Once there was a very poor man with a dozen hungry kids. Full of despair he wandered into the forest to see what he could find to feed them all. There he encountered a rather strange little man who smelled of burnt chicken feathers and had hooves instead of feet. The Devil, for that’s who it was, asked after the poor man’s situation and when the story was told he reached deep into his pocket and drew out a Little Walnut.

‘Here, take this walnut, ask anything of it and it will provide.’

‘But, you must surely want something for it..’

‘Oh well, if you insist, let’s just say, whatever you don’t know about back home.’

The Poor Man wracked his brains to think about all the things he didn’t know about but because he didn’t know about them the wracking did no good. So he agreed, thinking that what he couldn’t think about could not be such a big thing.

When he gets back he tells his wife about what happened and she erupts.. ‘You fool, the thing you don’t know about is that I am pregnant and that you have forfeited our child. WTF? Its not as though you don’t know about how these things happen..’

Yet what was done was done. The Poor Man became rich and bought a grand house for his family. The babe was born and was loved, yet their joy was palled by the prospect of the Devil showing up to claim his due. One night, two simple sages emerged from the forest and knocked on the door. The announced that they knew about what had happened and they had come to help save the baby. The Poor Man was amazed and asked what they should do. They told him to bake a loaf and leave it on the window sill, for the Devil would appear that very night.

Sure enough just before dawn the Devil arrived and called over the window sill..

‘Yo, my man.. I’m here to collect what you owe.. bring out the baby.’

To his surprise, to all our surprise, the Bread then spoke up, saying..

‘You are having to be patient and wait as I once had to be patient and wait..I was sown in Autumn and waited patiently in the soil the whole winter long as you wait patiently now. I was cut in my prime and threshed and beaten, just as you suffer now. I was ground down and pummelled into dough, then roasted in flames just as you now sit and roast in your own flames…’

The Loaf quietly expounding their mutual suffering until dawn broke. This particular Devil had no power by day. In any case he felt so tired out by the Loaf’s harrowing story that he crept quietly away and never returned.

In the more commonly known story of ‘Rumplestiltskin’, there is also the theme of a baby who will be forfeit to ‘a strange little man’ unless the protagonist can tell his name. In both stories the power of naming resolves the crisis. In Rumplestiltskin it is the little man’s name itself. In The Little Walnut, the naming of shared suffering.

You might say the Poor Man was not so deserving. The situation was of his own making. Yet he was desperate for his children. Moreover, he loved the new child and suffered the prospect of its loss. This love evokes powerful transforming energies from the deep psyche despite his foolishness, symbolised by the two wise men emerging from the forest just in the nick of time..

The Poor Man’s strength lies in his relatedness. His willingness to throw caution to the wind for the sake of feeding the family, despite its unfortunate consequence, also sets in motion the means to redeem the situation because his actions have not gone unnoticed by the Gods. The Principle of Relatedness, personified by Demeter as archetypal fairy godmother, well known for her love of her child, intercedes on behalf of the Poor Man in the form of a loaf of bread. As Goddess of grain and provision she speaks with the Devil and manages what Devils are generally starved of, tea and sympathy. She identifies with him without losing her own point of view. ‘You are suffering as I have suffered. You are having to wait as I waited.’ I really sympathize and you are not having the baby.

So too is it with our own Devils. If they are not to become neuroses then they need a maternal touch rather than heroic intervention. They need to be spoken with, at great length. Demeter intuits that the Devil’s wish for the child is ultimately the wish to identify with and be the child. She generously gives him the good stuff, the good maternal mirror. He is held and filled up without quite knowing how it happened, and so loses interest in its mere symbolic representation.

The shameful fury of all Devils, that they are rejected, has to be spoken to and soothed for them to begin to settle down. They feel demoted and are surly on account of it. In the absence of dialogue they’ll take the baby, the creative moment, instead. The way forward is not via heroic effort but by the invocation of Demeter to act as daycare for a while.

So, the Devil is contained by the relatedness of the Old Religion. The mysterious wise men from the forest who appear just when needed are the representatives of the Old Ways. They understand that if the situation is going to be helped it will have to by something other than a prejudicial sky god with an axe to grind.

In certain African tribes the village deals with transgressors in a very similar way. The person is made the centre of everyone’s attention. Then they take it in turns to remind the errant one of all their qualities, their good deeds, their shared experience. This repairs and vitalises tribal relations which they assume must have been damaged in some way for the person to transgress in the first place.

Once the Principle of Relatedness is restablished the danger passes and the scales of justice balanced without the need for sanction. Imagine if we approached the shadow like this? In our story the Devil is not vanquished. It’s not necessary to cast him down or out. Demeter has a way with him even if the Poor Man does not. His skill is rather in getting out of his own way, faithfully heeding and placing himself at the service of the two wise men.

