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.

Mammon’s Quiet Ledger

I asked AI to tell me a story about Mammon, the god of gain and greed. I had been wondering about his role in the recent land grab of Venezuela. It gave me this. I was amazed. I hope you are too. I’ll comment afterwards.

Mammon lived in a house with no windows.

It wasn’t that he disliked light; he simply preferred reflections. Polished floors caught the glimmer of chandeliers, mirrors doubled every flame, and gold—ah, the gold—turned even shadows into something worth possessing. Coins lined the walls like scales on a dragon, each stamped with the faces of kings who had begged Mammon for favor and cursed him in the same breath.

People said Mammon was a demon, and perhaps he was. But demons, like virtues, are often made by repetition.

Each morning Mammon opened his great ledger. Its pages were thin as skin and endless as appetite. Names appeared on their own, written by hands that were not his. Beside each name bloomed columns of numbers: debts, profits, losses, interest compounding like a slow spell.

One evening, a girl arrived at his door. No guards stopped her—there never were any. Those who came to Mammon arrived because something inside them had already unlocked the gate.

She carried nothing but a loaf of bread wrapped in cloth.

“I want to make a bargain,” she said.

Mammon gestured, and a chair shaped itself from coins. “Everyone does.”

“I don’t want gold,” she said quickly. “Or jewels. Or land.”

Mammon paused. This was unusual, not unprecedented, but unusual enough to be interesting.

“What do you want, then?” he asked.

She hesitated. “Time. For my father. He’s dying. If he had one more year, he could finish teaching me his trade. One more year and I won’t starve when he’s gone.”

Mammon turned a page in his ledger. Her father’s name was already there, the ink faint, the balance nearly zero.

“One year is expensive,” Mammon said. “What will you pay?”

The girl placed the loaf of bread on the table.

Mammon laughed, a sound like coins poured onto stone. “That wouldn’t buy a second.”

“I know,” she said. “But it’s all I have.”

Mammon studied her. No trembling greed, no wild hope of riches—only fear sharpened into resolve. He had seen emperors offer their souls with less clarity.

“Very well,” Mammon said at last. “I’ll take what you value most.”

She swallowed. “My future earnings? My labor?”

Mammon shook his head. “Too common.”

He leaned forward, eyes reflecting her face back at her. “I will take your ability to want more than enough.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“You will,” Mammon said gently. “When the year is done.”

The bargain sealed itself with a whisper. The loaf of bread turned to ash. The girl ran home, hope burning bright enough to blind her to the cost.

True to his word, Mammon adjusted the ledger. The father lived. A year passed. He taught his daughter everything he knew, and when he died, it was peacefully, with her hand in his.

The girl worked hard. She earned enough. She never went hungry.

But she never wanted more.

When others chased wealth, she stopped at sufficiency. When offered power, she declined. She gave excess away without ceremony or pride. Mammon watched as fortunes flowed around her like a river around a stone.

And for the first time in centuries, his ledger showed something strange.

A name with no growth.

Mammon found himself returning to that page often. Not in anger, but in curiosity. The numbers did not swell. They did not shrink. They simply were.

It unsettled him.

Mammon thrived on hunger—on the aching reach for more. Without it, gold was just metal. Power, just noise.

One night, Mammon closed his ledger and extinguished every light in his house of reflections. In the dark, surrounded by wealth that suddenly felt heavy and mute, he wondered—briefly, dangerously—what it might be like to be poor in desire.

…………………………….

Mammon got his first major career boost in the New Testament when Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” (Luke 16;13) He doesn’t say, “You cannot serve God and Satan,” which might make you wonder what the difference could be. The answer is that Satan is all about doing bad stuff, acts of wickedness, overt harm; whereas Mammon is a much more clandestine attitude of avarice and desire. Satan tempts people to evil deeds, whereas Mammon enslaves people with promises of security, status, and identity tied to riches.

Prior to his New Testament upgrade, Mammon was not elevated so highly in ancient times and so was far less of a problem. In early Aramaic usage, Mammon is not a deity/devil at all—just a neutral term for money or material possessions. From 500BC onwards, Jewish texts from this period often warn against trusting wealth instead of God. Mammon begins to carry a moral charge, wealth is dangerous when it becomes an object of trust or loyalty, though he is not yet personified as a demon.

In the original Greek text of the New Testament, Mamōnas is left untranslated, suggesting Mammon is more than money, it behaves more like a rival master. Scholars generally agree Jesus is portraying wealth as something that can command allegiance like a lord, yet at this stage Mammon is still not explicitly a demon but rather a spiritual power in the sense of a force which enslaves human loyalty.

