THE CRONUS COMPLEX

John W. Crandall

ABSTRACT: This paper studies a buried dynamic in psychopathology as it

arises in family process: the child's loss of self through caring before being cared
for. This role reversal which places childhood at the disposal of family need is
conceptualized, and the related material, integrated, in terms of the myth of
Cronus, who swallowed his children. Some tentative clinical probings of this sub-
ject are discussed as well as the resistive sources which have placed this subject,
for the most part, beyond reach of research and education.

INTRODUCTION

A Buddhist proverb says that to know what a person is really like we

inust first look at his face the day before birth. This is an ominous saying,
implying a tragedy on the day of birth. Not an obvious tragedy like a
disabling disease, but a deeper one. Implicit is a loss of the most precious
thing that exists: oneself Well would the Buddhist sage have understood
a young woman's dream: "I see myself in my house, an odd house
without window panes or doors. Strangers move in and out of these
openings for varied purposes. Some want sex and go to rooms especially
prepared. Others desire drugs and move to rooms ready with hypoder-
mics and assorted narcotics. Still others want to read, to sleep, or play
cards, and for them, too, there are appropriate places. My role in this
chaotic intrusion is to receive each person as he arrives, ascertain his
need, and provide for it. It's frenzied! Is everybody where he is supposed
to be? I'm everywhere: up and down stairs, steadying ladders at win-
dows, escorting people to their assigned places, the gate keeper for
pleasures not my own. At one point in the dream, I stop as if warned of
danger and scream: this is my house, but there is no place in it for me.
Others possess it!"
Those who ponder the meaning of human life, especially its tragedies,
bom afresh as they are in each generation, might well examine the
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JOHN W. CRANDALL

linkage between this dream and the Buddhist parable. The proverb is a
prophecy of loss, the dream the reality of loss (the dreamer's house was
her life, but it had been wrested from her), and between them something
happened. What it is, we are not told. We can only infer, not with scien-
tific precision, but with the artistry and intuition that Saint-Exupery in-
tended when he said: "The essential is invisible to the eyes. Man must
look with his heart" (1943, p. 67). In such a way then I would imagine
what it is that happens on that first day.
A child is born and makes an innocent move toward life, which is
there. Life is a welcomer of human interest. It is a gift-giver of blood and
muscle, organismic urging, talents, outer dimensions that face forward
toward the promise of a future, a literal proliferation of energies that
rush, flow, probe and excite, all in the service of the developing self. In-
nocence and life move toward each other. Something happens, though, to
keep them apart. "Stop!" sounds a voice. The child pauses, frightened,
and from the mysterious recesses of the first social setting, the family, a
hand extends and in it is a contract.
"Sign," says the parental voice. The child takes the contract, looks at
it, and hands it back. The family persists: "Sign." The child says: "No."
The family pressures: "If you would have a family, you must sign."
"But if I sign, I will lose my face."
"No matter. You have no choice. It's either your family and you or
you and you. Sign!"
The child signs.
The contract is insidious. It says: "You are now with us, your mother
and father, and you want freedom for your life as we did when we were
born. But it was denied us and we will deny it to you. Our parents needed
us. Because they did, they used our energies to fulfill themselves. What
we then gave away, we now demand hackfrom you. Take care of us. Be
the nurturing figure we never had: the good mother, the good father.
Help us, too, to live as we might have if things had been different. Let us
enter existence again through you. Be our fist, our genitals, our forager in
the world for its scarce goods. And if our history has made us mad, con-
tain that madness for us and let us call you wrong and ourselves right so
no one will ever know what has taken place."
This contract and the pathological conditions it unleashes I call the
Cronus Complex, after the Grecian Deity who swallowed his children.

The Cronus Myth

Cronus was a Titan, one of twelve monstrous children born to Gaea
(Mother Earth) and Uranus (Father Heaven). Gaea and Uranus them-
selves came from the original chaos of things and their children shared
with them the fury of such an origin. The Titans were enormous in size
and strength. Ocean was a Titan: he circled the earth as an enormous
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river. Hs^jerion fathered the sun, moon, and the dawn, and from Iaptetus
came Atlas and Prometheus. Cronus's distinction lay in his being lord of
this volatile brood.
Since his children were monsters, Uranus hid them in the earth as
soon as they were born, in the body of his wife. Gaea, in a rebellious act,
released the children and begged them to take revenge against their
father. Cronus, whom Hesiod describes as "cunning Cronus" (Brown,
1970, p. 11), the youngest and boldest of the children, took up the task
and castrated his father with a reaping hook. Subsequently, Cronus
married his sister, Rhea, who was warned by an oracle that any children
born of this union would overthrow him. Cronus thus swallowed his
children at birth: Hestia, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera and Hades; but Rhea,
when she bore her youngest child, Zeus, hid him away and gave Cronus,
instead, a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. When Zeus grew up he
forced his father, with the help of Gaea, to disgorge the stone along with
the swallowed children. There followed a war between Cronus and Zeus, a
war that Zeus won, principally through the thunder and lightning he
controlled.