Overheard on a train. A man was talking about his experience of being in analysis to his friend. The friend asked, ‘so what do you think is the main difference that psychoanalysis has made in your life?’ The first man replied, ‘well, beforehand every day was just the same old thing.’ ‘And now? asked the friend. ‘Well now’, he perked up, ‘its just one thing after another’.

The Torah says, ‘you do not see the world as it is, you see it as you are.’ The World is moulded and filtered by the psyche; world as projection-receiving Matrix which we then fondly imagine to be an objective reality, ‘the same old thing.’ The problem is not that life keeps repeating itself but that we only have one string to our bow and thus a limited number of songs to sing about it. Much of life’s suffering is inversely proportional to the conduit through which we permit ourselves to experience it. The narrower it is, the more shielded, the more the monotonous and consuming grind of ‘the same old thing’.

This dawning awareness is distasteful to any part of the psyche habituated to the notion that experience has something to do with events themselves. Psycho (soul)- analysis (disentangling) aims itself in part at the notion that a person can discover not only their truth, and thus separate from others, but also all their many and diverse truths, their inner complexity. Beyond that, like distant peaks beyond foothills, the Spirit of the Depths (Jung), the ‘Not-I’ of the objective psyche, which has its own truth and its own point of view, often somewhat contrary to the wishes of the personality.

As diverse aspects of the Self are able to be acknowledged and related to rather than simply sources of unconscious identification people tend to get much lighter with their stories. It’s no longer the clutching at straws of the drowning. Anxiety and paranoia decrease as this internal ‘elbow room’ increases, which is why a sense of humor often indicates favorable prognosis. If a person can pull their own leg then there is a new way of experiencing the same old thing emerging alongside the time worn habit. If a person can laugh at themselves without it being humiliating then so are they liable to be able to talk to themselves, to reflect, to consider, to take in all the angles.

Humor is the relief and freedom of being able to experience the old stuff in a new way. Contrary Others can stretch themselves out across a broad swath of your inner landscape and have differences of opinion without it necessarily leading to open warfare. The problem with this growing inner multiplicity is that life then gets messy whatever your story. Suddenly things just become complicated and the narrower point of view must be sacrificed along with the identity derived from it.

When you are a kid you want to be something definite, a Fireman, a Dancer, but then you discover you also fancy being a bank robber or Wolverine from X-men, inner gremlins which don’t fit your adapted world, caught now between the suffering of expired developmental sell-by dates and the suffering of not knowing who you are anymore. Not to mention subsequent encounters with all things ‘Not-I’ which, it turns out, also have an influential point of view, though sometimes horrible to address.

The idea that you cannot change the past misses the point. The important bit is not so much what happened but what meanings are ascribed to it. This is not to say that one simply needs a different attitude but rather that having different perspectives on the same situation is what you discover if you sit with it long enough and pay it sufficient attention.

Much of life’s seemingly gratuitous suffering often proves in the end to have been necessary for something. Adversity evokes consciousness, yet being cast adrift from the known, the one and only way of seeing things, is a threatening prospect. What if there is a storm? What if you get lost? Allowing such an anxious inner conversation is to grasp the tiller, to respond, to be less at the mercy of emotional entanglements, group think, compulsive knee jerk reactions, ‘the same old thing’.

The greater freedom of experience in ‘one thing after another,’ is to do with a kind of dissolution of fixed opinions of ‘how things are’, which allows them to be what they are more or less independent of your prejudices. We all have a few, some tucked away better than others, needing to be named in order to hold them in some kind of abeyance. Judging things ahead of time is the hallmark of a psyche dominated by a single story. Where there is only one possible interpretation of events you always know what happens next.

The man on the train was describing a journey the philosopher Heidegger would describe as the transition away from having the world ‘ready-to-hand’, as the one story that a breast might be to an infant, towards a multiverse where the breast also has its own life. Things as they are in relation to me somehow also become things in themselves, things ‘present-at-hand’, ‘Not-me’ and somehow autonomous; all of which has a way of making you question and doubt stuff which used to be carved in stone. It’s all a bit unnerving.

Being at the center of things is very grand but its also tiresome and undignified, a single story which suffocates the multiplicity of soul. To experience ourselves as the ones in orbit is much more complicated, full of insecurity and yet a Copernican revolution of the psyche which turns the lead of the same old thing into the gold of one thing after another.

Once upon a time there was a poor old woman whose husband had died. She had a son, Lazy Tom, who might have been a help but the boy was so lazy he simply added to her burdens. Lazy Tom would not lift a finger to help himself or anyone else. One day his mother begged him to go down to the river and fetch some water. ‘I would gladly go, but I am far too lazy,’ he replied. Only when she began to leap up and down and go a dark shade of purple did he agree to help her, slouching down to the river in self-pity and dejection.

