According to the Arne/Thompson/Utter classification of fairy tales, ‘The Queen Bee’, is among the oldest in oral tradition, stemming from a time before the division of Indo-European languages and perhaps at the dawn of the division of I from Thou.
Three king’s sons went out to seek their fortune. The older two ganged up on the youngest, calling him a simpleton and keeping all the best food for themselves. One day they came to an ant hill. The older boys decided to rip it up and see the ants run about in terror but the Simpleton stood over the nest protectively having allowed himself to imagine what it might be like to have your house torn from the ground by giants.
Further down the road they came to a lake with ducks. The older boys wanted to trap and roast the ducks but the boy could feel how awful it might be to be captured and roasted and so he forbad it.
Further still they came to a tree with wild bees nesting in it. ‘Let’s light a fire under them and smoke them out’, said the older boys but the Simpleton could already experience the choking smoke and the horror of being driven away from home, so he made sure they came to no harm.
At the end of the road was a castle. The king welcomed them with bed and board, though at breakfast the next day he presented the Princes with three challenging tests, saying that if they failed even one they would be turned to stone. The first challenge to the oldest Prince is to find a thousand pearls scattered in the forest by sunset. He finds a mere handful and is turned to stone. The next brother did just as badly the following day and suffered the same fate.
The Simpleton was beside himself with anxiety when his own turn came. He found a few pearls in the morning but as the day wore on the realization gradually dawned that he would never make it. He was doomed. He sat down on a stump and wept. At that moment the King of the Ants, whose life he had saved from giants, turned up with five thousand of his mates. They found the pearls and still had time for tea.
The second test finds our Simpleton at the edge of a pond with a strange array of stone legs sticking out of the water. ‘Guess where the Princess’s crown is thrown in!’ asks the king of the castle gleefully. Of course it was impossible to know but the ducks he’d saved from capture and roasting knew where it was and took him straight to the spot.
The final test was the worst. The Simpleton has to guess which of three identical Princesses had just eaten honey and which sugar or syrup. The Simpleton hasn’t the faintest clue but the Queen Bee of the hive he’d saved from smoke and destruction knew exactly and settled directly on the honeyed lips. The enchantment over the stone figures is thus broken and all return to life.
The capacity to reflect is necessary for more than problem solving. In fact, trying to figure out the tests with his mental prowess brings the Simpleton to despair. What saves him is his feeling connection to others, his capacity to act without thinking at all.
‘What we feel before we can think is a powerful determinant in what kind of things we think when thought becomes possible.’. Jean Liedloff
Thoughtfulness itself is rooted in feeling, the capacity to emotionally connect with another’s need. You could call it the willingness to enter another’s world yet it is equally about being penetrated by it, experiencing the stone in someone else’s shoe as well as taking the trouble to walk a mile in it. The Simpleton is moved to action because he can imagine the other’s fate as his own and allows himself to be impacted by that wounding emotional reality.
The encounter with the inner Other is equally wounding which is why Jung says ‘the experience of the Self is always a blow to the ego’. We speak of conscience being pricked, ego being deflated and being spurred to action. Its not much fun. Increases in consciousness are also attended by disillusionment and the loss of the ‘old outmoded dispensation’. It can paradoxically feel as though everything is being taken away from you, as though you are being destroyed.
‘The Self is the sacrificer, and I am the sacrificed gift, the human sacrifice.’ C G Jung
The Principle of Relatedness requires something more of us than reaching out. It requires a willingness to be impinged upon. It is not enough to give. We have to sacrifice something of ourselves in order to endure being penetrated by the emotional reality of the other.
This sacrifice is of one’s own security, the narcissism of self sufficiency. It lays bear your dependence, your vulnerability and incompleteness. The getting naked of ‘letting in’ is very different from the armored resolve of ‘letting go’, or its addictive cousin, ‘giving up’. It involves renouncing the desire to be normal and then the wish to be the author of oneself, not to mention the omnipotence of having the answer to everything.
I dreamed an alien queen was coming to Earth and it was up to me to provide Her with the right environment. She breathed an atmosphere which was nitrogen rather than oxygen based. I worked hard at it and when she arrived she seemed reasonably satisfied. I am too terrified to look at her. ‘Very good’, she says, ‘now, why should I keep you alive?’ Years of ducking and diving, dodging and weaving, came to my rescue, ‘to be of further service to your majesty.’
It might seem like arse licking but it felt like an ethical decision. It was necessary to adopt a propitious attitude in order to move forward despite my lose of status and authorship. She came with the authority of imperative.
‘Out of the natural state of identity with what is ‘mine’, there grows the ethical task of sacrificing oneself, or at any rate the part of oneself which is identical with the gift.’ C G Jung
When I was a kid growing up in Africa a bunch of us had gone down to the River Mchabezi on a summer’s day and dared one another to swim up to the weir and touch the wall whilst a foot of over-spill crashed down from the recent rains. The youngest of our party hadn’t the body mass to sustain the hit and he was swept out of sight. The seconds ticked by. I could feel him, pinned to the bottom of the river bed by the waterfall, stuck like a bug in syrup.
I dove in and swam the four meters down to the bottom boulders, feeling around in the churning water. Eventually, lungs bursting, I found a flailing arm and pulled him out. What I remember most is that when he thanked me for saving his life I couldn’t let it in and pretended not to hear what he had said.
I could not let myself be penetrated by his gratitude for the sake of staying with a fragile self structure still split between the omnipotence of being all things to all men on the one hand and a bumbling fool on the other. I could let in the drowning boy’s distress sufficient to save him but not the thanks which might confer new identity upon me, which might peg the event as remarkable. I could rescue him but not myself. So for years the feelings connected to that day had to be denied and with them, paradoxically, the values associated with courageous action. My own bravery was pushed into the shadows so as not to be wounded by the enormity of what had just happened.. so as to minimize the contradictory expectations of a mother who felt heroics were simply expected of me and a father who felt I couldn’t possibly be up to the task.
Letting the other in, whether it be the emotional reality of a third party or the marginalized self of your own inner world has a reorganizing effect on the personality which might well experience moments of its own developmental initiation as being agonizingly intruded upon.
The Simpleton allows himself to be transfixed like this, both by the distress of the creatures on the road and then by his own honest despair at the impossible tasks set for him by the king.
Once this has been endured, the piercing contents of the Unconscious become useful. They mobilize themselves to compensate the ego’s felt lack and insufficiency giving him not only a moral compass but also material assistance. The Kalahari Bushman identifies with his quarry to track it once the spoor has disappeared. A parent may respond to dangers it is consciously unaware of because it is identified with the child. Lovers anticipate one another’s needs because their psyches as well as their bodies have interpenetrated and so there is a flow of information between their inner worlds which exists beyond what is said or gestured.
Sometimes such knowing can be inconvenient. I once fainted on a military parade ground and had to be carried off to the medics tent. The doctor looked me over, sucked his teeth, then asked, ‘do you have a girlfriend?’ ‘Yes’ , I said. ‘Is she pregnant? he asked. ‘Err, I don’t think so. Why?’ ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘you have the worst case of morning sickness I have ever seen.’
