On Wanting to kill Yourself.

If you believed the story about Lemmings throwing themselves from cliffs, as I did, for decades, what else are you so sure of that just ain’t so?

Turns out it was a lie. Lemmings do not throw themselves from clifftops. Apparently the whole thing was invented by Walt Disney who wanted to sex up a documentary he made in 1958 called, ‘White Wilderness.” According to Canadian Wildlife and Fisheries the sets were fake, the Lemmings had to be bussed in from Manitoba where they were herded about and finally thrown, manually, into the sea. All in aid of Walt’s ‘True life adventure’ series…..

”The lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off a cliff by the Disney filmmakers.” R. Woodford.

Meantime the narrator Winston Hibbler trills,

“A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny.”

The lie is as obsessively strange as the story.

http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=56

The fantasy is more curious and interesting than the motive for deception.

Perhaps it says more about Disney and the culture he was helping to mould than he might have wished. It is the Disney generation, after all, that have a taste for marching off cliffs like never before, not the sensible and much maligned Lemming.

Beachy Head is a favourite clifftop for Britons to kill themselves. It even has a beer named after it, ‘Beachy Head’s Christmas Jumper, critisised by families of the deceased as ‘insensitive’. The clifftop is patrolled by chaplains who are about to be de-funded despite awards from the Queen. A gift shop in town sells sombre writing pads of just a few leaves and disposable pens with black ink.

No, that last bits not true, about the shop.

After several tours of combat duty what began to weigh upon me most heavily was not the horror of war, nor what I had done, or seen, or had levelled at me. It was how easy it had been to persuade me to march from the cliff top even without any great desperation to die or madly scribbled goodbyes.

Do we have a ‘death instinct’ as a species, or is there something peculiar about a culture that immolates itself on a steady basis? Recently released statistics of US service suicides show that troops are actually killing themselves at a higher rate than are killed by Isis, though the figures seem to be consistent with a shocking three-fold increase in US civilian suicides since 2000.

What is going on?

You might be tempted, along with Walt’s phoney commentator, to postulate that sudden increases in suicides were about overpopulation or some dire tragedy unfolding so desperate we’d die to avoid it, but the evidence points to the contrary. Countries with the lowest GPU and the toughest lives are also the least at risk from suicide. Psychoanalyst and Auchwitz survivor Bruno Bettleheim made the observation of physical and mental extremis that …

‘Despite the inhuman deprivation in the camps there was scarcely ever a suicide.’ B. Bettleheim.

Others are of the opinion that suicide is an act of revenge.

”It is always consoling to think of suicide. In that way one gets through many a bad night.” F. Nietzsche.

though in all fairness Fredrick, a dose of tertiary syphilis combined with the terminal mercury poisoning used to treat the 19th C pecker would wear down anyone’s will to live.

There is a fantastic movie called, ‘Drowning by Numbers,’ a macabre look at the vast grey area between murdering yourself and murdering others. It puts an astute line into the mouth of Smut, an adolescent boy in a family of killers and sycophants who finally hangs himself with a skipping rope,

”to punish all those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions.” Smut

all of which would seem to bear out the anonymous saying..

‘when you commit suicide you are killing the wrong person.’

‘Retroflected’ rage is rage turned back upon oneself, but with the intent to castigate those left behind. I’ve known several people to be saved from suicide by realising how much they wanted to (justifiably) kill their nearest and dearest.

The wish to kill oneself is what Marion Woodman would call, ‘concretisation’, doing on the outside what needs to happen on the inside, doing in the flesh what needs to happen in the psyche, making a symbolic equation between matter and identity. We mistake the pointing finger for the moon and believe it is ourselves that have to die rather than our situation, our self-construct, or a belief system that no longer serves.

”Without dying to the world of the old order, there is no place for renewal, because it is illusory to hope that growth is but an additive process requiring neither sacrifice nor death. The soul favors the death experience to usher in change. Veiwed this way, the suicidal impulse is a transformative drive..”            James Hillman.

There’s an old buddhist saying,..

”if you are going to kill yourself be careful not to harm your body.” anon.

The dying has to happen, by itself, from within. This is trixy for anyone with humungous control issues. In fact, you could say that suicide was a way of trying to cheat death itself by taking on the job ahead of time, when what life you have, when death itself, cannot be something to look forward to as meaningful experience. Suicide is a logical choice of any life lived purely for its own ends and for whom there is no mystery.