By the second century Mammon has become far more substantial. Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, and others speak of Mammon as a false master, an idol and a demonic influence. Augustine emphasises that Mammon rules those who love riches, much as God rules those who love righteousness.

By the medieval period Mammon becomes increasingly personified. Gregory the Great (6th century) treats avarice as a ruling vice that enslaves the soul, though not a named demon as such. By the 12th century, Peter Lombard in Sentences (Book II) discusses Mammon as a dominus avaritiae (“lord of greed”) though Lombard stops short of a full biography. Then, in the work of William Langland (14th century), Mammon finally emerges as a personified power of corruption and greed, closely associated with hellish forces and moral decay, clearly operating as a diabolic power. By the 16thC, Binsfeld’s Classification of Demons. (1589) codifies medieval tradition, affording Mammon formal demonological canonization alongside the other lords of deadly sin, Lucifer, Asmodeus, Leviathan, Beelzebub, Satan and Belphegor.

Mammon’s rise to power has been meteoric. From mere ‘thing or stuff’ to Keeper of Hell’s Treasury in two millennia. Could there be a connection to the equally meteoric and contiguous emergence of what Jung calls the ‘monotheism of consciousness’?

Back in the day you might choose your sacrifices according to which God it might seem most propitious to plea for increase. Mammon is wealth itself. The question ceases to be one of evoking the God’s abundance. It becomes one of amassing God as stuff. All of which means the more you have the more righteous you must be since there is now a direct link to be made between wealth and manna.

So it really shouldn’t surprise us to see all kinds of manifestations of this dotted increasingly through the ages to match Mammon’s trajectory from Bronze Age house elf into Lord of the Seventh Sin. Just before the time Jesus was flagging up Mammon’s cosmic debut, Roman senator Marcus Crassus had invaded Parthia because….. he just needed their gold, like, really badly. Once his ass had been thoroughly whipped at the battle of Carrhae, he was executed by the Parthian’s who killed him by poured molten gold down his throat, a kind of poetic underscoring of his enthralment to Mammon.

Plutarch (Life of Crassus) states explicitly that Crassus was driven by the desire for military glory to rival Caesar’s conquests in Gaul and Pompey’s victories in the East. He was motivated by greed for Parthian wealth. Plutarch writes, in essence, that Crassus sought neither justice nor necessity, but gold and reputation.

Crassus had at least some shame, presented the campaign as a defensive and stabilizing war to protect the Roman province of Syria and to check the wiles of Parthian power. He gave it some spin. Even Hitler, 2 millennia further into Mammon’s rise, claimed to be saving the Austrian people, saying they were being denied their right to self-determination. His invasion was cast as liberation and reunification.

No more. Mammon is now out front and centre. On Air Force One, being interviewed by reporters, US Senator Lindsay Graham interrupted Trump when asked about the invasion of Venezuela by a reporter, interjecting the time honoured ‘casus belli’, ‘there are going to be Americans alive today because he (Trump) shut down a narco-terrorist state..’ but the fakery was no longer necessary, When further prompted as to the possible plight of political prisoners and human rights violations, Trump dispensed with pretence, ‘We haven’t got to that, what we want to do is fix up the oil.’

AI’s story of ‘Mammon’s Quiet Ledger’ is so poignant because it seems to get underneath the gnawing issue of human greed and reframe it in such a way that it can be healed. The girl is free of grasping compulsion because of her love for her father and her proportionate need for and valuing of his wisdom. The Principle of Relatedness saves her from succumbing to Mammon’s influence. He is left not only wondering what it might be like to be free of the hunger which wants more than it needs, but is actively feeling the concomitant loss of power and influence effected by her devotion. This is something all of us can do. Every act of kindness, every gesture of love, leaves Mammon scratching his head, reducing his power in the world and even gaining grudging respect.

The Green Man.

Despite his striking image there are few stories about the Green Man. He tends to show up in disguise as Pan or Cerrunos, Bacchus or Radergast. One story, ’Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, casts him in the role of a self-regenerating warrior who rides into the castle keep of Camelot, bursting in on consciousness, challenging all present to fight him, one blow in return for another. Gawain accepts and beheads the knight thinking this might slow him down a bit, but the Green Knight just laughs. He picks up his head and rides off saying they will meet in a year and a day when the blow will be returned but not so readily endured.

