Author: andywhite

Psychotherapist/writer/artist/ author of, 'Going Mad to Stay Sane', a psychology of self-destructiveness, about to come into its third edition. Soon to be printed for the first time, 'Abundant Delicious.. the Secret and the Mystery', described by activist Satish Kumar as, ' A Tao of the Soul'. This book documents the archetypal country through which the process of individuation occurs and looks at the trials and tribulations we might expect on the way. In the meantime..... Narcissisim is the issue of our age. This blog looks at how it operates, how it can damage and how we may still fruit despite it.

On Having no Choice.

Being above the Law and “Having no Choice”, have something in common. They both absolve a person of accountability, which is the essential condition for any public office. And if one cannot pardon oneself for ones own crime then the next best thing is not to be responsible for it in the first place.

Curiously, the legal test for a criminal insanity plea rests precisely on this issue of whether or not a person can help themselves,

“arguing that the defendant is not responsible for their actions due to an episodic or persistent psychiatric disease at the time of the criminal act.” wiki

but what does it mean, not to be able to help oneself, to have no choice?

Does it mean acting instinctively is a psychiatric condition?

Probably not. And then there is the conundrum that stating you had no choice, is the end result of reasoned consideration. Which doesnt make sense.

and it doesnt have to, which is precisely the joy of being unaccountable. Its a moral version of not filing your taxes. Not only can you shoot someoneon fifth avenue and get away with it. You can poop your pants and nobody on the bleachers will say a word.

Not being responsible for the consequences is a threat parents sometimes use to get junior to tidy his room, but not before his brother made him punch him in the head and trash the room to hell some more.

And so the worst of all scenarios is that the pudgy little digit on the button feels absolved of its actions. Disocciated. It couldnt help itself. It was compelled by some rogue pinky.

The problem is not a massively inflated ego, though it is a useful disguise of posturing competance, but that there is only the most tenuous internal cohesion held together by regular doubling down displays.

So the problem is that the decision to Nuke Korea is made by the part of him that also says it is not his responsibility. Unfortunately, “the devil made me do it” is not an empty get out of jail free card. Watching the reality TV show of absolute power corrupting absolutely you can observe the process of degenerative ego functioning. A recent speech at Fort Myers contained regards sent by his wife who was stood right next to him…..

The reality of the Deep State is out of the closet. Most folk know that no matter who you vote for the government and wealth get in, that politicians are the grey uniformed lackeys of Overlords who dont get out much….

it can be like that in the individual soul. The evicerated ego can become a kind of puppet, a golum for the Denizens of the unconscious that have their own agenda and the power to erode a mans critical faculties.

Its dangerous enough when the infantile part of a person grabs the wheel and starts dictating events. “He made me do it” gets fuelled with babyish rage and pretty soon you are all over the road.

The problem is that its not just the babyish part of a man that threatens his ego integrity. Jane Goodalls recent compared the antics of our Great Leader with the dominance rituals of chimpanzees..

“In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: Stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks.”

Her words are echoed by others in the Chimp hood..

“The top male essentially goes berserk and starts screaming, hooting, and gesticulating wildly as he charges toward other males nearby. Trump’s incendiary tweets are the human equivalent of a charging display.” Prof Dan McAdams.

And if that were not enough, the Chimps are in the safer end of the jungle which is full of all kinds of archetypal forces.

I have just seen a video clip on FB of a cop gunning down a man outside a convenience store for resisting arrest..

Someone commented, “getting up in that aggressive way was what got him shot”. The cop didnt kill him. He killed himself. And perhaps the man who pulled the trigger believed that too, that he was simply witness to a suicide. The fact that he calmly emptied a clip of seven rounds into his chest at point blank range had nothing to do with him. It was his time.

When I commented, she said, “oh, well you have never been in that situation”, and I replied, “actually I have”, she responded, “then you should be more understanding.”

and there is the double bind of those that are no longer constrained by Principle of Relatedness. Things not making sense becomes a pious incomprehension of the Will of God in whose mighty Right Arm, you are now his Instrument.

The psycho beat cop, the bent Senator, the orchestrated oppression of the People is about more than greed. Its not just about angry babies stuffing themselves from the cookie jar, or mere hooting primates, they are also filled with the light of messianic riteousness, Wotan personified.

The God who had no choice.

and its better than coke.

Of course Wotan wishes to live in the natural freedom signified by the Rhinegold..

“but cannot because if he does his power as a ruler will be destroyed along with the order on which his authority is based.” S. Williams.

Wotan, God of Doubling Down.

God of War.

The End is Nigh, Again.

Apparently, tommorow is supposed to be the End of the World.

I hope you have packed your things.

The curious thing about Doomsday prophecies is not simply the supreme consistency with which they have all been wrong thus far…

…but that being eternally wrong doesnt deter people from further speculation. You begin to suspect that there is more going on than fear of God or Death. The fervour with which such things are peddled suggests something more interesting than Eternal Damnation is afoot.

But what could it be?

Having folk forever examining their consciences on the premise that the earth is imminently about to open up and swallow them whole, is a good way of keeping potential miscreants in line. Its also got to make you feel pretty damned important to be there at the time. You would be eligible for a free T-shirt, “Armaggedon, I was There”, with a skull and cross bones motif, just to show how hard you are.

You might give legitimate consideration to the thought that there is just a little passive aggression in exaggeratedly running about to dodge a falling sky, or loudly announcing that Gods Wrath will be visited on Teatime.

Its scary. Nursery will never be the same again.

Perhaps membership of an Apocalyptic Cult fills some unacknowledged need that attending church socials just doesnt quite cut. Meet and Greet is hardly as punchy as having ringside seats to the Final Reckoning.

They do say that giving a person news on their imminent demise has a somewhat invigorating effect on the psyche. Having your time left measured by a wristwatch can be positively galvanising.

Maybe if we were to look at individual responses to knowing the exact time of their own death we might get some insight into this collective phenomenon of being eternally preoccupied with the End of the World..

and not just because we can now do that to ourselves…

Convicted criminals whose countdown to the rope or the chair comes close to the catastrophic expectation of a collision with Planet X or the vengeful fires of Yahwehs wrath.