On his reluctant journey a small fish, gathered up with the water, spoke to Lazy Tom. ‘Oh let me go kind sir and I will reward you”, but the boy felt far too lazy and only once the fish had entreated him and splashed a good amount of water from the pail did he agree. ‘If ever you need help,’ called Fish, ‘just call for me saying, ‘Little Fish, Little Fish, come grant my wish.”

When Lazy Tom arrived home he found that there was nothing to eat. He remembering what the fish had said so he called out as he had been instructed and immediately there appeared a table groaning with food. They ate so much he fell into a deep sleep in the meadow woken much later by the passing by of the King’s daughter who was so beautiful he called again on Fish to cause her to be with child and wonder of wonders she bore a son before the year was out.

The King was none too pleased, demanding to know who the father might be. He called together the wise sages of the kingdom, who advised him to collect all the local men and see to whom the child might give a rosy apple, for he would surely be the child’s father. And so Lazy Tom was found out even though he was last in line. The King put him and the Princess and their child in a barrel and tossed them all into the river but of course the Little Fish was ready to hand and rescued them, not to mention rustling up a fine castle with all the trimmings.

The story poses a number of questions. What ails Tom? What light does the story shed on the nature of ‘laziness’. How is Tom’s affliction resolved?

The word “sloth” is a translation of the Latin term acedia which means “without care”. Spiritually, acedia first referred to monks who had become indifferent to their duties and obligations to God. Mentally, acedia is a lack of any feeling about self or others.

On closer inspection acedia is much more than a sin of omission. It seems to contain a subtle animosity towards the Gods, a dissatisfaction with one’s lot, the entitlement that goes with having been dealt a disappointing hand which can then become so easily a kind of bitter withholding and a refusal to play.

The original ‘acedia‘ could be translated as ‘angry indifference towards god (or the gods)’, a loss of connection to higher power leading to inflation and disconnection form self and world. The synonym ‘dejection’ is rooted in the latin deicere, thrown down (by god), ‘downcast’, with corresponding feelings of isolation and loss of relatedness.

Lazy Tom is experiencing the enervation of a rather particular kind of spiritual condition, one where ego and Self are furthest from each other. You can see Tom’s ‘laziness’ writ large in the concepts of sociologists Durkheim and Weber collective phenomenon of anomie and alienation, social conditions concomitant with a phase of history characterised by over-civilisation and a mono-theism of consciousness.

Mostly we tend to fall into the camps of either being either dismissive and reductive about the gods on the one hand or God fearing and devout on the other. You get to be zealous either way. But there is a murky, hesitant kind of in-between stage where you secretly suspect that the gods might be real but really wish they weren’t. Privately, you feel really pissed off at having to deal with them and all life’s aggravation which is failing to turn out as planned. ‘Laziness’ is never lazy on its own. An intrusive and dejecting Other is always implied, to whom one is reluctant, by whom you feel displaced, to whom you would then peevishly refuse co-operation.

If ‘laziness’ can be viewed as one end of an interpersonal dynamic it becomes remarkably reminiscent of analyst John Bowlby’s observations about ‘insecure attachment’ in the behaviour of abandoned infants. He identified three stages of separation response in these infants, firstly protest, then when that doesn’t work, despair, and finally ‘detachment’, all the clinical manifestations of which seem to be Lazy Tom personified. He is disconnected from the world around him, unmotivated and unresponsive. Given the ubiquity of this experience throughout our times it makes me wonder if it is not a collective expression of the final stages of separation from the Great Mother as detailed by Bowlby and the attachment theorists. The curse of over-civilisation with its disavowal of the Gods is listlessness, boredom, entitlement and enervation.

Apathy is not simply a state of being. It is relational. It’s about what exists between me and not-me. The etymology of ‘apathy’ is from the Greek meaning ‘freedom from want’ (a- without, pathos -suffering) which detaches you from the bonds of obligation and reciprocity with your neighbours, eroding fellow feeling. Behind the moral judgements on the lazy child is a story of isolation and loss. Lazy Tom has lost his father and through her despair perhaps Mother’s loving presence as well. He’s angry but his detachment makes it impossible to express other than by the resentful armoured passivity of refusing to join the world.

‘Behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.’ Bowlby 1946

The Little Fish in our story seems to know this about Lazy Tom and so it doesn’t give up on him. You can’t help but assume Little Fish is the representation of divinity or higher power, one which didn’t get itself into the pail by accident. Tom’s small gesture of relatedness is enough to catch the God’s attention and restore a living and fruitful connection, the child born to Tom and the Princess, new life out of the stagnation of ennui. Of course the old dispensation, the dominant structure in the personality, the King, is not going to like all this new-fangled energetic aliveness and will try to destroy it but Tom’s new relationship with Little Fish means the threat of annihilation is transformed into one of freedom and abundance.

