I have read Chris's post on Yoda, fear, hate and the dark side years ago, but was recently reminded of it while recently reading James Hillman's THE DREAM AND THE UNDERWORLD. He brings up some very interesting relations between hate and the hero that I don't think Lucas was aware of (but maybe Yoda was?) but does certainly have some relation to what Yoda says:
"The convertability of underworld figures into upperworld actions nowhere shows better than in the image complex of Styx. The frigid river Styx (whose name, 'hateful,' or 'hatred,' derives from stygeo, 'to hate') is the deepest source of the God's morality, for on its water they swear their oaths, implying that hatred plays an essential part in the universal order of things. Besides such originating and ordering principles as Eros, and Strife…and Necessity…and Reason…we must also make a place for Hatred in the scheme of things. Styx's children are called Zellus (zeal), Nike (victory), Bia (force), and Cratos (strength). Their mother's cold hatefulness is converted by them into those implacable traits we have come to accept as virtues. Her children provide the prototypes for that crusading morality which accompanies the ego on its righteous task of destroying in order to maintain itself. (57-58)
"Hateful mother Styx and her hyperactive children did not escape the notice of Freud, who puts them into the conceptual language of hate and ego. First he distinguishes between hate and love, saying that hate is older than love (CP 5:82) and that they 'did not originate in a cleavage of any common primal element, but sprang from different sources' (ibid, p.81). Hate, in other words, derives from its own ground and serves a distinct purpose in 'the ego':'The ego hates, abhors, and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are for it a source of painful feelings…the true prototypes of the hate-relation are derived not from the sexual life but from the struggle of the ego for self-preservation and self-maintenance.'
"Freud's fantasy that the ego must preserve itself by struggle (for which strength, force, zeal, and victory become requirements), and the moral justification with which these qualities support the fantasy, is a Stygian enactment in the upperworld. The ego has become Styx's instrument, a Child of Hatred, icily preserving itself against all enemies, the greatest of which will be warmth, hence our usual notion that hate and love are contraries. Actually, hate has the same objective as love, according to Freud. Both seek pleasure, for which hatred used the ego to destroy pain. Each of us becomes a child of Styx when we embark on the pain-killing course, justifying our victories and zeal in destruction in terms of 'self-preservation' and 'ego-development.'"(59-59)
"The dissolution of these attitudes would mean reconverting the zeal and force of our ego-strength back into the hatred that is its source. Then we would see the hatred in our heroics." (59)
by Joe C Maurone on August 29, 2004 at 12:34 PM