How prisoners face their end seems to be the same the world over. They obsess about food and need more than usual amounts of bathroom time. The famous last meal is our human response to the helplessness and horror of being dragged towards a death that someone or something has arranged for you.

Sometimes the prisoner comforts themselves with something that reminds them of home and childhood. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber wanted mint chocolate chip ice cream. Ricky Ray Rector wanted Pecan Pie he decided to save for later. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy went the whole hog and had shrimp, a bucket of KFC chicken, fries and several pounds of strawberries.

The exception to the rule seems to be Victor Fueger, hung in Iowa at the age of 28, who asked for a single unpitted olive, though, to be fair, it was in the hope that the olive would grow into a tree above his grave as a symbol of peace….

So human response to death being a tad more concrete than at-some-point-in-time is to feast and comfort themselves in any way they can. Eat, drink and make merry for tomorrow you die.

The main difference between the convict being marched down the Green Mile and the End Timers is that the folk all dressed in white gathering on the hillside at dawn of the appointed day are all really glad to be there.

Why?

Because if you are riteous and sorry and about to die but still somehow out and about on your own recognizance you might feel entitled to be exempted from the rules for a spell. After all, it is a special occasion.

And so it makes you wonder if our preoccupation with having life cut short represents a secret need to be momentarily freed of the repressive attitudes that cannot help but lurk beneath first-and-only. A wish for some brief respite from the Treadmill and all the life denying rules and expectations that go with it. A need to eclipse whatever it is that promotes meanness, that taboos tenderness and intimacy. Something both to mend and to remember the trauma of being ripped from the Great Mother.

After all, what does your town do if you are all convinced the world ends tommorow? You forgive your enemies, make love and party till dawn.

The Lure of Automatic Pilot.

Pizza Hut have bought out a trainer. Embossed on the tongue of the shoe is a button that you can press to order pizza. It sends out a GPS location to your nearest convenient franchise and..

boom..

pepperoni at your fingertips.

In Greek mythology the magical shoes were Hermes department. He had a pair of winged sandals that allowed him to pass between Olympus and the Mortal Plane. The magical shoes mediated between worlds just as they did for Dorothy in her travels between Kansas and Oz.

Very handy.

The capacity to mediate between worlds with enchanted footwear is the nub of a developmental stage in childhood characterized by symbol formation which magically uses transitional objects to manage the gap between Self and Other. It is the essential condition for passing from “first-and-only”, wherein hell is other people, to “being-amongst-others”, where we not only learn to tolerate otherness but are redeemed by it.

“You are therefor I am.” Satish Kumar.

This shift of perspective, is from what the Gnostics called “hylic consciousness”, It comes from the Greek “hyle”, meaning husk, the unnourishing and winnowed part of an ear of wheat and is characterized by the person who simply lets themselves live without reflection or enquiry…

” He takes life as it comes and does not worry about the problem of meaning, its worth or its purpose. He devotes his time to the satisfaction of personal desires, enjoyment of the senses, riches, ambition.” R. Assagioli.

Transition from ego as landlord to the experience of no longer being master in ones own house is expressed in the Alchemical tradition as “the problem of three and four”.

..as taxing as divvying up a pizza between an odd number of people..

because three into four wont go. The conscious mind and the denizens of the deep Psyche are like oil and water. Making it across a threshold that demands acknowledgement and valuing of the Other without being swallowed up by them..

and with Pizza trainers instead of Hermes sandals for help…

is a way more tricky business than you might imagine..

“Not a few have perished in our work.” Alchemical saying.

A modern fairytale that expresses this sense of crisis and shows how it is resolved comes from an unexpected source, Robocop.

The hero Murphy has his humanity stripped from him and is largely reduced to robotic functioning, a fate suffered by many who adopt the first-and-only stance because it…

” contains the archetypal, omnipotent, defensive and mechanical, as well as the manipulative and destructive nature of Robot.” Lederman

The robot adaptation of the narcissistic character is, however, not entirely negative. Robocop can be redeemed by a combination of two factors. One is that his partner, Lewis, continuously reflects his humanity back to him. Her unflagging faith that he is in there somewhere gives him the courage to explore his obscure situation. Second, he finds his own dramatic solution to the problem of three and four.

Robocop has three protocols, 1) Uphold the law. 2) Serve the public trust. 3) Protect the innocent. As you might expect in any fairystory there is a hidden fourth directive which is entirely incommensurable with the first three..

Do not rise up against your masters.

Becoming conscious of this contradiction throws Murphy into turmoil. The law must be upheld… depending on who is involved. Serve the public trust, for as long as it serves the masters to do so. Protect the innocent, if its expedient…

Murphy realises hes been forced into a catch 22 situation that he cant win. Unless.. he plunges his hands into a massive electric generator that wipes out his programming but also nearly kills him.

Wright speaks of,

“the traumatic birth of self-consciousness, erupting into the still intact (and mechanical) symbiosis with mother.”

Realising that you harbour hidden and contradictory injunctions is shocking. Rewriting the inner script means first realising that you are being run from within by something so old, so habitual, so not-self that you can lose sight of its operation.

Folk simply clank through the day on automatic pilot fulfilling ancient expectations which may once have ensured survival but now serve the demoted purpose of simply keeping oneself on an even keel, maintaining the comfort zone, making sure reality does not intrude or question the preferred construct.

People will go to extraordinary lengths to keep the automatic pilot going because what they are up against is not a mere addition of information, another nut for the store house, but a shift of paradigm that threatens to bring the storehouse down.

Be careful what you wish for…

A good example of this is the story of Hiroo Onoda a Japanese soldier who continued to fight WW11 untill 1972 in the Phillipine jungles. He did this because he absolutely refused to believe that Japan could have surrendered. It was inconceivable. Surrender was more ignoble than suicide, something he had been expressly ordered against. Could his superiors be any the less accountable?

And so he fought on.

Many people have an inner Hiroo, an old soldier still fighting yesterdays battles, disrupting the present with archaic material, fused to the Motherland, crushing the possibility of change or anything unscripted.

Over the years great efforts were made to persuade him that the war was over. Leaflets were dropped, photos and newspaper articles, all regarded by Hiroo as propaganda, fake news.

