The story of Rapunzel begins with her father stealing the herb Rampion from a witch’s garden for his wife’s pregnancy cravings. He is caught and the witch demands the child yet to be born in payment. She locks the child in a tall airless tower without company or stimulus. The witch visits by climbing up her long tresses having called out..
‘Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your golden hair…’
A passing Prince overhears all this and becomes curious. Once the witch is gone he calls out…
‘Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your golden hair…’
and is soon cooing sweet nothings with Rapunzel who, before long, is visibly pregnant. In a later iteration of Grimm’s story, toned down somewhat for a delicate audience, Rapunzel complains about the Witch’s weight, saying she is heavier than the Prince. Either way her secret is betrayed. The Witch cuts off her hair and banishes her to a far off desert spot where she had to live, ‘in great grief and misery’. Meantime the oblivious Prince arrives at the foot of the tower and calls out..
‘Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your golden hair…’
The witch lets down the severed locks and corners the Prince once he has climbed up. ‘Aha’ screeches the witch, ‘ you would fetch your dearest but the bird sits no longer upon the nest. The cat has got her and will scratch out your eyes as well. Rapunzel is lost to you and you will never see her again.”
Some versions of the story have the Prince throwing himself from the tower in despair, others have the witch shove him out. Either way he is blinded by the vicious thorns which grew about as he fell to earth. He is compelled, like Oedipus, to wander as a blind beggar for many years.
One day, in a remote desert place he hears someone singing. He recognizes the voice. Yes! It really is Rapunzel who runs to him, splashing his face with hot tears which magically restore his sight.
And so they all lived happily ever after, except the witch, who hears about the news and is crushed by the agony that Rapunzel and the Prince have found contentment despite her best efforts.
How does this all happen? Not by heroic effort. The protagonists are miserable wretches, a suicidal blind man and a beggar woman whose sin is no greater than wanting to be fully alive.
If sin is to be apportioned it belongs with the thieving father who hasn’t the balls to knock on the witch’s door with his cap in his hand and his shoes shined, all creased up with worry whilst he asks ever so politely if he might have a handful of Rampion for his dear pregnant wife for which they would both be eternally grateful. And what might he do for her by way of recompense…ma’am.
So the young lovers are paying for the sins of the fathers. Rapunzel loses her thoughtful tresses. My analyst Chuck told me he often cropped up in people’s dreams as their barber, shaping what came out of people’s heads. But the witch does not come to Rapunzel as an alchemical hair dresser. She is an envious mother complex determined to sever her from her own thoughts and ideas. Moreover her Prince is blind and lost.
The counterpoint to the heroic story is Fate’s intervention when all hope is gone. The ancient Greeks called it ‘Enantiodromia’, when things turn into their opposite because of the extremity of the situation.
Another way of saying this is that the psyche is an autonomous self-regulating system which doesn’t care too much about the intentions of the personality. In fact, it’s likely to oppose the personality if it gets too out of whack, too one sided. What this means is that extreme situations constellate the tendency for a counter intuitive outcome. Stuff that shouldn’t happen does. Its chaos theory at work from one point of view, the intervention of the Gods from another.
Last month a Chechen rebel leader was assassinated by a Putin operative in broad daylight as he took a stroll through a leafy park in Berlin, within walking distance of Angela Merkel’s office. Whilst news pundits focus on the repercussions for international relations and discuss the ramifications of totalitarian hitmen operating freely in democratic capitals, there is an element of the story so dreamlike it might give cause for hope despite the circumstances.
The killer did not get away. Against all the odds, he was caught, not because of any counter intelligence operation or outstanding police response but because the killer was so wrapped up in the theatrics of his secret agent identity that he entirely bungled his escape.
This is how it happened. The killer, ‘Vladimir Sokolov’, approached his victim from behind on a bicycle. He put two bullets into the back of his head with a 9mm Glock 25 and then sped away. So far so good. Assassination successful, killer pedaling away at twenty miles an hour and already out of sight. What could go wrong?
Everything had proceeded according to plan. Only the worst kind of luck could now ensnare the killer; well, that and his own unconscious processes, his secret need to gild the lily. Apparently, Vlad was not happy with the mere success of his mission. He wanted more of a story to tell, one more about flair than it is about murder, one that will make people shake their heads and mutter, ‘what a guy’.
So, two hundred meters from the scene of the crime, he gets off his bike and ditches it dramatically into the river Spree, blind to the several onlookers, followed by his wig, the pistol and a bag of Paprika just in case any sniffer dogs were out for a swim that day. Then he dove into some bushes and began to strip, changing into a pink t-shirt and sandals plus fake mustache during which time the police had arrived and bust him as he was making his 4mph denoument on a kiddies scooter.
Police recovered an authentic Russian passport made out to a fake name and address which immediately pegged him as an FSB operative. He was carrying proof of being a Russian agent, whilst conducting a political hit on German soil. Its like carrying a go to jail forever card.
Justice was served, not by heroic action or valiant effort, but by the unerring tendency of criminal activity given free reign to still somehow fuck itself up, or to evoke forces which will happily do it for them.
‘The Psyche does not merely react. It gives its own specific answers to the influences at work upon it.” C G Jung
This is what lies behind the calamity of Trump off the auto cue, he goes on auto pilot, seemingly egotistical but actually being progressively sabotaged by his own complexes. He passes it off as bullish aggression but it is actually self destruction. The principle of Enantiodromia can be seen perpetually at work. Every time he opens his mouth he makes enemies and offends some block of his own voters.
Just days after the unanimously unpopular gesture of inviting the Taliban to Camp David on the eve of 9/11, he holds off the economic disaster of Chinese tariffs for the worst possible reason, the 70th grand anniversary of communist dictatorship. You couldn’t make it up. Still less might you believe that, rather than bluster, its actually Trump’s unconscious working hard to make sure that he fails in his stated endeavour, in order to balance the scales of his inner world.
The Psyche is self regulating. Those who will not be contained from without, who feel that they are above the law, will be contained from within by the autonomous Psyche which is effectively trying to heal a cramp in the personality deemed to be living too narrow an existence. This is why corrupt person’s will always say and do all the things designed to get them caught. Slips of the tongue and physical tells work against conscious intention. Strange encounters, million to one chances, like the recent American operative who had to be extracted from the Kremlin having had the chance to photo Putin’s desk with documents related to the election meddling sat right on it. Own goals and corrosive gaffs from out of the blue begin to provide the checks and balances otherwise unavailable.
The Principle of ‘Enantiodromia’ compensates Rapunzel and the Prince for the witch’s efforts to deny them life. Sokolov had his pretensions compensated with humiliating capture. Trump cannot help but shoot himself in the foot. None of which is to say that individual efforts are ever wasted. Sometimes it might seem as if you have to wander in the dark for ever and endure being cut off and cast out. Yet it is precisely these experiences of suffering or inflation that evoke the Gods attention, manifest as Grace or the Raven’s Claw respectively, which descends by itself and when least expected.
