Rich Symbolism and a Deep Psychological Bond : Whales and People: Shared Feelings Below the Surface

As rescue workers struggled last week to free three California whales trapped in the icy Arctic Ocean, onlookers all over the world seemed increasingly concerned about the fate of the helpless creatures, especially after one of the animals apparently succumbed, leaving only two to battle for survival.

It is not the first time that humans have become obsessed with whales, and psychologists, literary critics and others have been resurrecting some longstanding speculation on what the emotional hold these gigantic animals have over mankind and what deep-seated feelings whales provoke in the human imagination.

Herbert Nieburg, a psychologist in Westchester County, N.Y., and a professor of counseling at Long Island University, spent an entire 1 1/2-hour class last week discussing the subject with his graduate students.

What they decided, Nieburg said, was that feelings about the helplessness of the whale seem to give rise to any of a number of unconscious feelings people have about themselves, particularly about their own sense of helplessness in the world around them.

‘We Identify’

“We identify with their precariousness, the difficulty they get themselves into,” Nieburg explained in a telephone interview.

Until quite recently the whale had been viewed as menacing and dangerous and had been widely hunted for profit and sport. “The whale (represented) the bad guy,” Nieburg said. But now people have come to believe “he is a bad guy that really isn’t so bad after all. He’s just gotten a bum rap,” he said.

This attitude transformation has made the whale the symbol for the entire ecology movement in the United States. Begun largely in the 1960s, the movement champions inter-relatedness and dependency of all nature’s creatures. Prior to this decade there were two other well-documented cases of whale “watches” in North America where hordes of people went to observe the giant mammals trapped in natural waterways. In both cases, the public reaction was notable.

In the first case, a whale was stuck in a river in Oregon in 1931. People came, not to help, but to try to net the whale, to gas it and to use it for target practice. Eventually the whale was harpooned, preserved in formaldehyde and transported around the country. For an admission fee, almost anyone could have a look at it.

The second whale “watch” occurred in Newfoundland in 1967. There in a small town, a pregnant female was shot hundreds of times before she finally died.

Roots in Mythology

Going back even further to classic mythology and Victorian literature, the whale was seen as a creature of danger to be pursued and destroyed--if one was man enough to do so.

In the most famous of all whaling stories, Captain Ahab pursued Moby Dick, the great white whale, at the cost of his own dehumanization and the sacrifice of his crew. The only one who survived to tell the story of “Moby Dick” was Ishmael, who seemed not to share the greed and pride of fellow travelers and who alone, according to literary critics, recognized what the whale seemed to represent: mankind itself and its pursuit of knowledge.

Whales also have a powerful hold on humans because in traditional psychoanalytic thinking they are symbols of the mother.

Explained Alan D. Entin, a psychologist in Richmond, Va.: “Whales have to do with the water,” which is a symbol of both the mother’s womb and the unconscious mind.

“Whales swim in deep, murky waters and, much like our deepest fears and emotions, surface only occasionally,” Entin said.

There are a remarkable number of stories involving whales--Pinocchio, for example, and the story of Jonah in the Old Testment--”so it’s perhaps no wonder that we are obsessed with whales. We have grown up thinking about them,” said Dr. Carole Leiberman, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA.

But why should stories about whales have been told in the first place? Leiberman theorizes that it is because these stories allow men and boys to fulfill their fondest dream and also their greatest terror--returning to their mother’s womb. In the case of Jonah and Pinocchio, both fall into the sea and both are forced into the bellies of whales.

“Just as the sea is the symbol of the mother, so is the whale,” which is not a fish at all but a mammal who nurses her young, Leiberman explained.

“Man has a restless longing to return to the comfortable state of the mother’s womb,” she said. “On the one hand, it is safe. On the other hand, one feels trapped there just as Jonah and Pinocchio did. And just as we feel ambivalent about being in the mother’s womb, so we are ambivalent about being delivered from it. . . . These are powerful images, to say the least.”

Urge to Humanize

Throughout history man has also tried to anthropomorphize--that is, make human--other creatures of nature apparently because of some apparently inner psychic drive to understand and control them. At least that was the theory of Sir James Frazer, a distinguished Scottish anthropologist.

In his classic 1890 study of magic and religion, “The Golden Bough,” Frazer described why savage hunters and fishermen felt obliged to observe rules of abstinence and to submit to ceremonies of purification before killing a variety of animals, including whales.

Basically, savage man was afraid of what an animal’s spirit might to do him, for he conceived of animals as “being endowed with ‘souls’ and intelligences like his own, and hence he naturally (treated) them with similar respect,” Frazer wrote.

Today, some anthropologists theorize, that respect goes beyond simply repeating rituals before slaying an animal. It means not only refraining from killing the animal but actually protecting it from destruction as well.

Exactly why this attitude seems to be directed more toward whales than other animals is not clear. Nevertheless, said Nieburg, saving the whale has become a way for man to save himself from his own excesses, his own unrestrained efforts to tame nature and “civilize” the world, Nieburg said.

A Vietnam veteran seemed to recognize this notion when he risked his life two years ago, along with dozens of other people, to help save Humphrey, a humpbacked whale that had gotten itself stuck under a bridge in the Sacramento River.

Saving that whale, the veteran said afterwards, helped him to “make up” for what he had lost in the war--that is, his own self respect.

Humphrey, like the California whales in Alaska, had also made headlines worldwide. At the time, two well-known social scientists from the University of California at Berkeley, Neil J. Smelser and Alan Dundes, likened the wayward whale to someone coming into Los Angeles and getting on to the wrong freeway. It was the epitome of an innocent gone astray.

The current situation in the Arctic also evokes feelings of sympathy, “but more importantly it is a chance for people to be brave,” said Walter Fisher, a professor of communications arts and sciences at USC.

“In these kind of struggles people show themselves as noble and heroic,” Fisher said. “It shows the human spirit as we would like it to be all of the time.”

‘Drama of It All’

But really what’s behind all of this, is “the drama of it all,” explained Fisher, who has written a book “Human Communication as Narration,” which argues that all of communication is basically the act of dramatic storytelling.

“For some people, the whales are a diversion from more pressing concerns like ‘Who am I going to vote for?’ and ‘Am I going to make my house payment?’

“But remember,” Fisher added, “not everyone identifies with the whale. Not everyone gets their meaning of life and their sense of well being from the fate of these mammals.”