He was finally persuded only by hearing of Japans surrender from the lips of his own commanding officer, Major Taniguishi.

“Suddenly everything went black. A storm raged inside me. What had I been doing for all these years?” Hiroo Onoda.

Hiroo got a big shock, but he also went on to become a philanthropist and even donated some of his considerable back pay to local Phillipine projects as well as setting up a school Japan.

Many folk never get out of the Jungle. They remain omnipotently fused with the mother/land, content with the replacment of their autonomy by rows of endless choice, something to keep you occupied, hey, how about these new shoes you can get. They order pizza.

When Hate trumps Love..

Love hurts for a number of obvious reasons, the sudden prospect of loss through mere parting, through to real abandonment or betrayal. Worst of all, perhaps, the ardent striving of till-death-do-us-part which really does end at the mouth of an open grave.

But there is a hurt to Love we are generally more reluctant to admit, one that makes us ambivalent in our quest. Failing to address this knotty undermining of our own efforts to love and be loved makes it seem as though all these impediments to happiness come from outside,

from unfair stuff happening…

and wicked others.

Fessing up to the fact that you subvert your own goals and aspirations is a perplexing and deflating experience. There is something in the mix that the rational mind has failed to take into consideration..

And it is this…

” the meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.” C G Jung

Conversing converts.

Intercourse interrupts.

Love hurts because who you think you are dies with the experience, along with stuff you thought was important but isnt. Being bent into a new shape, having your sense of self deconstructed by Cupids arrow, is as much a crisis of identity as it is expansive liberation precisely because your borders are suddenly stretching over different parts of the map.

“Each becomes an object of knowledge and perception by the other, which has a wounding or violating effect.” E Edinger.

This deters us from reaching out with all the instinctual urgency of self-preservation. Reaching in…. to previously unknown aspects of Self, is just as dubious a prospect since such Unknowns have a way of rewriting our scripts and job descriptions. Its far more tempting to convince yourself that the Other is whatever you already know of it and that you are the captain of your ship.

Love also requires that we keep our mouths shut. I was impressed by a line in a case history by analyst and author Nina Coltart where her client thanked her for all the things she didnt say.

Hate is a lot easier. It requires little regulation of oneself and sports the dual benefits of both eradicating anxiety and cementing identity.

Purveyors of Hate are selling something very attractive, the kind of knowing-who-you-are and certainty of purpose denied to Love who is fretful, perplexed, bewildered.

Though Hate is most often..

“the wish to destroy that which cannot be controlled or dominated.” Otto Kernberg.

a balanced veiw has to include the possibility that Hate is not entirely destructive. The Greek story of Hephaestus, thrown from Olympus by a hating Hera, tells of a Being betrayed on all sides and physically disabled by the violence of his youth, yet he becomes the greatest of all craftsmen, his smithing arts and jewellery known throughout the world.

So Hate can be transformed. It can be forged and hammered into something else. Why? Because it generally started out being part of a legitimate situation that only latterly gets expressed inappropriately and out of context.

The problem with the way Malignant Narcissism hates, is its need to do so. Hate is used as the glue to hold oneself together and to adhere oneself to others without having to be changed in the process. You can have your corndog and eat it….though the fine print in such a generous offer involves you being eternally driven from within.

Analyst Guntrip quotes from a patient, “I can only keep myself going by hating, I cant stop fighting, I wont give it up. I cant give in. I feel I will lose everything if I do”.

It becomes imperative not to experience the worth of others. In fact, the worth of others humiliates me, casts me down. You cannot be smart without me being stupid. You cant be beautiful without saying I am ugly. Your brightness besmirches me..

and so Im gonna get you back.

The Narcissistic character must destroy outwardly in order to co-here inwardly because his Ontological security is rooted in antagonism..

and because I like to be offensive.

What he refuses to entertain, the delights of affrontery notwithstanding, is that he does so in order not to be a separate and autonomous person with his own ledger, with his own life to live and death to die. He affronts to remain little. Babies say anything. He does this by attributing all the goodness, youth and aliveness of others to himself. He sucks the life out of the world so that he can remain omnipotntly identified with the Good, which means that others must be actively turned into things, deprived of the qualites that comprise personhood, deprived even of legality and citizenship.

You cannot belong..

why should you, if even with my Billions I feel that I do not?

How Baboon got his Butt.

Back in the Before Time, Zebra was pure white. He was also the meanest, most ornery crittur in the bush. He liked to set the other animals against each other because it made him feel good. He liked to order them about and tell them in what parts of the forest they could and could not travel..

White as white he was..

Whenever he felt bored or insecure he would dream up some new piece of persecution to divert himself for a moment. This meant that the animals avoided him and so he became even more bored and insecure.

“There has to be a way to pick up a quarrel with the animals… I have to find a place where they all go to and then find a way to annoy them,” he muttered to himself as he stood all alone on the grassy plains.” Kalas Ambasivan.

So he went down to the waterhole where all the animals had to drink and lay in wait for them. When they arrived he leapt out with unrestrained glee, ” Ho, you stupid creatures, don’t you dare go near the water. Its Mine.”

“May we drink from your water?” asked one of the animals timidly.

“No, Never!” replied the haughty Zebra. “All forest resources are for Zebra, first and only…

” But you don’t need to own everything,” continued the foolish creature.

“Silence,” commanded Zebra. “that is fake news.”

Then Baboon stepped forward..

” What if I refuse? ”

“Ha!” yelled Zebra, delighting at the prospect of a fight. “You cannot attack me,” And he built a boma of wooden branches around himself as a protective wall which he then set alight to intimidate everyone.

But Baboon was unafraid. He sailed over the burning branches onto Zebras back. It was the last thing Zebra expected. His own cowardice could not countenance the prospect that Baboon could act in such a spontaneous and unselfconscious way.

And even though Baboon was burned and pummeled and kicked till his arse turned blue he managed to unseat Zebra and bring him crashing down into the burning branches where the singe marks have remained to this day.

Baboon does something spontaneous and authentic.

He is wounded in the process.

But he is victorious.