Clinical Implications

There are many aspects of this myth, as briefly outlined, but the cen-
tral one is the swallowing of the children. Rheingold's thesis of the
"Medea Complex" (1964, p. 37) deals with the homicidal wish of the
mother towards the child. The Cronus Complex is not murder per se, that
is, a child throttled or drowned, but a destructive ingestive process which
hinders the capacity to exist separately and autonomously. Completely
ignored in this pathology is the purpose of advanced parenting which
Gibran has imaginatively stated:

Your children are not your children

They are the sons and daughters of Life's
longing for itself
They come through you but not from you (1967, p.l7).
This fades in the Cronus Complex. While life might still have strong
desires, its chance is diminished, barring some undoing process,
therapeutic or otherwise, at some future point in time. Cronus is the dark
spirit loose in the family who proclaims that children are his possessions;
they exist only to help him make up the life lost at his own beginning
when he was called monstrous and hidden in the earth.
Cronus is unlived life. He does not say with that lusty Greek, Kazant-
zakis:

And from the moment I saw, my soul began to solidify. It no longer

flowed with constant fluctuation like water; a face began to thicken
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JOHN W. CRANDALL

and congeal now around a luminous core, the face of my soul. Instead
of proceeding first to the left, then to the right, along ever-changing
roads in order to find what beast I was descended from, I proceeded
with assurance because I knew my true face and my sole duty; to
work this face with as much patience, love and skill as I could
manage. To 'work it.' What did this mean? It meant to turn it into
flame, and if I had time before death came, to turn this flame into
light, so that Charon would find nothing of me to take. For this was
my greatest ambition: to leave nothing for death to takenothing
but a few bones (1965, pp. 27-28).

Of this Cronus knows nothing. He is fully fleshed when death comes,

because he, like the child he kidnaps, is a victim of the same process. He
is the destroyed as well as the destroyer. As such, there is a blankness to
his being, since the tools of his being, his organs, dimensions and energies
which could have been uniquely shaped, have been delivered up to the
hungry ones before him. It's like the schizophrenic male who saw his
mother in a dream as a dead cow lying in a meadow. He went to her in the
dream and systematically divested himself of his human reality. He took
his eyes out of his head and put them in her sockets: she began to see. He
put his mouth in her mouth: she began to speak. He took off his arms and
legs and gave them to her: she got up and walked and touched. In the end,
he emptied himself and the mother was filledfeut with a stolen existen-
ce. In a paraphrase of a Biblical passage from Ezekial, the mother dead in
the valley of dry bones says, "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is
lost; we are clean cut off." But the son, confusing himself with God, com-
mands as God did: "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry
bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones:
Behold, I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. And I will lay
sinews upon you, and cover your sldn and you shall live; and you shall
know that I am the Lord" (Nelson, 1952, p. 235)
This then is the contract presented to the child at birth. "Son of man,
can these bones live?" Before it a child is helpless. There is no ego or self
to fend it off. It is the precondition for survival in the family system. The
contract arises from the center of family deprivation and strikes the
child's center, defining the ingestive purpose to which this human
possibility must be put. With the definition goes a warning that waves
other options away. It is communicated that acceptance is dependent
upon a self-surrender to what the family's deprivations demand. This is
an awful basis for relating to needed objects, since it exposes the child to
psychic thefts for which there can rarely be an adequate recompense.
Religion speaks of being born again and so, too, does psychotherapy; but
these are painful ways of renewing existence and there are few that
choose them. For the most part, the empty generation of today waits for
the promise of its successor which can be drained in turn. Cronus can kill
each generational dream, in three distinct yet related ways, all
proceeding from Cronus's basic dread: the capacity of the child to over-
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throw him. Regardless of cost, this capacity must be beaten down.

