeds halfway through his masculine development and then drops it as being too hot. Often a certain bitterness arises, because, like the Fisher King, he can neither live with the new consciousness he has touched nor can he entirely drop it.”
– Robert Johnson
According to Johnson, the Percival myth teaches us that it is the naïve, childlike, and foolish part of us which brings us healing. In the myth, it is Percival, the innocent fool, who finally asks the question which heals the Fisher King. In our own lives, it is the child part of ourselves which we must make contact with to heal our psychic wounds. As adults, we become rigid and inflexible; often the result of the very ways in which we learned to survive our Fisher King wounds. To heal, we must allow the naïve child we were before the wound to transform us.
Percival does not immediately ask the question which heals the Fisher King, of course. Before he finally does so, he first must undergo a series of trials and adventures, the first being his confrontation with the formidable Red Knight. According to Johnson, the Red Knight represents the repressed aggressive part of the masculine psyche: to heal one’s inner wounds, a man must reckon with, conquer, and ultimately sublimate his aggressive instinct in the service of something higher.
In the myth, we see that while Percival is able to defeat the Red Knight, he is unable to put on his armor. It was a garment given to him by his mother, who did everything she could to shield her son from the dangers of the world, which prevents him from doing so. It is Percival’s allegiance to his mother which prevents him from donning the Red Knight’s armor, and in asking the right question, ultimately delaying the King’s healing.
Johnson writes that just as Percival’s loyalty to his mother prevented him from fully fastening the Red Knight’s armor, men experience a parallel struggle on the level of the psyche. Our ongoing attachments to our mothers often prevent us from moving purposefully and forcefully through the world.
Freud once wrote that “the good mother necessary fails.” By this he meant that it is necessary, at a certain point in a boy’s life, that his mother withdraw her protective hand and allow him to reckon with the challenges and dangers of the world. In a time of rampant fatherlessness, many men today have not yet been released from the care and protection of their mothers. It is the experience of many modern men that an invisible psychic thread keeps them forever tethered to their mothers, a la Percival’s garment.
One client I worked with grew up as “the golden child”, idolized by his alcoholic single mother and given the role of supplying her with meaning. Any deviation from her perfect image of him was met with anger, tears, and hysteria. Is it any wonder that such a boy grew up to be hyper-agreeable, conflict averse, and cripplingly self-conscious? Yet to move through the world with strength, firm boundaries, and definitive purpose would entail a betrayal of his mother.
Early in his journey, Percival stumbles unconsciously into the castle, not yet ready to ask the pertinent question. Likewise, there is a point in a young man’s life in which he experiences something he is utterly unprepared for. It is the experience of many young men that an inadvertent encounter with something of deep meaning overwhelms him, causing him to retreat back into the unconsciousness of ordinary life.
These experiences can take on many forms: falling in love, having his heart broken, failure in his career, losing a parent. Many men find themselves overwhelmed by the deep emotion wrought by these experiences—sadness and anger chief among these. Instead of feeling these emotions, many modern men mask them with drugs, social media, video games, and pornography. Like Percival, they are not ready to ask the pertinent question: “Who does the grail serve?” Yet it is not until we stop numbing and dissociating that we can move through life with purpose.
Remember, it was Percival’s failure to remove his mother’s garment which prevented him from asking the right question. So too, it is often the failure of men to separate from their mothers which keeps them paralyzed.
“No son ever develops into manhood without, in some way, being disloyal to his mother.”
– Robert Johnson
Much pain is doggedly avoided in protection of one’s parents. A boy will do just about anything to preserve his relationship with his mother. He will invent any story, adopt any defense, and even sabotage himself through shame, depression and self-attack, all in service of protecting this most cherished of bonds.
When a man begins to look at his childhood wounds, it inevitably puts him in tension with his parents, as he must inevitably ask to what extent their involvement, or lack thereof, was responsible for their wound.
Yet it is necessary to ask such a question, not to convict and condemn one’s parents, but to admit and experience the full depth of feeling associated with his wound. It is not until a man can extract the meaning from these experiences that he is ready to ask the right question and dwell permanently in the Grail castle. It is often necessary that subsequent encounters with meaning must be made before the man is ready, just as Percival had to brave his trials.
It is typically such an encounter that leads a man to therapy. Something has, or is going, terribly wrong in his life. The meaning of this experience, in whatever form it takes, is experienced as overwhelming, inescapable, and decidedly negative. His marriage is in shambles. His wife cheated on him. He was fired from his job. He can’t stop drinking. It is often only in such an experience that a man seeks out help in the form of therapy.
When Percival finally returns to the castle, after years of maturity, he is able to ask the right question. “Who does the grail serve?”
Johnson re-interprets the question this way: “what does my life serve?” or better yet, “what is my purpose?”
Most modern men, unmarried and childless, answer the question this way: “my purpose is to improve my life,” or, in other words, “my life serves me.” Absent any higher purpose, we tend to seek our deepest meaning in service of ourselves. Our lives become about serving our interests, our purposes, and our pleasures.
Johnson states, “Most modern people asked this question would reply that I am the center of gravity; I work to improve my life; I am working toward my goals; I am increasing my equity; I am making something of myself—or most common of all—I am searching for happiness, which is to say that I want the grail to serve me.” However, that is the wrong answer, and it is a man’s unconscious knowledge of the insufficiency of the answer which prevents him from ever asking the question.
Yet to answer the question any other way would mean disloyalty to his mother. It would mean living for something larger for himself. To venture fully into the world would entail risk, sacrifice, danger—and separation. The very thing he is terrified of doing. It is in a man’s purpose that he finds the answer to the question:
Who does the Grail serve?
What does my life serve?
The therapeutic process becomes a journey in which a man learns to redeem his most painful experiences in service of something higher than himself. He learns to transform his deepest wounds into his deepest purpose.
If our purpose is nothing more than our own happiness, our own pleasure, and our own comfort, then we will remain paralyzed, our wounds never being healed. It is far more comfortable to continue to indulge in the temporary, fleeting pleasures of video games, alcohol, and pornography, than to feel one’s inner pain. Only a commitment to something greater than himself can propel a man to seek to feel the very thing he has spent his entire life avoiding.
In this way, the therapeutic process can be thought of as a kind of hero’s journey, not unlike the myth of Percival. In therapy, a man must make contact with the innocent and foolish part of himself: his inner child. Only our child self, the one who suffered the wound, is capable of healing it. But that healing is painful. It involves staring at uncomfortable truths, feeling overwhelming emotion, and reorienting our entire way of being. Sometimes it even entails the psychological separation from our parents.
The therapeutic process becomes a journey in which a man learns to redeem his most painful experiences in service of something higher than himself. He learns to transform his deepest wounds into his deepest purpose.
He learns how to ask the question: “who does the Grail serve?”