On page one of a Google search on the subject you will find www.findangel.org/‎ whose banner runs..

‘Do not try to predict the future,’

It’s an insightful warning to those in their legion whose narcissistic control issues are so enfragiled that they have to know what’s happening next all the time, even to the point of orchestrating their own demise.

‘Live as though you had centuries, then you live hopefully.’ C. G.Jung

We all intuit that there is more to this life than meets the eye, some mystery that the mind cannot fathom, some sense of self that lies outside time and space, unconstrained by the clay of mortal frailty. We have a longing to be aquainted with this realm and can be tempted to hurry the process for want of being fed in ‘this’ world,  forgetting that anything existing outside time and space is, by definition, already here….

The longing to escape is the longing to find meaning irrespective of one’s circumstance and station, meaning which the ego realises it cannot provide for itself, in which it is defeated, but of which it can avail itself by turning, finally, to its own deep roots.

You are the tree not the leaf.

There is an apocryphal story of a Rabbi and his group picked out for torture before death in the Nazi camps. They finally had to dig the pit of their own mass grave. They were stripped and thrown in. Soldiers stepped forward cocking automatic Shmeisers.

‘Well’, said the captain, what have you to say now Rabbi?

The Rabbi replied, ‘ We have one another down here, I am in the bossom of my People and already in the arms of Eternal Life. What about you?’

this article is adapted from my book on self-destructiveness, ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane.’ https://andywhiteblog.com/2016/06/11/going-mad-to-stay-sane-2/

The Vengeful Goddess

Sekhmet is one of the oldest known Egyptian deities. Her name is derived from the Egyptian word “Sekhem” which means “power” or “might”. She is depicted as a lion-headed woman, sometimes with the addition of a sun disc on her head.

Sekhmet was represented by the searing heat of the mid-day sun. She was fierce. She had teeth and claws. She was also the patron of Physicians, and Healers and her priests became known as skilled doctors. So the fearsome deity  was also known as “lady of life”. Above all, she is the protector of Ma’at, balance.

Sekhmet was closely associated with Kingship. She was often described as the mother of Maahes, the lion god who was a patron of the Pharaoh and it is suggested that the Pharaoh himself was conceived by Sekhmet.

According to myth, her father Ra became angry because mankind was not following his laws and preserving Ma’at. He decided to punish mankind by sending Sekhmet, the ‘eye of Ra’, and she began her rampage. The fields ran with human blood. At the sight of the carnage, Ra repented. He ordered her to stop, but she was in a blood lust and would not listen. So Ra poured 7,000 jugs of beer and pomegranate juice (which stained the beer blood red) in her path. She gorged on the “blood” and became so drunk she slept for three days. When she awoke, her blood lust had dissipated, and humanity was saved.

So what was it that pissed Ra off so much?

A bit of imbalanced Ma’at?

Seems a bit extreme.

Except that the imbalance was the loss of Sekmhet herself who shortly afterwards lost her status and her teeth when morphed into the rather more matronly and benign Hathor.

Lion got traded in for cow.

And since the Gods’ vengeance is invariably poetic Ra sent the very force which Humanity had so unwisely ignored to make a point from which it was impossible not to draw certain conclusions.

Your sins of ommision shall also be counted.

To withold is more damning than the sword.

Sekmhet’s fury is at the hybris engendered by depriving the Gods of their just acknowledgement.

When children are treated as idols, ‘special’ kids, little angels, the deprivation is two fold. Firstly the gods are not getting their due, but then neither is the child. Both are robbed of Ma’at. This makes Sekmhet and the child alike detached and vengeful.

The narcissist/psychopathic personality has been called the forgotten wo/man of psychiatry. There is a good reason for this. Psychiatry is focused on symptoms and the narcissist doesn’t have any.

How is that possible?

Because the narcissist’s wounds are about the absence of something essential rather than the presence of something florid or exotic.

Its difficult to spot what isn’t there.

Interestingly Dorland (1974) describes the narcissist/ psychopath as someome who has an anti social personality so the dysfunction is in relatedness…

”never in faults of logical reasoning, verbal confusion or technical delusion but rather in the sharper reality… of feeling behaviour” H. Cleckley.

The Narcissist does not simply disregard the ethical considerations or the rights of others in pursuit of selfish ends that momentarily outweigh his or her value system. What’s under consideration is part of a much more pervasive pattern…

that disregards regardless.

Conscience never really got developed in the first place.