Being burned from behind is a metaphor of betrayal. It means acknowledging not only the reality of the impact of Zebras actions on the lives of the forest animals, but also of their own collusion. Avoiding him on the forest trails, failing to speak out, turning a blind eye to intimidation, are all the passive acceptance of pretending things aren’t so bad and that threats to freedom will just go away.

And yet betrayal is something that appears to be fundamental to life. The idyll of primal innocence has to be lost and the shadows in everything faced. Zebra has no shadow as yet. He is pure white. Which is why he is so dangerous. He doesn’t believe himself capable of dark stripes, so he has no watch on his own wickedness. Wisdom is not knowledge of stuff, its consciousness of ones own darkness, enough to make you alert and wary in an empty room.

“When alone, behave as if in company. When in company, behave as if alone.” Zen Proverb.

Betrayal is a kind of necessary evil, and perhaps the bullying white Zebras of this world too. They help us to find what we are made of, the testing of ones spirit being also the fuel that makes it grow.

Adversity somehow drags authentic response from the soul and though Baboon gets burned for the privilege, he does more than cast a ballot. He defies the firey wall.

His blue bum is an expression of authentic life. You cant fake a massive blue arse or its meaning. What you see is what you get. As indicators of sexual receptivity and tribal seniority they continuously advertise what is actually going on. No fake news in baboon culture.

So Baboon manages to bring Zebra down not by the co-ordinated effort of collective might but by his own spontaneous and individual action.

Its easy to feel overwhelmed by your own insignificance. Its something Zebra counts on. You imagine you have no power because you are just one person. Yet every act of courage begins with one person refusing to buy into the con that this is a limitation.

Being just-one-person is a great thing, more than you can hope for, because it is from the refusal to be dictated to and the insistence on having your own say whether there is anyone there to listen or not, that change comes.

Folk may denigrate you saying that’s just your blue arsed opinion, but actually that is all any of us ever have, can ever aspire to. and so really all they are saying is, “I haven’t yet learned to speak my own mind.”

Baboon risks the flames because his suffering blue arse means something to him. It symbolises something. He is free of the eat-work-sleep merry-go-round by which he had formerly been seduced. So he cannot be steered, cowed, or have the wool pulled over his eyes.

Despite his superior size Zebra is defeated and given a mark that represents his babyish need to have everything be black and white, for the solution to everything to be obvious and to have everybody else be stupid. His fate is poetic because he lives in a world in which there can not be reconciliation between opposites without first being torn apart by his own contradictions and complexities. Baboon on the other hand has been initiated by fire, happy with the contradiction that he is just-one-creature.

…………………………………………….

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

On Wanting to be Great Again.

When you think about inspiring words of leadership, great speeches that stir the heart, they all have something in common. They evoke values which connect people to themselves and to their neighbour.

Their words touch on some universal recognition that the quality of life is more important than its width. There is a sense of lyrical poetry or a sudden cadence of imagination that invites the listener into some greater awareness of themselves and their purpose.

And sometimes its just the opposite…

The invitation to regress, to have permission to suspend the hard work and moral demands of critical thinking, to indulge Poor Me, can be mightily seductive.

”Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment!” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 344, Para 652.

Judging ahead of time, pre-judice, is an attractive ticket because it invites us to sit back and bask in our own glory… provided of course that we can then find a scapegoat to carry the group shadow. None of which should be too difficult since judging ahead of time is precisely that we know what is going to happen next, a big plus in an age of anxiety.

So speeches reduced to sound bites and slogans appeal to a far older part of the hind brain than the lofty ideals of the neo-cortex.

” We ask little except that ye abstain from red meat and fornication”. Acts 15;29

Mr Trump has taken considerable criticism for both the content and the style of his speeches. Some say that his incoherence indicates the onset of senilty. They cite and compare a variety of speeches from his earlier years in which he seems to manage grammar and syntax perfectly well.

Of course this would be no great surprise for a man of 71, but there is a further consideration that has ramifications greater than the precise nature of his medical diagnosis….

…people speaking in tongues has been part of Bible Belt culture for some time. When folk get inflated they regress. This impacts coherence, but scarier than diminished diplomatic finesse, is the mind set that goes with it, which is that if you want to understand me you will just have to keep pace and figure it out. Listen better. Follow me as I flit from flower to flower.

The concept of Symbiotic Omnipotence, coined by psycho-analyst Masud Kahn, is useful for understanding the significance of incoherent narcissistic rhetoric. One of the key features of Symbiotic Omnipotence is that it is a double act, a folie a deux, a between, in which the psyche of both parties, starting with mother and child, stay in a partly fused state built on mutual superiority. In adult life this dynamic often plays itself out in co-dependent relationships where the glue is delusional shared specialness.

“Isn’t it wonderful that we both hate the same things.” Seymour Skinner from the Simpsons.

The contribution of third parties is denigrated as insignificant or fake, eroding….

”…the perception of others as valuable or nourishing, through subtle collusion and indulgences”. M. Khan (Journal of Analytical Psychology vol 19, 1974)

There is no real point in making oneself understood in any case since the world is reduced to Them and Us, fools who cannot comprehend and allies who already get it.

Under such circumstances correct grammar and lofty syntax come a poor second to the attitude which says ” I don’t have to make sense and nor do you.”

People love this. You can get to be a very particular kind of baby all over again. Its an invitation to act out all the petty grievances and violent tendencies that had to be repressed the first time around, all of which then led to the sorry pass whereby identity has to be shored up with knowing what happens next and forging the kind of relationship with the world that….

”enables a person to both perceive and deny [reality]”. M. Kahn ibid

useful, say, if you had some command codes and a red telephone.

Wanting to be great again is the secret wish to be the omnipotent baby in the room, without any constraint, seeped in specialness, but one which urgently needs the Symbiotic Other to define it, to manifest its hopes and dreams.

A classic instance of symbiotic omnipotence in the news concerns one Kevin Gugliotta, a Pennsylvanian priest who has recently been sentenced for peddling child pornography. He says he did this to punish God for not letting him win at poker.

“According to pre-trial records, Gugliotta told probation officers that he was an avid poker player, and he felt God was attacking him when he lost games.” RT Question More.

https://www.rt.com/usa/400904-priest-child-pornography-poker/

What is so scary about this is not just that friend Gugliotta assumes Gods involvement in his loss, but that his own response to such divine wickedness doesn’t have to make sense in the process, unless he perhaps had some personal wish to be the nasty thing that happens to nice people.