Once upon a time two seafaring travellers were shipwrecked by a great storm and thrown ashore with nothing more than their lives and the clothes on their backs. They climbed the cliffs and staggered into a nearby village going from house to house begging for help and food. The local people were mightily put off by their ragged appearance, by their desperate eyes and unintelligible language. One after another they rebuffed the strangers, saying that they could not understand the guttural words or the wild gestures.

Eventually the travelers reached a ramshackle cottage and knocked on the door. An old lady answered. She too could not understand the words of the strangers nor the gestures they made, but it was clear to her that here were men in dire straits who must be cold and hungry so she invited them in. She and her husband built up the fire and served the guests the last of their food. The travelers, impressed by this generosity, reveal themselves as Jupiter and his son Hermes. They bless the elderly couple and invite them to name their own reward.

This story of ‘Philemon and Baucis’, told by Ovid in his ‘Metamorphoses’, is ostensibly a moral tale about how to treat others ‘because you never know who they might be’. Yet it seems to go much further. The old couple invite the gods in regardless of who they might be, happy to see the divine in any who might pass by, caring little for whether they are comprehensible or not, seeing past all the differences to the essential unity of I and Thou.

The danger of our modern dualism is that the Other becomes incomprehensible. If the Other is demoted from a Thou to an It, then I must also become an It. To depersonalise the Other is to eradicate your own humanity. This means that love is not simply an emotion but also an identity and a way of knowing the world. This preserves the intelligibility of the stranger which in turn brings us to self-knowledge. You cannot know who you are in the absence of the Other. This is why solitary confinement is such a terrible punishment. You are not just deprived of company but of the capacity for self-reference. You cease to know who you are.

This is why love is so healing, it connects you to yourself as well as to the Other, puts the ground back under your feet as well as the glint in your eye. That Descartes’ ‘Cogito’ should have attained such a pinnacle in Western philosophy is really an indictment of Western thinking and suggests we have been collectively regressing since the time of Ovid.

The idea ‘I think therefor I am’ is no less self absorbed and isolating than masturbation. Descartes, like the child’s recourse to self-pleasure, arrived at his conclusion via the negation of everything outside his own frame of reference, essentially that everything was incomprehensible except his own preferred organ.

This has given rise to the idea that independence is our greatest good and that the fulfillment of personal happiness our most basic right, which in turn has led to a culture of narcissistic encapsulation, the demonisation of anyone that is not-me, and the proliferation of arms required to defend the sacrosanct white picket boundary of self-hood. Meantime the reality of the Other is demeaned to the point that they can be invaded with impunity and perhaps for their own good, sovereignty lost in the Nationalism of ‘First and Only’. Such godlikeness eradicates our own humanity as much as that of the Other, creating wars, famines and ecological disasters for which no-one seems to be responsible or accountable because it is all so ‘incomprehensible’.

This rather suggests that the story of Philemon and Baucis is about something fundamentally different from do-as-you-would-be-done-by. Theirs is not simply an expedient or moral act but rather a way of being born out of a recognition of themselves in the Other. Their act of service is not in anticipation of reward, nor an insurance policy set against their own future misfortunes. Their kindness is absolutely grounded in the present moment out of the understanding that such charity is the chief source of meaning in life, that to give is to be enriched and to bestow is to find one’s own place in the world.

Even when the Gods invite Philemon and Baucis to name their own reward they choose to serve in the local temple and to die together. Their focus is still on the other, not because they are morally good but because they realize that their own fulfillment and purpose depends on it.

It’s as though Ovid was anticipating the erosion of the Principle of Relatedness in Western culture and doing his best to forestall it with his simple tale. Had he been able to gauge the extent of this collective regression he might have had more to say. Descartes is not alone in his material dualism. His philosophy extends itself to our entire view of nature from Darwin’s survival of the fittest, a model rooted in the idea of eternal conflict and competition, to Newton’s view of the cosmos as a giant mechanism in which we are all but cogs. By the mid 17th century Western separational philosophy had exiled the soul to the pineal gland and by the 19th century it had been even further demoted to a mere neurotic or hysterical symptom.

Separation from the Other renders that other incomprehensible and therefore a source of fear, insecurity and mistrust. Relatedness sees oneself in the Other which naturally gives rise to care and nurture without the need for moral pressure. Descartes’ narcissistic ‘Cogito’ needs reframing, ‘Estis, ergo sum’. You are, therefore I am. Perhaps James Hillman’s complaint that ‘we have had 100 years of psychotherapy and nothing has changed’, might then be resolved as the artificial unintelligibility of the other is allowed to collapse back into reverential awe and wonder.

Inspired by Satish Kumar’s book, ‘You are, therefore I am.’

