In Olden Times, when wishing still helped .. there lived a King with a radiant daughter. Their castle lay hard by a great Forest, within which there was a cool well. On a warm summer’s day the Princess would go and play by the well with her golden ball, a favorite plaything. One day the ball fell in the water and was suddenly swallowed up. She sat there crying when up popped a massive, bloated Frog..
‘Do not weep… I can help you, but what will you give me?’
‘Whatever you please, my pearls and jewels, even my crown…’
‘Er, actually, what I really want is just that you love me.. and be my companion.. and play-fellow.. and sit by you at table.. and eat from your plate.. and drink from your cup.. and sleep in your bed…..and..’
The Princess agrees without thinking too much past the ease with which she has already resolved to duck out of their arrangement. Frog retrieves the golden ball and with scarcely a thought the Princess runs off, leaving him behind. Later that evening at dinner and having quite forgotten the incident there comes a great banging at the castle gate..
‘Princess, open the door, I come to claim on your promise.’
The Princess is freaked out and explains what has happened to her father …’ and now he is outside there, and wants to come into me…’
The King insists she keep her word and Frog is let in. He heaves himself up onto the table and begins to feast from the Princess’ golden plate, slurping from her silver cup until he is quite bloated. ‘Now take me to your bed, where we will lie down together…’
The Princess was horrified but the King insists, so she took him in two fingers and put him in a corner of her bedroom.
‘No, no, in bed with you.’
At which point something splintered and broke in the Princess. She picked up the Frog and threw him against the wall with all her might. A scream of rage and a sickening splat. ‘Now, will you be quiet, odious Frog…’
Suddenly, in place of Frog stood a handsome Prince who explained that a wicked witch had cast a spell on him but that he had been redeemed by the Princess’ actions. Next day a carriage arrives to carry them off to his kingdom together. The coach is driven by Iron Henry, the Prince’s faithful companion who had placed iron bands around his heart in lament at the cursing of the Prince. Now they break free one after the other with such a cracking as to think the carriage had broken, so great was his happiness.
Our story begins ‘when wishing still helped’, when ego development is still so nascent that fantasy and reality are still all mashed up, when inner and outer events can still happily trade places.
The Golden Ball reminds us of that unity of personality we had as children, before we split into male and female, rich and poor, good and bad.’ R Bly
When the golden ball is lost undifferentiated oneness has reached its sell by date. Blissful as ignorance may be it has to be lost and when something finally does come along which is decidedly Other, it can come as a shock. The Princess first encounter with Not-Me is in the form of this primal, cold blooded demon lover whose demands feel humiliating and intrusive. The ego is deposed from its place of primacy in the psyche by something which seems as hideous as it is autonomous.
Frog represents the dangerous, engulfing, devouring aspect of the unconscious. He is reminiscent of the Medieval ‘Incubus’ a demon spirit which sexually possesses while you sleep, a graphic representation of being helpless and overwhelmed by unrelatable forces.
There’s something inevitable about this. The constellation of ‘me’ depends upon an emerging sense of ‘not-me’, that which we differentiate from. This is bound to involve a sense of disgust and revulsion; or perhaps as incomprehensible intrusion so brilliantly portrayed at the opening of the movie, ‘The Hobbit’ when all the Dwarfs come crashing through Bilbo’s door and suddenly life is utterly disrupted.
The Princess feels persecuted by developments, not least of all because her father rigidly insists on her keeping her word despite, like Eve before her, being quite unable to grasp the true consequences of her actions. Perhaps her mother is absent because she too got gobbled up or cast in the sea with millstones around her neck. Whatever the truth, Princess has no advocate in her father who simply intones the word of the law in an unrelated kind of way and fails to mediate or plead with Frog. He’s uninvolved and so Princess is thrown back on her own resources like Gretel in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ who has to circumvent her adaptive ‘good girl’ identity by pushing the engulfing witch into the oven.
Sometimes Frog has to be kissed, sometimes he has to be squashed. Perhaps the important thing is that Princess is emotionally involved in some kind of visceral way. Both the kissing and the splatting of Frog entail breaking a taboo, operating outside the rule book, being the author of independent action, being visible with her instincts.
Hate makes sure we do not abdicate our own point of view. If an encounter with the unconscious is to serve the ego then it must not be by way of the latter’s blind adherence. Psychiatrist and analyst Roberto Assagioli says of the crisis caused by spiritual awakening,
‘no validity should be attributed to messages [from the unconscious] containing definite orders and commanding blind obedience’.
The Princess must use her own instinctive discrimination in the face of overwhelming threat for the transformation of the indiscriminate Frog to take place, for him to become humanized and useful.
‘The first ego organization comes from the experience of threats of annihilation which do not lead to annihilation and from which, repeatedly, there is recovery.”
D. Winnicott.
If hatred is love grown angry then any philosophy of life prejudicial to hate, or that regards it as ‘negative’ is also against love’s frustrated yearning. To silence hate is to quash the hope that love might be forthcoming. The Princess’ actions are in expectation of a fairer deal, an expression of the desire to be loved that does not involve her extinction.
‘Hatred, I consider, is just a standing reproach to the hated
person, and owes all its meaning to a demand for love. Ian Suttie
In order to make such a demand you have to feel worthy of it. The splatting of Frog is angry insistence on her own loveableness which refuses utter subjugation, reserves the right to self determination… and therefor transforms the situation.
This flowering of the feminine ego releases the masculine principle from its less differentiated and purely instinctive iteration into something more relatable and resourceful. The psyche itself evolves in response to the ego daring to be itself, warts and all.
Being good does not bring about transformation. The emphasis on following the rules makes an empty vessel of us in which the golden ball will roll around interminably.
‘There are two tragedies in life, not getting what you want and getting it.’ Oscar Wilde.
So there’s something just as bad as the encounter with Frog and that is never to meet him at all, never to find the transformative value of ‘Yuk!’ or shed the restriction of being bound by kingly approval. The impact of this on the psyche at large is emphasized by the curious detail at the end of the story of Iron Henry, the faithful servant of Frog and mediator between worlds, a Hermes, whose joy at Princess discovering herself and transforming his master is celebrated by spontaneously breaking the constrictions around his heart.