Permission to be above the law, both those of the land and those of linguistic coherence, is a dicey prospect for anyone, especially a leader. To succeed, he needs Others who will bite, in their millions, at the tempting invitation to be similarly unconstrained, having been seduced into the conviction of their own specialness, but still needing the Opioid Epidemic from Hell to manage the gap between the American Dream and the Nightmare of Hate.

Executions: a Psychology.

Floridas execution industry has suffered a recent set back with controversy about the use of a new type of lethal injection, Etomidate.

It doesnt work?

Oh no, it kills people really well..

The problem is that it causes the condemned recipient ten seconds of *mild to moderate discomfiture*, before suffering the worlds worst heart attack.

First off, if its untested, how does anyone know that…? But more importantly, what kind of a split reality do we live in where you might be happy to kill someone whilst moping their chin after a hearty last meal, making sure their death suit is freshly back from the cleaners or losing sleep over the *moderate discomfiture* of the person currently having his heart stopped.

Somehow the discomfiture…..

don*t make the noose to tight on him, its unconstitutional!

…and the unpleasant feelings associated with having your heart ripped out in tune to the lapping oarstrokes of Charons ferry, seems somewhat disconnected from the big picture..

All this split politeness about judicial killing has quite some history. Its a tradition that the condemned are allowed last requests, even if you hate them. You might have to send out for pizza, give them a choice of blindfold, or a final fag, perhaps the book clutching comfort of a man in a black dress muttering words to break the arkward silence of those last few moments..

Perhaps thats why the executioners get to be hooded, to hide the shifty look that knows there is covert agenda..

or could it be for politeness sake, so that the poor condemned need not be offended by the coldness of a face with all the mercy of a stone cliff on a stormy night…

or perhaps its to discourage unnecessary chit chat. Rapid dispatch will serve to reduce the unpleasant chances of wetting of oneself, so thats jolly decent of them.

Oh and in fact you dont have to worry about having your head chopped off, which is a barbaric,… but we might dangle you by it and let you twist and kick for a bit. Way more humane.

The choreography of the pageant is preceeded by the death watch, a macabre ritual of intruding on the prisoner every couple of minutes to make sure he doesnt somehow manage to cheat his fate and make an earlier appointment with death, magically producing the means to kill himself from an empty cell, as though the maximum penalty also made you into a witch if you werent one to begin with.

Prisoners are often given a physical before their execution, in order to ensure that they are fit enough to die..

which is very considerate..

So, if you hurt your nob having a final desperate wank, you might be let off?

No, I dont think it works like that. Though it does beg the bizzare question of what constitutes health grounds for a stay of execution..

you cant kill me, I have a life limiting condition…

yes, its called the green mile.

The physical, the meal, the solemnity of final requests, the intricate rules, observances, training procedures to make sure the restraints dont chaf, all these are structures of denial about what is actually happening which have to be set in place to live with the contradiction of believing how evolved we are whilst clinging to the practices of tooth and claw. And so before delivering 300,000 volts to your exquisite jelly we will moisten the sponge, just so.

We dont want to kill people but we have a whole host of juicy ways of doing it which you can experiment with…of course, once due process has been tended to and we have made sure that the prisoner is not bruised before he is fried. We are humane.

Or maybe the execution industry is all part of a policy of bread and circuses designed to keep people amused whilst the State picks their pockets and slips shackles on their imagination. When times are hard the rate of judicial killing rises. The people must be diverted.

Of course, we are way too gentile to have such circuses publically anymore, that would be distasteful..

and crowd control is soo expensive.

But the court room dramas leading up to them, and the reliably endless media coverage makes up for all it. Shucks, its like having a front seat at the arena complete with corn chips and beer without having to leave the comfort of your own home.

how did life get this good?

But there is a problem..

For more than the amusement of a culture couch bound and weary from its own greatness, and for greater purpose than deterrence, there lies a dark and hidden motive that strikes further than the prisoners heart… and that is to convey to one and all that life is cheap, his, yours, mine. And since it is cheap it is not worth fighting for.

As soon as you argue for the relative worth of a particular persons life, irrespective of whether they *deserve* to die, then you are on the slippery slope of an arguement for the relative worth of any and all lives.

Andrew Anglin, founder of neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer wrote this about the Charlottesville attack…

*the real tragedy is what happened to the car. It was a very nice car, worth much more than the life of anyone who died.*

The ultimate effect of having a federal industry that puts people to death is not less crime, the deterrent effect, or justice for victims, but the ennervating message, embraced wholeheartedly by the collective insecurity of Supremacy, that the value of life can be measured like stock. And you wonder why your infinite, boundless soul is depressed.

Bluebeard, the Secret Hell.

Why do people take refuge in the strong arm of those who beat them? So as not be at home when he comes calling. Your castle is burned to the ground but you get to hold the torch.

Alice Miller calls it ‘Identification with the Aggressor’, a process by which a child or subjugated person defends against the precarity of their situation by dissociating from it and forming a psychological alliance with the source of their suffering.

It was named ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ after bank raiders in Sweden took hostages that then became their fervent supporters, even writing to the Prime Minister asking to go with their captors. Hieress Patty Hearst became a gang member of the group that kidnapped her. Natascha Kampuch wept at the death of her jailer and rapist Wolfgang Priklopil, moved into his house and ran his car…

It’s an aspect of what Levy-Bruhl calls ‘participation-mystique’, a process of merging with another, initially observed..

‘in so-called primitive cultures where certain objects treated as holy artifacts were seen as filled with the spirit of their owners or worshipers.’ Gifford

Without such meaningful totemic relationships which allow a person to be in the presence of their own mystery without being contaminated by it, we in the West do the same with pop stars and celebrity, reality TV and the cult of personality, which despite the high of being one with your hero..

‘can influence a person or group of persons into acting against their own best interest’. (ibid)

Identification with the Great Leader makes all kinds of heroic feats possible though you may not survive them. It wipes out all your troubles back home and replaces them with a fizzing righteousness so potent it can transcend the fear of death and calmly walk wave upon wave of unfaltering youth to the grave.