Once there was a Poor Man whose sole possession was his horse. He earned his wages by carting others’ goods about. They rode out in all weathers to keep themselves fed and kept. The Poor Man was a kindly sort and loved his horse. One day Horse spoke saying, ‘I know you love me, though my loads are heavy… so I want to help you. Set me free and I will return with the means to change our lives.

The Poor Man was a bit dubious. Would Horse ever come back having tasted freedom? What if something bad happened? How could Horse discover the means to change their lives? After a while the Poor Man began to remind himself that Horse was a noble and good creature who loved him dearly and would not leave him to fend for himself and so he agreed and took off the halter. Horse galloped twice round the yard and then shot off into the forest at high speed, leaving the Poor Man standing there perplexed and in some disbelief at what had just unfolded.

In the forest, Horse found Fox’s lair and lay down in front of it, blocking the entrance. Fox was rather annoyed by this but then thought to herself that there was a lot of prime rib on Horse so she went off to see Wolf and persuaded him to come and help shift the prospective winter stores.

They pushed and pulled and heaved but all to no avail. Eventually Fox persuaded Wolf to tie his tail to Horse’s tail and try to pull him away like that. So they tried and Wolf pulled and the knot got tighter and when it was tight enough Horse leaped up and chased off back to the Poor Man’s cottage at high speed with Wolf howling behind. Wolf’s pelt was sold and with the proceeds a new life began.

If the question, ‘how does consciousness evolve?’ was discussed as fiercely as the straw man of whether we have free will or not, as though we were incapable of paradox, then Psychology might be in a happier state. Something which prevents us thinking about this is that we think we already have the answer. It seems obvious that we evolve by our own efforts. Yet such a point of view is rooted in the idea that the ego is captain of the ship not to mention the delusion that we know what’s best for ourselves.

Our story challenges the prejudice that individuation requires such great heroics. Perhaps Horse speaks to the Poor Man because he is unencumbered by all the trappings of conventional opinion and become sufficiently receptive to hear what Horse has to say.

The transformation of their situation comes about as a result of the Poor Man paying a particular quality of attention to Horse, and making a decision which seems to be against his own self interest. Its decidedly un-heroic and his friends would think he had gone mad.

The Poor Man’s gift seems to be his understanding that he cannot help himself by his own efforts. He has been driving carts for a long time and never makes more than he needs to sustain them both. He realizes Horse is his only hope even though he cannot imagine how. Yet still he obeys some deep impulse to trust Horse, his animal soul, to resolve their situation and sets him free. Horse then journeys in the Underworld where he uses guile and trickery to capture Wolf, the dangerous aspect of the Unconscious and return with his enriching pelt.

Horse seems reminiscent of Pegasus, a spiritualized instinct brought to consciousness by virtue of the hero Perseus paying a a particular kind of reflective attention to Medusa, her reflection in his shield. Buraq, the Islamic Horse, carries the prophet Mohammed through the seven Heavens serving as a bridge between worlds just as Horse in our own story acts as a bridge between the Poor Man and the Forest.

Paying attention is an underrated pastime. Jung described it as the sin qua non, the precondition of transformation..

”If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water.” C.G. Jung, CW 10, p. 163

In an Eastern meditation technique called ‘the Secret of the Golden Flower’, the meditator allows a spontaneous fantasy to evolve in the mind’s eye which, given attention, unfolds by itself revealing a Consciousness which is non-ego, Atman, the Self.

This makes paying attention a big deal. If the Poor Man had tried to go into the forest on his own Wolf would certainly have had him. When the alchemists say, ‘not a few have perished in our work’, they are referring to the ones who went into the forest by themselves, the ones who had not yet come to love Horse and pay attention to her.

Unfortunately paying attention these days is often associated with pedagogical imperatives which can kill off curiosity and wonder. Having to pay attention all too easily becomes a power struggle, taking all the pleasure out of the flowering which occurs when we give out attention to someone or something freely.

The Poor Man is saved by his poverty. He knows he doesn’t have the resources to go into the forest alone. He understands that he is not the agent of transformation unlike many who are convinced that change comes about by mighty effort and determined action. Listening to your hunches, your gut feelings and the taste in the back of your mouth, is sometimes as important.

Perhaps this is why Marie- Louise von Franz says that the success of an analysis rests entirely with the analyst and whether or not they can pay sufficient attention.

Wilhelm’s edition of the I Ching (Hex 61) says that change in even the most difficult situation can be bought about by relatedness, by paying a particular kind of attention.

‘One must first rid oneself of all prejudice and let the psyche of the other person act upon us without restraint, then one will establish contact..’