Overthrow means strength. Every child's possibility is strong; it con-
notes a forceful potential which can lead, at some future date, to op-
position and negation. These, in whatever forms they may take, are not
viewed by Cronus as sources of the child's life, but as sources of threat.
They would put the child beyond exploitative reach. To prevent this,
Cronus buries the child's strength, as he himself was buried. It can be
done crudely, as by simply introducing into every "I can do it" a bullying
"No, you cannot." More subtle methods place silence or indifference in
the way of self-assertive acts, so that the child comes, in time, to hesitate
before its powers. The seeds of mastery grow wary of the soil that lodges
them. They sense that the soil hardens when they would expand; it
grasps, it does not release. Strength must then find a place for itself in an
environment that has no place for it. The absurdity soon wears out the
expansive urge which possesses the child so bravely at the beginning.
The compliance and impotence that follow are acknowledgements enough
of Cronus's mastery
Overthrow means separation. In her book. And Now Tomorrow,
Rachel Field portrays a child at play: Emily.

"From its start the early August day was mine. I ran barefoot into a
world of dew and opening flowers; of robins making little watery calls
and splashing at the rim of the lily pool. I measured my seven year
old height against the vigorous green of hollyhocks by the fence; but
stretch as I might, I could not reach the lowest pink rosette. . . . I
stood there elated and alone, with my bare feet rooted to wet earth.
Some vigorous sweet essence of summer and sun flowed through me
in that moment of breathless watching" (1942, pp. 17-18).

Such revelries of a distant spirit are intolerable to Cronus and be

negates them. They occur in what the existentialists call eigenwelt,
"existence is mine." In eigenwelt there is a centrifugal force which pulls
the child away from the family to the peer group and marriage. It is the
ground, too, of a possible rejection; it poses the upset of family balances
and space for the emerging self. Sensing this force which would free the
child from his influence, Cronus stops Emily at her play. Above the
robin's calls and splashes, he puts another sound, his voice, here hushed
with the urge to caution. "Be careful, Emily. Roses have thorns. Germs
are found in wetness. Can you really be warm when I am cold?" This
sound arrests Emily. Danger stamps itself upon her experience of the
morning, the danger of separateness, now contaminated by an empty
presence which becomes progressively emptier the farther she goes away.
To be separate means to destroy the intimate and necessary object. The
backward tug created here by the need of Cronus is irresistible. Emily
must return to him else, in her fantasy, both will die.
Overthrow not only implies strength and separateness but also the
ultimate purpose of these states: strength and separateness for the end of
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a self-discovery. Strength is the base structure for the act of distancing

which, when achieved, makes an open space wherein to explore the
meaning of the authentic self. Kazantzakis says that everyone has a cry
to be slung into the air before death.

. . . let us waste no time, therefore, lest we be caught short. It is true

that this cry may scatter ineffectually in the air, that there may be no
ear either below on earth or above in heaven to hear it. No matter.
You are not a sheep, you are a person, and that means a thing which
is unsettled and shouts. Well thenshout! (1965, p. 478)
The shout forms in the child's throat and dies there. Cronus's hand is
over the mouth. To Cronus, the shout is the child's escape, the child
beyond reach of him. The warnings that arrest the child in the
separateness of play thus intensify with the discovery of novelty, if for no
other reason than novelty's sheer power to liberate. Novelty moves
lightly to express the freshness of things. It is the least trapped of
qualities. It seeks from the old only what is congenial, and from the new
only what it naturally embodies: discovery. Novelty unfolds with its own
design outstripping everything that would make it what it is not. The
child can be subject to novelty and carried by it to some safe place where
what others arrange has little influence. Cronus knows this. He knows
that if he loses here, he loses everywhere, so he moves quickly to stifle the
shout that would, otherwise, rise so naturally. The victory is not a dif-
ficult one, since the other defenses of authenticity, strength and
separateness, have already been bridged. The shout trails off to a silent
scream, like Elsa's scream in Katherine Anne Porter's novel. Ship of
Fools. Elsa, a prim, obedient young woman, is the prototype of
everything that Cronus, in the end, achieves. She exists merely for the
parental will; it is the magnet to her reluctant spirit which it ultimately
absorbs. What results is a "yes. Mama, yes. Papa" person twitched this
way and that, hopelessly, forever, by purposes not her own. Only the
dead bones stir. Inside her

there groped blindly, the young innocence and the longing, the
pained, confused, limited mind, the dark instincts winding upon
themselves like snails (Porter, 1962, p. 67).
And again:

"Dominoes and checkers with her father, housework that she hated
under the constant advice, direction and reproof of her Mama, never
to be able to call even her hair her own, to be left on the shelf an old
maid at last, yes, that would be her fate, she could feel it deep within
her. Her heart sank and then rose in her and began to knock
desperately against her ribs as if it were a prisoner beating against
the bars, as if it were not a part of her but a terrified stranger locked
up in her, crying, crying, "Let me out!" (Porter, 1962, pp. 178-179)
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"Son of man, can these bones live?" In the Cronus Complex an an-
swer is given: "Yes, they can livethrough the child's freshness, which is
seized and exploited as a means of reentering existence. "Infancy," says
Emerson, "is the perpetual Messiah which comes into the arms of fallen
men and pleads with them to return to Paradise" (1973,1: 8).

THE CRONUS COMPLEX: A BURIED DYNAMIC

Clinical pro bings

It is curious that the Cronus Complex has not been more fully un-
earthed by those concerned with the origins of the human tragedy,
especially since the murder to which it refers is so plainly there, so quick
in its appearance in family histories, and so regular as the master motif in
the pathology of many patients seen in clinical practice. The literature, at
times, comes close to the Cronus Complex; there are occasional clinical
examples, theoretical tendencies, and dramatalurgical illustrations, but,
as yet, no extensive grappling with its possibilities and, certainly, no
large scale framework of theory. Lowen comes close to the Cronus Com-
plex in his work on depression: "Every depressed patient I have treated
was a person who had lost his childhood. He had forsaken the infantile
position in an attempt to relieve his parents of the burden his care placed
on them" (1972, p. 243). Cohen (1969) in his seminal paper on the origin
and function of sadistic behavior unearths the unconscious contract be-
tween the mother and the infant wherein the infant provides emotional
nurturance to the parent under the guise of receiving it. Bell and Vogel
(1962) in their examination of the scapegoating process in families
present evidence that the scapegoated child is a screen upon which the
family projects its intolerable fantasies. Giffin, Johnson, and Litin (1954)
isolate the phenomenon of "superego lacunae," the gap in the conscience
structure of children through which forbidden parental impulses are
channeled. Told overtly to be virtuous, the children here are cued, never-
theless, nonverbally and unconsciously to do the wild things that the
parents dare not do. Kaufman and his associates (1954) bring Cronus into
view in their study of overt incestuous relationships between fathers and
daughters, in their analysis of the deprived family in which such an in-
sidious role reversal takes place. The archetype of such a family is com-
posed of the irresponsible, often alcoholic husband and the stern, de-
manding mother, usually tied in with a guilt-producing and infantilizing
maternal grandmother; desertion is a major themeall the parenting
figures have been abandoned by their own parents; all are in search of a
nurturing figure, with the mother finally relinquishing responsibility for
the husband to the daughter, who becomes his wife. Cronus is writ large
over Slipp's (1973) superb article on schizophrenia, which asserts that in
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JOHN W. CRANDALL

the development of this disease within the family, the schizophrenic un-
consciously senses the parents' dependency on him to act out their in-
troject in order for them to gain control over past and present relation-
ships.

"I never felt good unless I was a reflection of what my parents

wanted," says a young schizophrenic girl. "They only cared for what
I could give them; beyond that they were not interested. I felt both
my parents kept me from being a separate person; I had to feel and
think the way they did . . . I had to be good to keep everyone
together. If I got angry with my father, I was afraid it would kill him
. . . I felt tremendous power. I held everyone together, and if I got
angry I could kill them. I kept them alive by being nice" (Slipp, p.
389).

It is Lloyd deMause, however, and his associates in the

psychohistorical school, who are opening up the Cronus Complex on ever-
widening theoretical bases and who give hope that it will not remain
forever buried in the ground. Their work on Hitler as the pathological
caretaker of his mother is magnificent. "Hitler as the Bound Delegate of
his Mother," is how one writer puts it (Stierlin, 1976). Lloyd deMauses's
"psychogenic theory of history" (1974) (the theory that the central force
for change in history is neither technology or economics, but the per-
sonality changes occurring because of successive generations of parent-
child interactions) focuses on critical family interactions as the stuff of
which heaven or hell is made, thus making the Cronus Complex a subject
more likely for extensive research. His concept of the "double
image"the perceptual distortion of the parent that ruins
childhoodone side of the image, projective: "I exist to release the mad-
ness that your awareness cannot tolerate," the other, reversal: "I exist to
be the parent you never had," brings dynamically into focus the double
substance of which the Cronus Complex is composed. Whatever work is
done on the Cronus Complex in the future must certainly rely heavily on
the foundation that deMause has laid.
The above researches are illustrative and they must be considered, in
the light of the pervasive ignorance of the Cronus Complex, as ten-
dencies, as feelers and probings into what is as yet, little known.
Psychological theory, quite apart from the humanity at large, is largely
oblivious to it. One can go through a doctoral program in psychology and
never be exposed at all to the Cronus Complex. The journals are
strangely silent. Why this neglect of what is so plainly before the eyes?