Sometimes the battlefield’s turf is the quietly carpeted drawing rooms

of gentility rather than the crack and thump of conquest at any price, but still….

‘a person caught up in this spell would rather die or injure him or herself than consider new information that might upend their thinking.’ ibid

Most people know the story of Bluebeard. He murdered his wives one after another and kept them in a secret locked room. He forbids his most recent bride from entering the room on pain of … well, a lot of pain, but she is unbearably curious and sneaks in while he is away…

just a peek…

Too late!

The room is a charnel house of former wives. She drops the key to the floor in horror where it becomes stained with blood that will not wash off no matter how she tries…

Bluebeard finds her out, and sets out to do just what he said he would do… though she is saved in the last moment by her brothers who show up in the nick of time…

an’ cut ‘Ol Bluey down…

The traditional meaning is that of a cautionary tale,

‘Oh curiosity thou mortal bane, spite of my charms thou causest oft pain and sore regret..’ Charles Perrault

followed swiftly by reassurances that men are not so bad..

‘This a story is of time long pass’d; No husbands now such panic terrors cast; Nor weakly, with a vain despotic hand, Imperious, what’s impossible, command:’ (ibid)

More recently its been given socio-political attention with Bluebeard in the role of Patriarch enforcing gender roles with violence, or more psychologically with Bluebeard in the role of pathological narcissist. Clarrisa Pinkola Estes calls him,

‘the predator of the Psyche, wanting to sever intuition, a malignant force at odds with the instincts of the natural self.”

Von Franz amplifies this theme, Bluebeard is the destructive, murderous animus which must be encountered in order to grow..

”If a woman hasn’t gone through the experience of being trapped by a demon animus she only has unconscious thoughts.”

All well and good, but there is a curious detail in the story that snags my attention.. Most of the interpretations are based on later versions of the tale in which the youngest of three sisters falls for his charms because she is naive, or she marries him against his will. But in the original, by Perrault, there’s neither foolishness nor abduction…

Bluebeard goes to one of his neighbours…

‘a lady of quality, whose two daughters were perfect beauties. He desired of her one of them in marriage, leaving to her the choice which of the two she would bestow upon him….

‘I want one of your children, it doesn’t matter which…’

None of this phases anyone. There is no outrage, no injunction to never darken her door again. Mother colludes and passes of her kid like a mail-order bride who gradually identifies with her rather than face how she has been betrayed.

‘There was nothing then to be seen but parties of pleasure, hunting, fishing, dancing, mirth and feasting. Every thing succeeded so well, that the youngest daughter began to think the master of the house not to have a beard so very blue, and that he was a mighty civil gentleman…

A six year old child, having been persuaded onto her parent’s lap rather than explore the nearby swings and play area, is trying to extricate herself in an ungainly way whilst mother chides her softly like Nursey from Blackadder..

”Oh you.. banana-brain…”

child’s inaudible muttering…

”What are you?… a banana-brain”.

more muttering..

”Banana-brain, that’s what you are.”

And you could say its just harmless fun and the mother is ‘joking’ in an extroverted and jovial way. ‘Its just people being what they are,’ you say, but actually its the worst kind of cruelty.. making a child feel stupid for wanting a go on the swings, feeling like a banana-brain in adult life for wanting to explore, embittered then and muttering in her old age for the life that’s been denied her.

Such throw away lines are how lives are poisoned. Often repeated they become the kernel around which identity is built because our survival compels us to adapt to expectation. So even when she’s free she stumbles, can’t get co-ordinated, making a hash of her liberty, just like… a banana-brain.

Her inner life is destroyed, not by showdowns, punishments or overt rejection but by one thing parodying another, by the wicked cleverness that can say you are stupid and I hate you with a smile. What’s the matter, can’t you take a joke?

Life is what you make it but more importantly its what you believe it to be. Life will faithfully offer us up our expectations of it, rising to manifest and mirror back to us all our prejudices, secret fears and covert assumptions.

‘We do not see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” Torah

That which we cannot face on the inside comes at us from without. Having had her inner life attacked by her social-climbing mother, our heroine learns to attack herself, killing off her spontaneity, deadening her sexuality, stringing up her feelings and hobbling the discriminating function that feelings are there to serve.

When she intrudes upon Bluebeard’s inner chamber she is bound to find there some expression of this violation. She is going to find her worst nightmares in the little room because she has been entered into this arrangement in terrible bad faith, having had her integrity sold out and the possibility of true love traded for the appearance of an easy life.

Bluebeard is certainly a villain, but never pretending to be more or less than he is. There is no deception. ‘I want one of your daughters, I don’t care which.” When mother colludes the poor bride masks over the awful injury this constitutes by following suit, by pretending that people and privacy don’t matter, but has to kill off her aliveness and subjugate herself to the tyranny of life’s baubles which will extract their pound of flesh from her one way or another. Her inner world will be attacked on a regular basis.

Life presents us with the face we show it and mirrors back to us inner states normally occluded from view.

I once comforted a woman whose husband had just had a heart attack and was at death’s door in hospital… but I withdrew my hand from her shoulder as if bitten by a snake when she wailed, ‘who will help me now?” Her thoughts were not of him, nor her tears about him, but about the burden of her middle-class chores.

Through her tears she then told me a dream that wild dogs had gotten into her lovely white Mercedes convertible and torn all the upholstery to pieces. Her inner life had been ripped out by her paltry material concerns and the utter failure to transcend her own petty troubles.

”We thought it was the outer event that had happened to us, but now see that it is we who have happened to ourselves.’ F. Wickes.

And so there is no transformation. The dead wives are as much a part of her world as Bluebeard himself. Killing him off still leaves her with the problem of life denied and the damage done to her personal destiny by the spell which compels her to identify with toxic values rather than her own gut feeling which knows people are more important than any amount of power you may have over them.

A mother is walking down the street with her child. She’s in high gear and the child of three-ish is having to run to keep up. She looks at him with annoyance and says, ‘why are you running?”

The boy, out of breath, replies, ”because I’m not.”