This might make the Poor Man seem like a passive player in the drama but really his skill is the difficult art of not interfering. His relinquishing control over events has the Taoist quality of Wu Wei, ‘doing nothing’, which is is at the heart of what it means to follow Dao or The Way. According to the Dao De Jing: ‘The Way never acts yet nothing is left undone’.Wu wei doesn’t mean not acting, it means a particular kind of paying attention and not getting in the way.

This kind of receptivity creates change, allows things to unfold. It is to the psyche what warm rain and sunshine are to the garden. The secret seems to be that what prompts Horse to speak at all is the Poor Man’s good heart, his love and respect for the Other, which then enables Horse to act on the Poor Man’s behalf.

One of the most pernicious trends afoot these days, dwarfing even the aggressive stupidity of superpowers, is the embattled ailment between Narcissists and Empaths. FB is full of it. A wide spectrum of social media touts the means to identify the enemy not unlike the tell tale markings attributed to medieval witches. U tube has one video after another on ‘the signs’ of Narcissism, how the evil one operates, gaslights and turns sour the milk of human kindness. There follows a plethora of advice on how to manage, manipulate, arm wrestle and otherwise defeat the wily Narc in a variety of modern stocks and ducking stools. Most amusingly, an arsenal of information on how to know if you are dating one without the least smidgeon of reflection or inquiry into what the attraction might have been in the first place.

At the other end of the spectrum, in an orgy of self fellating congratulation are the sabre rattling virtues of the mighty Empath, noble, self sacrificing and armed with a check list of how to know if you have sufficiently scaled the ramparts of moral goodness. The list is as nauseating as it is long and amounts to the unholy trilogy of denial, splitting and projection which typify our most primitive psychological defenses, responsible for all kinds of interpersonal and collective tragedies.

When I found myself (see how passively that’s phrased) in a relationship with a malignant narcissist (adjective for extra emphasis) I was so distressed and identified with the victim in the equation that I sought out an analyst and dragged myself to the first session armed with kleenex and… a dream. I dreamed that she (the terrible one) was a broomstick, her face vaguely visible in amongst the besoms, which I was flying up through the night sky. My analyst, bless him, sucked his teeth and muttered, ‘well, you are riding her….and there is something witchy going on’.

What I learned over the next months, most painfully, was far from the noble ideal I had that one day my love, being so pure, would penetrate, transform and save this ungrateful wretch. It gradually became apparent that my endless and devout patience, unstinting affection and spiritual devotion intended to redeem the broomstick woman, lifting the spell which had enveloped her, was itself casting a spell, projecting my own dissociated material on to someone whose misfortune it was to be only too happy to receive it.

I discovered in me an anxiety which needed this unpleasant woman in my life to confirm to myself a much preferred image of who I was, in order to identify all the more fully with the polished and virtuous persona of one whom life had treated unfairly, who deserved better, who labored selflessly for the greater good whilst justifying a belly full of bitterness and riteous victimhood.

With her in my life I could sweep all my neurotic and inferior aspects under life’s carpet and ride high on the inflated fantasy that it was all for some great cause. I was saving her soul. My empathy was a super-power. I was on a divine mission.

The fantasy that you can save someone from themselves is like the first missile in a nuclear war. It can only get worse, engulfing both sides in a folie a deux unconsciously bonded together by the shared belief that they are special, rooted in a conviction of personal power sufficient to arm wrestle the other into submission.

The literature is full of dire warnings about how the vulnerable Empath must protect themselves from burn-out, exhaustion and scamming, forgetting that the compulsive driving force to sacrifice themselves is part of their own psychology. The greater part of this tragedy is not simply that the hapless Empath masochistically dashes themselves on the rocks of Narcissistic impenetrability, but that their efforts actually make their partner worse.

If you give your power away the other will become a tyrant. If you massage the other’s ego they will become inflated. If you project the shadow long enough, to paraphrase Jung, it will appear.

The most difficult thing for the Empath is not the terrible treatment thy receive from their grandiose spouse but to get to the bottom of their own moth-to-the-flame insistence in converting others to their own way of thinking as though life depended upon it and to renounce the delusion that their fierce persistence is an expression of love. The Narc/Empath symbiosis is a contract entered into by both parties to consolidate a delicate psyche and renounce the prospect of growth as a price worth paying for the privilege of staying with the devil that you know.

Both parties profit. The Empath gets to recreate the emotional deprivation of early childhood and polishes the strategy of compliance and goodness s/he used to mediate a loveless world while the Narc’ gets to be cast in the familiar and time worn role of ‘the bad one’ who gets to be looked after by one who will find their lack of responsiveness a challenge rather than a turn off. Both get to consolidate their self structure and both get to identify with an omnipotent variant of their otherwise fragile personalities.