Gawain undergoes a series of trials, secretly set by the Green Knight himself. He arrives finally at the appointed hour facing almost certain death. But Gawain is spared. The Green Knight, it now transpires, is acting on behalf of King Arthur and has been commissioned, along with Morgan le Fay, a powerful witch, to test the honour and bravery of Arthur’s knights. Here, the Green Knight seems to be a psychopomp of the individuation process. He not only tests but also helps and has compassion for his charges as he oversees their development.

I had always thought of the Green Man as quintessentially British, baked into the folklore but it turns out not to be so. The reason there are so few stories about the Green Man is perhaps because he is actually an immigrant to the British Isles. The Green Man migrated from India via Iran in the second century, Italy, France and `finally aboard the boats of Norman invaders who decorated churches all over Britain with his image.

The stage for the Green Man’s debut in Britain was set centuries before he arrived and thousands of miles away at the battle of Actium 31BCE. This was a battle fought between Marc Anthony and Cleopatra on the one side who supported the old Roman republic and Emperor Octavian who preferred a more direct approach to government and subsequently became the first Emperor of imperial Rome, the first God-Man. Octavian changed his name to Augustus, the Increaser, hinting at a divine or sacred authority. He proclaimed himself son of the Gods and replaced their images on Legionary standards with his own. He was not simply in charge.

It was with this newly minted imperial mind-set that his grand nephew Claudius then invaded Britain, an invasion which was now idealogical as well as territorial. There could be only one man-god. Claudius’ subsequent persecution of the religious orders of ancient Britain is legendary. He sent his general Suetonius to eradicate all native spiritual practice which he did most efficiently, destroying sacred sites and killing all members of the druidic order at that time.

A thousand years of Dark Ages passed, during which time the Green Man was making his way slowly across Asia Minor and Europe, drawn by this massive wound to the British psyche at the hands of imperial zeal whose rooting out and purging of the old gods had been both ruthless and systematic. Nature abhors a vacuum. By quirk of fate and 1066 the Roman church then brought to Britain gothic art and the compelling images of foliate heads on the doors and eves of its cathedrals.

For another thousand years the Green Man waited in the vaulted ceilings and stone masonry of the church, making it home. Then, on the brink of the Second World War and the orgy of destruction about to unfold from the industrial mechanisation of our world, Lady Raglan wrote an article first using the name, ‘the Green Man’ in the magazine ‘Folklore’. This so gripped public imagination that the Green Man was widely if retrospectively adopted as a national figure, albeit one of 20thC folklore, a symbol nevertheless around which some hope for regeneration and the rewilding of our collective imagination might gather. The Green Man’s response to imperial destruction is what you might expect given his reputation for regeneration. He came back.

The Green man is a trickster. Not only did he manage to smuggle himself into Britain but he gets himself quietly adopted by a culture which then agrees he was always there. Moreover, he will insist on sprouting, sometimes in the most unlikely places and in the most unlikely ways but always in response to a need, a feeling of loss or fear or barrenness.

I wonder if the predominance of the Green Man’s image over actual stories about him of any kind isn’t testimony to how old he is, like the ice giants of Norse mythology or the Titans of Greek mythology. We have few details as such but more a sense of their energy and presence. The Green Man is elemental, unknown, save the disposition to surprise and delight, to restore and regenerate.

Whilst the Green Man is traditionally associated with seasonal cycles he is particularly connected to Spring because of this emphasis on regeneration, clinically relevant because it is really rather different from the idea of transformation. The Green Man could be thought of as a chthonic form of Mogenson’s ‘Dove in the consulting room’, to remind us that growth happens by itself once optimum light, warmth and soil are provided.

These different models find common ground in Hildegaard of Bingen’s ‘Viriditas’, latin for ‘greeness’, a dynamic principle of regenerative greening, a metaphor of life returning to an inhospitable inner land via natural processes which revitalise and invigorate, a response to difficult material surfacing in consciousness. Dream images of greening often herald new growth and change, the return of life, warmth, abundance. Simply being out in Nature is profoundly restorative, helping us connect with ourselves and underscoring what’s important in life, simple things and precious others.

Pinocchio. On wanting to be a real boy.

The story of Pinocchio, a wooden puppet who aspired to be a real boy, was originally intended as a cautionary tale by Italian author Carlo Collodi. Disney’s adaptation made him a lot more loveable but he still retained the narcissistic traits flagged up in the original version. Pinocchio refuses to adapt to the world much to the distress of his conscience, Jiminy Cricket, and in sharp contrast to his to his otherwise fervent desire to become real.