The poor lad cannot face the denial of his reality in her question, the dismissal of his inner world to which the only honest answer is a forbidden truth-telling version of, ‘because you’re in a big bad mood and stomping off…

without looking to see if I’m left behind….

And so the only thing he can do is to deny his own reality. At least there will be common ground if only on the basis of shared contempt for the child’s point of view. This will cost the child his footing. On the pavement and in life.

This boy is not, ‘failing to internalize values’ (Kernberg)

He’s internalizing them only too well.

I … am not quite real, but I can run and walk at the same time. Look out everyone it’s the fantastic running/walking boy!

Where adequate treatment fails, double think and grandiose Self structures ensue. We can’t be whole for as long as we identify with an expectation to run and walk at the same time.

Otto Kernberg coined the phrase, ‘Grandiose Self Structure’, to describe Narcissism. But his insistence on it having a ‘pathological formation’, tends to strip it of meaning before we’ve even had a look around.

The problem with calling anything abnormal is that we tend to lose respect for it and forget to ask helpful questions.

and so he has to account for sadism by saying that,

”the infliction of suffering is the child’s attempt to defend against his own helplessness, through the exercise of omnipotent control over another.” O. Kernberg

No, that’s what kings do.

Not children. Y’all confuse’.

Important names for things can get in the way of experiencing them. Its like mastering the Kama Sutra without ever looking your partner in the eye,

The thing about early deprivation is that it urgently needs to split off and project desperation. The child concludes that it is un-held because it is lacking or deficient. Moreover, the baseline of how people treat each other, reality itself, is violated. The intrusive dark splinter of not quite being real has to be visited on another.

and even more pointily when collectively encoded in religious lore…

DO AS I SAY ON PAIN OF DEATH..

in one moment and…

DO AS YOU PLEASE SO LONG AS YOU PRAISE ME.

on the other.

His poor flock are suddenly awash in persecutory anxiety and paranoia. Their double/bind is unbearable and can only regain their composure by joining Yahweh in his unreality …

”I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” St Paul.

and so it begins.

Kohut is unequivocal, Narcissism,

”results from massive shortcomings in mothering.” Kohut.

and even Kernberg will give a bit and refers to incipient..

”intolerable reality in the interpersonal realm.” Kernberg

which I suppose is a sanitized way of talking about the unbearable misery of being a child who is related to in an ideal way or not at all, which is what you get when Mother has had her spiritual essence sucked out of her by animus-ity which refuses to sacralize her mothering .

The Tyranny of Lawn.

How people have their gardens is interesting. What they do with them, even if it is nothing, says much about a person because it embodies something of their relationship with Nature and their own Deep Selves.

Maybe you don’t have a garden and long for one but that too is a relationship, missing space to potter and grow stuff. Or, you only have a potted Yucca to call your own but that can be enough if you love it.

Some feel gardening is just housework out of doors. If you scratch a little you’ll find that Life itself is a drudge, the day a series of tedious boxes to tick all linked together with Obligation’s resentment.

Others ‘maintain’, their patch. Its a notch up from housework-out-of-doors because there’s a little pride in it though it’s limited to space to-be-kept-the-same, the chaos of creative potential held firmly in check.

More are making their mark or making an effort, or having something to do because there is nothing to do..

On the far-side there are the parking lots, Nature supplanted by Tarmac, forecourts for the glittering prize.

More wierd than the Parking-Lotters are the Lawn Brigade, acolytes of a tradition strangely rooted in tyranny and death.

Back in the day, only the rich could afford to hire the many hands needed to scythe and weed the grass, so a lawn was a mark of wealth and status. The earliest lawns, however, had a very specific purpose. They were the closely trimmed verge around medieval castles in France and Britain, kept clear of trees so guards had an unobstructed view of any dodgy blokes in armour that might hove into veiw.

Part of the problem with building big fat castles and hiding your loot in them is that everyone for miles around knows it’s there. The word ‘lawn’ comes from the Celtic ‘laun’ meaning safe enclosure, which sounds very sweet and mystical except that it was invariably a clearing on the other side of which are bearded hordes with a malevolent twinkle in their eye..

and pointy sticks..

The first lawns were battle grounds. Nice to promenade about on with your mates and stretch limbs weary from the Watch, but their real purpose was to deprive everything within bowshot of cover to hide in.

The bigger your castle, the more anxious the need for protection, the bigger your lawn needs to be, a kind of insurance policy reasoned on the likely assumption that the more loot you have the more attention you are likely to receive from unsavoury parties.

The problem with making a bet that something bad is going to happen to you is that it catches the attention of the Fates as well as that of your less than salubrious neighbours who are bound to then usher all kinds of ill to your door…

mostly in the form of armies.

So the status symbol of the pristine lawn originates in fear and conflict precipitated by folk having more than they need. The lawn, gentle epitome of Pimms, Tennis, and that Lounger-in-the-Sun, is actually the yawning gap across which Us is divided from Them.

So the next time you’re out trying to relax on the lawn but finding it difficult to do it justice, it might be down to your endocrine system anticipating the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune..

and the cannon balls of very bad luck…

but mostly what makes it so difficult for us to relax that we need multi-billion dollar service industries working around the clock to make any kind of dent in it, is good old fashioned Conscience…

.. way deeper than any internalised moral code which knows that both the castle and its sumptuous lawns are bread from the mouths of starving babes and who’s purpose it is to rectify the balance any way it can, including the judicious use of colourful neurotic afflictions and physical symptoms.

Conscience is its own thing, beyond any great influence of the ego. It grows horns and a tail like anything else we try to suppress, becoming a kind of Fury that brings it’s own form of Justice to the table when normal constraints have failed.

It is She who compells any person who has more than they need to..

”unconsciously seek retributive punishment in order to atone and so remove the sense of guilt at having avoided the problem of love.” Frances Wickes.

Curiously, the Palace of Versailles has just obtained a dreamlike piece of ‘lawn art’, pictured above. It is a life size statue of Sarah Kerrigan in her role as ‘Queen of Blades’, an assassin hero from the Starcraft Universe. She is an avenging harpie..

‘Hell hath no fury like a woman swarmed..’ Queen of Blades.