Knee jerk sympathy for the tear stained Empath is to fall into a primitive Orwellian, ‘two legs good, four legs bad’, version of reality. Understanding is hobbled by the naive assumption that the poor misguided Empath is simply loving the wrong person that the situation might be resolved by moving on. Not a few comforters are to be found gnashing their teeth in a fury having listened endlessly to the complaints of the muddled moth who, having been persuaded with great effort to quit the flame upon which their wings were singed, just went and found another one burning even brighter.

Any ‘helper’ must begin by asking, ‘what is the nature of the ailment?’ Incorrect assessment renders all subsequent efforts fruitless. If someone is a poor shopper how did they get that hungry? What pain in themselves is ameliorated by focusing eternally on the wounds of others? How does it serve them to believe that some third party is responsible for and preventing their happiness?

The stumbling block, the rock upon which the Empath is broken, is the gut churning realisation that if the Narc’ did not exist they would have to be invented. The term ‘sado-masochism’ is so useful, even before you unpack it, because it denotes a system of interdependence which is lost when Empaths and Narcissists are considered in isolation. Without the Narcissist the Empath would immediately be stripped of righteousness, would have to take back their split off inferiority and renounce omnipotence. This of course is difficult and painful though it is the end of victimhood and enactment giving rise to an experience of the opposites being an inner phenomenon rather than an outer one, a stony path but one which leads to a disentangled wholeness rather than unattainable perfection.

Long ago and far away a king was once going along in his carriage when he overheard a woman by the roadside proclaim that if she was chosen as the king’s bride she would bear him twin sons with hair of gold. He was intrigued and stopped the carriage, inviting her up… They quickly fell in love and were soon married. Before long the new queen was with child..

In the castle there also lived a wicked witch who had long wished that her own ugly daughter would be queen. She was enraged that her plans had been thwarted. When invaders threatened and the king went off to war the new queen did indeed bear him two beautiful boys with golden hair. The witch then stole these infant twins and buried them in the garden, replacing them with two puppies which she then told the king about in a letter. He was so horrified he ordered his bride to be thrown into the sea where she were swallowed whole by a whale which then dived down into the depths of the ocean.

When the grief stricken and remorseful king returned he reluctantly married the witch’s ugly daughter. He then discovered that two golden pear trees had somehow grown up in the castle grounds. He found them quite delightful and liked to sit in there shade, little suspecting their origins. The wicked witch surmised their true nature and had the trees chopped down and burned. A passing goat ate a few leaves before the pyre was consumed and soon gave birth to two golden haired kids.

Again, the witch pounced and ordered the kids to be butchered for the royal table. As their lifeless bodies were being washed in the stream two pieces of their innards turned into golden fish and swam away…

Years passed. One day a fisherman caught a most unusual catch and was doubly surprised when the fish began to speak, offering him a rich reward if only he would let them go free and introduce them to the king. The fisherman released the fish as he was asked and two handsome young men with hair of gold leapt up in their place. They were then bought before the king who was told the whole story of what had happened and that their mother was still captive in the stomach of the whale. The king ordered the whale to be caught and sure enough she was found inside, safe and sound. Everyone was overjoyed except the wicked witch and her daughter who were gruesomely and creatively put to death.

The term ‘shadow-work’ gets bandied about a lot these days with some controversy about what it actually amounts to. Still less obvious is the nature of the shadow itself, except perhaps, that it constitutes unacceptable aspects of the personality, the self we refuse to be, a conglomeration of perceived personal inferiorities or negative qualities. Though he coined the phrase himself, Jung offers us a fairly cursory definition of the shadow, confining himself in the main to discussion about its projection. We are, he says, less good than we imagine ourselves or want to be…

‘Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. Carl Jung

His protege Neumann follows suit. According to him the shadow is a Mr Hyde to the ego’s Dr Jekyll..

‘All those qualities, capacities and tendencies which do not harmonize with the collective values – everything that shuns the light of public opinion,’ Erich Neumann.

Though Jung pays lip service to the idea that creative attributes can also be a part of the shadow his view is generally that it is comprised of all that is socially unacceptable, requiring moral courage to face its shameful contents.

‘The only exceptions to this rule are those rather rare cases where the positive qualities of the personality are repressed, and the ego in consequence plays an essentially negative or unfavourable role. Jung vol 9.

Such definitions presuppose traits and attributes found to be at odds with societal values and summarily repressed. This somewhat fail to take into consideration the effect of traumas which occur earlier than ego formation and therefor without reference to social norms. Moreover, these definitions of the shadow tend to skip over the salient fact that what is most anathema to collective values is precisely our individuality. Thus, what first gets buried in the shadow tends to be comprised of those qualities and potentialities which contribute to a unique sense of self, the golden haired twins.

