Artemis. Jean Shinoda Bolen

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 who the fifty heroes were who went on this mythological expedition, which took place a generation before the Trojan War, some of the names included are familiar as the fathers of the heroes in the Iliad.

      Meleager and His Mother

      When Atropos tied the fate of Meleager to the smoldering end of a burning log, she gave the queen the power to control her son's destiny. The biology and psychology of infancy similarly gives to a mere mortal woman—often a young one—the power of life or death over her child. In the beginning of a newborn's life, its survival depends upon basic maternal care. In the early weeks and months of life, survival can depend upon loving maternal contact. In medical school, I learned that babies separated from their mothers to protect them from the London Blitzkrieg suffered from anaclitic depression and died, even though they got good basic physical care. They were kept warm and fed, and had their diapers changed, but many didn't survive. It seems that infants who are not held and cherished, who do not hear their mother's voice or feel her body or her breath may die for lack of maternal loving care. One could perhaps say that they die of a broken heart.

      Failure to thrive is a common diagnosis for older babies and toddlers who are underweight or listless. Many of these children have been neglected by their birth mothers, who are often practically children themselves, or who are suffering from extended post-partum depression, or who have had too many children to look after another. Likewise, there are children (most often girls) who are not vaccinated against common diseases or brought to a doctor when they are sick. Many of these die of readily treated illnesses or suffer from malnutrition, especially in instances where poverty and patriarchy decide who in the family gets the food.

      Whatever the circumstances, to a baby, the mother is the environment. Mother either provides or does not. Her size relative to the baby is enormous. She is all-powerful, all-providing, or all-withholding. She is the embodiment of the Great Mother in a pre-verbal world—an archetype in the unconscious of men that helps explain the efforts that men make to control women and their irrational fear of them. Thus, the power over Meleager's life that Atropos gives to his mother has a reality in human infancy and early childhood.

      However, as boys grow up, their mothers' life-or-death power becomes metaphoric rather than real, relating primarily to the development of their emotional lives. Alice Miller, in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child (Basic Books, 1981), describes how boys can learn to pay attention to their mothers' emotional needs and to respond in ways that will soothe them, at the expense of their own feelings. They learn to attend to their mothers' moods and needs. A narcissistically wounded mother wants her little man to be her mirror, not to express his own feelings or challenge her. The emotionally absent or distant father who is not available to either his wife or his son may be complicit in fostering an emotionally incestuous relationship that takes on the metaphoric configuration of Great Mother/Son Lover, which was a phase in pre-patriarchal religions and is an archetypal relationship.

      It is important that some mothers and some sons recognize this pattern in order to change it. This may not have been necessary for Meleager, who, from the beginning, “hung out” among men and emulated them. Boys like him are outer-oriented, interested in things rather than people, and competitive. If physically coordinated and athletic, they compete in sports. The Apollo archetype fits Meleager—God of the Sun who is the favorite son of Zeus and twin to Artemis; the embodiment of a masculine attitude that observes, favors thinking over feeling, competes with his intelligence, and strives for excellence; a person with an innate discipline to practice at whatever he needs to master to reach a goal or win. While Meleager will not be a “mother's son”—overly close to her and sensitive to her feelings more than his own—he may become an extension of her social ambitions through the plans she makes for him.

      By the time Meleager reaches manhood, he has easily met the expectations of his father. But his mother has expectations and needs for him to fulfill as well. He must marry someone appropriate in her eyes, and she expects him to make a choice from among the young women she selects. In a patriarchy, women live through their relationships with men. They have status by virtue of being someone's daughter, until they become wives and then the mothers of sons. When they are widowed, they are immediately diminished in importance, although, at least in ancient Greece, they were not expected to join their dead husbands on the funeral pyre. In a system like this, it is the relationship of a mother to her son that matters. And to this end, it is important that the son's wife be respectful, if not indebted, to her mother-in-law.

      Ambition takes many forms. Where women cannot themselves aspire to power or prestige, they live their ambitions out through