These blades are not for cutting the grass. They are for exacting poetic retribution. When the Principle of Relatedness is cut off for the sake of having power over others She haunts the lawn, working tirelessly behind the scenes to reach those parts that official channels cannot, making us live in the ivory tower the lawn serves…

cut off from self and others.

Paranoia and Parapraxis.

Once upon a time there lived a poor couple whose greatest wish was to have a child….

From a small upstairs window in their little cottage, where they could see over a high wall and into a wonderful garden owned by an Enchantress in which there were all manner of exotic and magical plants, the woman spied a great clump of Rampion growing. Rampion is famed for it’s fertile properties and she set her heart upon having some. So she persuaded her husband to clamber over the wall in dead of night and fetch her a bit.

..which he did.

and the next night too… and the night after that..

..getting quite blase now about his habitual stroll through this strange garden by moonlight to collect Rampion.

Until one evening, in a twinkling, the Enchantress has planted herself in his path, way bigger than he imagined with purple tendrils of electricity snaking about her fingertips.

‘What are you doing’? she asks, in a voice silky with impending malice..

”Er, sorry your Enchantress-ship. I was collecting Rampion for my wife who wishes to conceive a child. Please don’t turn me into anything nasty.”

The Enchantress pondered for a moment, ‘very well, but when the child is born it will be mine,” and then she vanished in a thunder clap leaving the poor man clutching his Rampion and quaking in his boots. On the day the child was born the Enchantress appeared as if by magic and scooped the babe up, ‘I will call her Rapunzel after the Rampion,’ she said and then they were gone..

To say that the Enchantress was an over-protective mother doesn’t quite do justice to her determination that Rapunzel be sequestered from the world. She built a tower in the forest without doors and Locked Rapunzel Up. Occasionally the Enchantress would arrive with supplies and command Rupunzel to lower her lengthy tresses for her to climb up..

‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your golden hair..’

One day the local Prince is riding by and sees all this happening. He’s a tad curious and go’s over to the tower once the Enchantress is gone…

‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your golden hair..’

So, he climbs up and they fall in love… as you might expect. But what happens next is not so expected…

One day the Enchantress visits and as she’s climbing over the balcony Rapunzel inadvertantly blurts, ‘ oh, you are so much more heavy than the Prince,’ and before she realizes it the truth is out. The enraged Enchantress cuts off Rapunzel’s tresses and banishes her to a filthy hovel in some farflung desert place. Then she lies in wait for the Prince.

Slips of the tongue, or ‘paraparaxis’, meaning ‘beyond what is acceptable’, in Greek, can get you into a world of trouble. The problem with slips of the tongue is that they have a nasty habit of outing unacceptable truths. Its as if the Truth is just busting to find expression. The more unacceptable that Truth is the harder it will push for the light.

which is all very well. But to the person who’s just outed themselves its like having an inner traitor.

My most cringe-worthy slip of the tongue was in the library, wanting to borrow a reference copy of the ‘Writers and Artists Year Book. The librarian was very attractive and scantily clad in summer heat. I tried my best to ignore the fact, not least of all because a gaggle of old ladies in the doorway were looking me up and down as if to say, ‘we know what you’re thinking you filthy little man..’

So I was on my best behaviour, and doing my utmost to be polite..

‘Good afternoon, do you have a copy of the Writer’s and Arse Tits Year Book?

which brings us to the next order of business, Paranoia. Something Unknown is Doing I Don’t Know What… and it doesn’t seem to have the interests of polite society on its agenda…

The Prince climbs up Rapunzel’s severed locks only to find the Enchantress at the top who wants very much to scrag him. Only by throwing himself from the tower is he saved, though he loses his eyes to the thorny thicket surrounding the tower on his way down.

Paranoia is when you think something is going on but its not. We overlay reality with our own inner pallette to the point that what gets painted is really rather different from what is actually there. The Prince thinks he’s getting Rapunzel but has to deal with the Enchantress instead…

a common male complaint.

He’s bound to feel that some wicked will is working against him. We’re all conditioned by experience to expect the world to respond to us in a particular way. Survival depends on learning who we are from our environment and living up to its expectations even if they are not good for us.

”Instictive forces do not reason. They assume, from the immense weight of their experience,.. that it will serve the individual well to be stabilized according to initial experience.’. Jean Liedloff.

What this means is that..

‘the design of each individual is a reflection of the experience it expects to encounter… defined by the circumstances to which its antecedents had adapted.” ibid

So the boy who was humiliated by his mother, says to himself que sera sera, this is how it is. He adapts and expects to be humiliated by Life. He will even engineer it if he can, because survival means integrating Expectations, even if that expectation is that you are stupid and will fail.

‘Not so easily do we forget what we learned with our Mother’s milk’. Dostoevsky

The prejudices and assumptions we all have about life serve to create a seamless fit between the peculiarities of childhood and the objective face of a wider and untested Universe later on. Confronting your own paranoia, realising that how things were needn’t be how they are, is a huge wake up that can rob a person of their usual perceptual ability symbolised by the Prince’s blinding.

When I was a kid there was always a sense of something amiss at home that I couldn’t name until one day my father put his hand on my mother’s shoulder and she involuntarily shuddered with disgust. I was shocked. My first thought was, ‘what else is it that I cannot see.” And even though it was disorienting and painful, I grew.

because the painful thing was at least real.

‘Loosening and even fragmenting the internal psychic environment. . . is the ground for the birth and development of higher psychic structure. Disintegration is the basis of developmental thrust upward, the creation of new evolutionary dynamics and the movement of the personality to a higher level.’ Dabrowski

So the prince has to wander blindly about the kingdom like a beggar until one day, deo concedente, by the will of the gods, he finds Rapunzel in her desert hovel. She recognizes him straight away, embraces him and her hot tears fall upon his eyes which are then restored.

Love heals all wounds.

Both Rapunzel’s parapraxis, which caused so much trouble, and the Prince’s paranoia…more trouble, ultimately serve the individuation of both and bring them together in a very human way unencumbered by the ivory towered inflation of their first encounter.

So slips of the tongue, though embarrassing, serve to bring unconscious material within reach of consciousness; and paranoia, though uncomfortable, helps to air the gap between what we think is happening and what is actually going on whilst continuously encountering the Unknown and being bent into interesting shapes by it.