Pinnochio’s regressive tendencies are personified by Cat and Fox who encourage his truancy from school. They also encourage him to explore the dubious delights of ‘Pleasure Island’ with its promises of endless gratification. There he allies himself with Lampwick a devil may care persona figure bent on self indulgence…

“Right here, boys! Right here! Get your cake, pie, dill pickles, and ice cream! Eat all you can! Be a glutton! Stuff yourselves! It’s all free, boys! It’s all free! Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!”

Unfortunately it all goes rather badly for them and Pinocchio only narrowly escapes being turned into a donkey by leaping blindly into the sea where he is swallowed by Monstro the whale, a Noah-like descent into the unconscious.

The story has strong moral overtones but more importantly it seems to represent something more than the fate of naughty boys. It is rather a developmental stage through which we must all pass with connotations more persuasive than the injunction to be good and with implications of profound import for our current political climate.

The utter shambles unfolding in America, the sexual sleaze of Epstein’s Pleasure Island, the cover ups and distractions, all have a way of evoking moral outrage from the rest of the world which, unfortunately, render us hamstrung in any attempt to explain the meaning of such corruption. Indignation, righteous as it might be, has a way of arresting enquiry into how the Trump phenomenon managed to unfold in the first place or what it might be which motivates either his inner circle or his MAGA base. The descent into autocracy cannot be explained from the moral high ground and we are left with reasons which seem insufficient, such as the desire for personal enrichment or the entrenchment of jobs and position. Their fawning puppetry demands deeper analysis.

During Trump’s canvassing for his first term he held a town hall in Iowa which he began with the question, ‘how stupid are the people of Iowa?’ This insult to the audience of proud Iowans was received with thunderous applause. Narcissistic co-dependence is typified by this kind of enabling. One of the most insidious reasons for this is the fervent conviction held by the abused that appeasement is the precursor to redemption. If only I try harder, wait long enough, humour sufficiently, demonstrate endless patience, the other will change and grow. Such beliefs are no less pathological than the abusive behaviour of the narcissist themselves. Both are deeply rooted in magical thinking.

When Pinnochio lies his nose grows. He’s genuinely surprised about this because he is not yet a real boy who can tell fact from fiction. He is still at a developmental stage which cannot distinguish fantasy from reality or recognise the sovereign status of others. This is no mere lack of empathy but determined resistance to the kind of conscience which, unfortunately, attends the very maturity and becoming-real he otherwise desires. Jiminy Cricket spends most of the story getting battered and bruised.

When Trump is trolled as Diaper Donny, the implications of such mockery have yet to be elucidated. If he were to be given a polygraph test during one of his forays from the truth he would pass with flying colours. He doesn’t lie, he just can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. He’s still at the developmental stage where if he says it then it’s so, which is the original meaning of ‘abracadabra’, from the Aramaic, ‘I create as I speak.’ The threshold of wishing-not-making-it-so has yet to be crossed. He’s not immoral but pre-moral. The lies are not ‘post truth’. They are pre-truth.

The problem with becoming a real boy is that it’s attended by both conscience and consequence, by the deflating limitation of the rule of law, by grief laden loss of entitlement and specialness. He and his sycophants fight as hard as they do because a great deal more than position and power are at stake. They might also lose preferred identity. The choice is not a happy one, the belly of the whale or the prospect of being turned into a donkey.

Pinocchio’s redemption is to be able to connect to someone/something greater than his isolated and encapsulated self. In the belly of the whale he discovers Geppetto, his creator, whom he saves and in the process ‘dies’ to his old self by being brave and unselfish. The transformation of narcissism tends to be this dramatic, involving a death and rebirth motif presided over by some kind of spiritual insight/illumination.

This is made difficult for us all if those in our orbit have a vested interest in promoting the grandiosity of narcissism’s false self. From this point of view the problem is not the narcissist themselves but their enablers. And why, you might ask, does anyone support the strutting of the wooden despot? Because it relieves everyone else of the burden for their own growth. The narcissist is both the saviour and the problem child all rolled into one, someone upon whom both our potential and the shadow can be projected which means we need not take responsibility for either.

The easy life, the American Dream, entails having someone at the helm who is a mix of god and devil. When the world dances in the streets at Trump’s passing, which is not too far away, they will already have forgotten how much he has been necessary to our collective equanimity. The same senate who murdered Julius Caesar for wanting to be an Emperor happily ratified Octavian to that same position only a few years later.

Starving Mathias.

There was once a poor man who was so hungry everyone called him Starving Mathias. His sole possession was a measly length of rope, so he decided to go into the woods and hang himself with it. As he wandered between the trees looking for a suitable branch he came across the Devil coming the other way.

‘Hello Starving Mathias, what are you doing here?’