Resistive sources
Perhaps the Cronus Complex is too monstrous for more than casual
inspectionand it is monstrous, as Shakespeare noted in Titus An-
dronicus:
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Why there they are, both baked in that pie

Whereof their mother daintily hath fed
Eating of the flesh that she herself hath bred (Wright, 1936, p. 210).
The thought that mother and other family members can consume a
child as a recompense for "life lost in living" (Eliot, 1962, p. 81) is ap-
palling. To allow the thought at all is to open doors upon the most
grotesque of role reversals: the child caring before being cared for. A
daughter is a mother's mother or a father's wife. A son is a mother's
husband or a father's father. Or either can be the expressive agent of
repressed parental fantasy. It is an awful business no matter how one
looks at it: awful because a child's authentic possibility can be destroyed
by such a process, awful because the parents who stimulate the reversal
in the darkness of the unconscious consciously deny that anything is hap-
pening at all. There is no awareness. The Cronus tragedy just endures.
Awful or not, though, the entrapment of the child is a solution for
many people, their way of fighting for life denied to them in the original
family, and judging from the silence surrounding the Cronus Complex, a
solution that warns hands away. The sad waste involved must certainly
be a major reason for the silence.
Another reason the Cronus Complex is pushed away is the pain in-
volved in confronting it. For the Cronus Complex is the embodiment of
all the psychic convictions born early that the most precious possession
one has, oneself, is not really going to be honored, nurtured, or respected;
that in one's fragile extension toward one's first object of trust, one's
family, one is swallowed by the family's needs. From these convictions
comes a cry of hopelessness still wracked by desire; of natural need
doomed to an unnatural adapting, as compensation for the previous
generation's neglect. It is a cry no one wants to hear.

Little baby soft and new

Like a bud that's opening
But when the flower should be in bloom
Little baby will be gone (Joffroy, 1971, p. 201).

This little poem was written by Frantisek Bass, a child, in the

Terezin ghetto in 1942, shortly before he was murdered by the Nazis.
Who can stand this cry, either in its awfulness as manifest in the gas
chambers or in its counterpart as manifest in the ingestive processes of
the Cronus Complex? In either case, it is unbearable.
Tolerable or not, though, the mystery of the Cronus Complex per-
sists. It stands out for me graphically in the following dream of a young
man. He had been in a hospital for a serious operation where his needs
should have been predominant. In the dream, which he had under ether,
he saw all about him the color green. He identified the color with the
green of springtime, with the grass that appears then and with the bud-
ding of the trees, the green that connotes birth and creation. In addition
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JOHN W. CRANDALL

to the green there was a sound, quadrophonically produced, enveloping

all the aspects of the dreamer's space, which was a large room. The sound
was his mother screaming. Superimposed over the visual image of green
and over the auditory impression of the mother's scream was the letter q,
and wherever the dreamer wenteither to the green or the screamthe q
went also, there to become a trampoline off of which the dreamer
bounced. The q was identified by the dreamer as a question mark, and the
interpretation of the dream was given in the context of the central dilem-
ma of this man's existence: the green or the screamthat is the question!
Does one go to one's own life and creativity, or does one go to the cry of
Cronus, the cry that overlooks the needs of the patient on the operating
table as if they did not exist. Back and forth, back and forth over the am-
biguous gthe green or the scream.
For many, this is the critical choice.

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Brown. N. (tr.) The Theogony ofHesiod. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Cohen, S. The origin and function of sadistic behavior. Journal of Contemporary
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deMause, L. The evolution of childhood. The Journal of Psychohistory, 1974, i, 495-521.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Harvest Books, 1962.
Emerson, R. Nature. The Journal of Psychohistory, 1973, i, 2-15.
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