‘The frightened [infant] cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.” Erich Fromm

What this means is that the shadow, in its first iterations, is primarily made up of a person’s essential nature. What is given up to ensure going-on-being in the earliest years is not so much anti-social traits but our creative potential which is repressed out of the need to preserve the emerging self from repeated unmanageable blows of fate, the invading armies which defeat the king. The wicked witch in our story is the inner counterpart to these outer slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the hostile invaders breaching the nation’s borders. She responds to this attack on the realm by defensively burying the heirs to the kingdom, the personality’s future possibility.

In this way the diabolical figure traumatizes the inner object world in order to prevent re-traumatization in the outer one.‘ Kalsched

In the footsteps of post `Jungian analyst Michael Fordham (Defences of the Self), Donald Kalsched furthers our understanding of the shadow with the contribution that it is far more complex than previously understood. It is rather a complex comprised of an archetypal identification with the aggressor/invader coupled with the forcible encapsulation of the essential self. The wicked witch steals and buries the golden haired princes in the wake of alien conquest and puts her ugly daughter on the throne.

This attacking figure is an internalized version of the actual perpetrator of the trauma, who has “possessed” (invaded) the inner world of the trauma victim, though this diabolical inner figure is often far more sadistic and brutal than any outer perpetrator.’ Kalsched.

The perverse logic of such a malevolent ‘death mother’, to paraphrase Marion Woodman, is to prevent the repetition of trauma.

‘Those who carry the most ferocious manifestation of Death Mother may have been the most creative of children, [but] if there is unconscious hostility in the environment we will do anything to ensure that our life feels safe and secure, even if it is static, rotten, and dead.’ M Woodman.

To this end the wicked witch buries the golden haired princes and supplants their mother with her own ugly daughter, much as Donald Winnicott describes the process of the ‘true self’ being supplanted by the ‘false self’. The ‘true’ queen winds up in the belly of the whale, swallowed up by the unconscious, whilst the ‘false’ queen rules the land from the ego’s castle.

Never again,” says our tyrannical caretaker, “will the traumatized spirit of this child be this helpless in the face of cruel reality…. before this happens I will disperse it into fragments [dissociation], or encapsulate it and soothe it with fantasy [schizoid withdrawal], or numb it with intoxicating substances [addiction], or persecute it to keep it from hoping for life in this world [depression].” … Kalsched

The wicked witch and her daughter draw their power from the instinct for self-preservation itself, misdirected though it may be. As can be seen from our story, they are forces powerful enough to repeatedly kill off the efforts of self-realisation. The popular idea that growth is simply a matter of ‘letting go’ greatly underestimates the spell casting power of the witch and negates the reality of unconscious complexes that may well have you in their grip, against which no amount of ‘letting go’ is ever going to make a blind bit of difference.

Fortunately the golden haired princes are as tenacious as the wicked witch. They morph into ever evasive forms with every effort to kill then off. This motif of twins is interesting and instructive. Jung was of the opinion that the symbolism of twins suggested some creative principle on the cusp of consciousness. Edinger states it more succinctly..

‘The ego destined for individuation is born as twins.’ E Edinger.

Yet in order for this occur there must be some means, already established in consciousness, to facilitate this process. The princes are returned to awareness by the intervention of a particular quality of being, the ordinary fisherman, whose native simplicity is what’s required to redeem the princes and bring them before the king.

Hemingway says of this old man archetype..

‘He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility’. Ernest Hemingway. (The Old Man and the Sea)

Simplicity, as the condition sin qua non for the return of the Princes, is emphasised time and again in the annals of alchemy as being the essential component for the redemption of spirit from matter, ie for the reclamation of unconscious contents.

‘That wo/man is well qualified to complete the work because s/he possesses that which is simple.’ C Jung

and again…

‘that which is nearest to the simplicity of the soul is the bridge to spiritual transformation.’ ibid

The complex is resolved by the simplex.

This somewhat changes how we might traditionally view psychotherapy. Instead of wracking our brains wondering about the origin of anxiety, for example, we might do as the fisherman does and find out what the golden fish want to become. They want to become embodied aliveness. Perhaps anxiety is not so much a projection of guilt or aggression but what simply happens to spontaneous aliveness when it is dismembered and buried out of the need to protect ourselves from further invasion. If life’s excitement cannot be entered into it is going to assume pathological expression. The notion that there is any such thing as a ‘negative’ emotion tends to focus on the eradication of anxiety, or tries to reduce it to a fear of something without asking what the anxiety wants to become, what it’s ‘telos’, its ultimate object or aim, might be.

Of course this is going to be a dangerous process, the king is going to take some convincing. The fisherman’s revelation is going to involve a radicle shift in his mind set and some considerable rewriting of history which will bring with it memories of defeat, realisations of betrayal, confrontation with inauthenticity. Yet these trials seem secondary to those already faced by the persistent twins whose determination for expression, whose lust for life, whose willingness to endure, have already escaped the machinations and transcended the power of the wicked witch.