Sekmhet’s altar is empty.

There’s a strong tendency in the literature not to hold parents responsible for their narcissistic progeny….

”I do not believe obvious mistreatment or any simple egregious parental errors can justifiably be held as the cause,..” ibid

and so despite brilliant descriptions of narcissistic enactments in his equally brilliant book, ‘The Mask of Sanity’, Cleckley is left scrabbling about for an explanation.

It being so difficult to spot what doesn’t occur.

Freud probably made the first description of the part played by deprivation.

”The necessary condition….is absence of love and a lack of emotional appreciation …” S. Freud.

I recall a training video on Autism we were shown as students. The young boy was being very badly behaved and kicking the skirting board in the hallway. The narration was focused on his behaviour and the strain on family life….

Unnoticed was what didn’t happen…..

an easy thing to miss…

His Mum was stood there with her arms folded….uninvolved.

even the three tear old sibling was pulling at her skirts as if too say,

‘Come on mum, get involved, be involved.’

I gave my son a massive plane with lights and buzzers for his third birthday. He stepped back a bit when it started going.

”I don’t want it, daddy.”

and for a second I was poised to give him a telling off for his ingratitude.

Did he realise how much I spent on the damn plane?

But then I realised that my gift was over-kill, compensation, the glazed look in his eyes was a mirror of me. I was uninvolved. The whole thing was so big and flashy he couldn’t play with it. He couldn’t hold it. He couldn’t imaginate his own adventure, pre-empted in fantasy by all the various sounds and movements it was already making.

And so I was ashamed.

All I’d given him was a manifesto of my own flashy noisiness which he couldn’t play with.

And so my ‘gift’ was actually an act of theft.

You took his Ma’at.

”Once, only obvious irrationality was regarded as a personality disorder. In fact, many less obvious disorders are more serious and incapacitating than those with gross superficial manifestations that can be readily demonstrated.” Cleckley

In fact, perhaps the delusional or schizophrenic person is a little better adjusted, given that symptoms contain meaning which can come to consciousness. How much more scary than the person who thinks they are Napoleon is the man who knows himself perfectly well but doesn’t care about you or your life as a premise for interaction.

I prefer Napoleon….

..and the paradox that even though it is the quality of a parent’s interaction with  baby that determines baby’s later feeling life and the quality of future relationships or lack of them, so is it true that the epidemic of Narcissism is a collective phenomena, a direct consequence of the loss of the divine feminine.

How shall mother be….. if motherhood can’t be sacred?

Hathor, her sister, and in fact more a new incarnation of Sekhmet, mourns her loss.

Crucially, Hathor is goddess of motherhood and childbirth. If she is grief stricken for the loss of the lion/sun aspect of womanhood what will that bring to the mother/infant relationship?

Bruno Bettleheim, an analyst who spent time in Auschwitz, draws the comparison between concentration camp life and the inner world of the psychopathic child…

”in terms of the shared sense of depersonalisation and deprivation.” B Bettleheim.

Whatever the content of mother’s inner world, baby has a piece. Levy Bruhl originally called it ‘participation mystique’, a pre-verbal shared reality.

”the involvment in his mother’s emotional state is something he cannot separate himself from… he absorbs her psychological state as he absorbs nutrition.” F Ruppert.

If her state is one of being disenfranchised of spiritual worth or divine advocacy, then inner poverty is bound to result.

As is the compensatory gesture of having the child be special, laden down as he is with mother’s unvalued depths…

this dynamic is collective and cumulative.

and so society becomes increasingly self-centred and emotionally shut down…

Buuuut .. ..

thou shalt be more than a little bit depressed.

Wouldn’t it be spiffing if there was some poetic justice, some dark streak of irony in Sekhmet’s vengeance?

After all, the Single System systems have bred a very particular kind of person…

one who experiences the world as un-nourishing..

who doesn’t get told ‘no’..

has a propensity to project the shadow,

who is deadened in feeling…

without which values become a moveable ration pack,

who believes they are special and entitled

and that deep down they are godlike..

or doing God’s work…

with ‘unintegrated aggression’.

and no remorse or conscience….

Sounds like the perfect soldier to me.

Wouldn’t it be fun and clever if Sekhmet, ‘Lady of Pestilence’, then took them all and gave them guns and bombs while she drank her 7,000 jugs of beer and pomegranite juice,

ate nachos…

and just watched from the bleachers while Humanity took up from where she’d left off?