PROTEAN MAN
calls forth the other side of the God-devil polarity generally applied
to science, and sees it as a purveyor of total destructiveness. This kind
of profound ambivalence creates for him the most extreme psychic
paradox: the very force he still feels to be his liberator from the
heavy burdens of past irrationality also threatens him with absolute
annihilation, even extinction. But this paradox may well be - in
fact, I believe, already has been - the source of imaginative efforts
to achieve new relationships between science and man, and indeed,
new visions of science itself.
I suggested before that protean man was not free of guilt. He
indeed suffers from it considerably, but often without awareness of
what is causing
his
suffering. For his is a form of hidden guilt: a
vague but persistent kind of self-condemnation related to the sym–
bolic disharmonies I have described, a sense of having no outlet for
his
loyalties and no symbolic structure for his achievements. This is
the guilt of social breakdown, and it includes various fOrIns of his–
torical and racial guilt experienced by whole nations and peoples,
both by the privileged and the abused. Rather than a clear feeling
of evil or sinfulness, it takes the form of a nagging sense of unworthi–
ness all the more troublesome for its lack of clear origin.
Protean man experiences similarly vague constellations of anxiety
and resentment. These too have origin in symbolic impairments and
are particularly tied-in with suspicion of counterfeit nurturance. Often
feeling himself uncared for, even abandoned, protean man responds
with diffuse fear and anger. But he can neither find a good cause
for the former, nor a consistent target for the latter. He nonetheless
cultivates his anger because he finds it more serviceable than anxiety,
because there are plenty of targets of one kind or another beckoning,
and because even moving targets are better than none. His rlifficulty
is that focused indignation is as hard for him to sustain as is any
single identification or conviction.
Involved in all of these patterns is a profound psychic struggle
with the idea of change itself. For here too protean man finds him–
self ambivalent in the extreme. He is profoundly attracted to the
idea of making all things, including himself, totally new - to the
"mode of transformation." But he is equally drawn to an image of
a mythical past of perfect harmony and prescientific wholeness, to
the "mode of restoration." Moreover, beneath his transformationism
is nostalgia, and beneath his restorationism is his fascinated attraction