Now, Starving Mathias may have been depressed but that’s not to say he wasn’t scared or angry, ‘Why, I’ve come into these woods to find incense to smoke you out of Hell! he replied, giving the Devil his fiercest look. The Devil dropped to his knees and begged Starving Mathias to spare him, offering him whatever he might ask for if only he refrained from such a dire threat.

‘Well,’ said Starving Mathias after some thought, ‘two hundred pounds of gold should do it.’ The Devil instantly and gratefully produced two hundred pounds of gold in a large, hefty sack which Starving Mathias hoisted onto his back and carried home.

The Devil also went home, quaking with fear, and told all the other devils about his terrifying encounter with Starving Mathias who had threatened to smoke them all out of Hell. The other devils were deeply troubled by this, not to mention the huge sum of two hundred pounds of gold, which they all agreed was far too much. They resolved to get it back somehow and spent considerable time scratching their chins, wondering how to go about it.

Eventually one of them, a great barrel chested demon, had the bright idea that they could just ask for it to be returned. The others heartily agreed and so the barrel chested demon roared up to the world and found Starving Mathias in his garden at the picnic table just about to tuck into a feast of suckling pig smothered in dauphinoise potatoes with a dip of creme fraiche and spring onions.

‘See here Starving Mathias,’ he said, trying to sound as gruff as he could, ‘we, er, we think that two hundred pounds of gold is way too much.’ He placed hairy knuckled fists the size of badgers onto the table to look as tough as possible. ‘We, er, we’d like it back, the gold..if you would be so kind.’

‘No, said Starving Mathias between mouthfuls, ‘no, I’m not going to do that.’

‘Well!’ said the barrel chested demon, dropping his voice another octave, ‘well, in that case, er, in that case…. I challenge you… yes, that’s it, I challenge you to a fight!’ He did his best to draw himself up to his full height with some added flames and pink smoke for effect.

‘No, I’m not going to fight you,’ said Starving Mathias, gently dabbing his mouth with a napkin, ‘I would only throw you down and crush you,’ he yawned. ‘But if you really want a fight why not go pick on my hundred and eighty eight year old grandfather. He would be the right match for you..’ and so Starving Mathias showed the barrel chested demon a cave deep in the woods from which could be heard the sound of gentle snoring. In rushed the barrel chested demon only to find that his protagonist was rather unhappy about being woken from his hibernation so early in the Spring and promptly crushed the poor demon’s bones in a mighty bear hug before cutting him to pieces with steak knife claws.

The barrel chested demon, or what was left of him, fled back to Hell blubbing pitifully. The other Devils muttered amongst themselves, agreeing this should not stand. They had rights after all. More importantly, the two hundred pounds of gold was way too much. Eventually a sleek and athletic looking devil volunteered to take Starving Mathias on. He found him just polishing off some stuffed peacock drizzled with hawks head relish served with petite pois and steamed purple sprouting. ‘See here Starving Mathias, two hundred pounds of gold is way too much….. but to be fair I will challenge you to a race. The winner will get to keep the gold.’

‘No, I’m not going to race you, said Starving Mathias, ‘ I would only run so fast as to knock down the walls of Hell… Why don’t you take on my son, John, who would be a much better match for someone as slow as you’. So Starving Mathias took the athletic looking devil into the woods, knowing exactly where to find a sleeping rabbit having his midday nap. He kicked the bush under which the rabbit lay and it shot off down a steep gully. The devil tried to follow but the gully was full of terribly sharp stones washed down by recent rains which cut his poor feet to ribbons. ‘Who knew your son John could run so fast,’ he whimpered, or that stones could be so sharp..’ and so he limped all the way back to Hell, which is much further away than you might imagine.

The other devils were mightly put out by all this. Something had to be done. Eventually the strongest of them got up, declaring he would return the gold. He was huge and strode up to the world, shaking the earth with every step. He found Starving Mathias in his garden just finishing off some medium rare venison steak cooked in white wine and dijon mustard. ‘See here Starving Mathias,’ growled the strongest devil, trying, but failing, not to step on the flower beds with his enormous mutton feet, ‘two hundred pounds of gold is way too much. ‘I challenge you to a contest of raw power. See that cart horse yonder? We’ll take turns to see who can carry it around the yard the most number of times. The winner will get to keep the gold.’

Starving Mathias flossed his teeth a bit and thought about the challenge. He was somewhat concerned because he hadn’t quite built up his strength yet… He pondered and reflected and pondered some more…. ‘all right, he said, ‘you first.’ So the strongest devil picked up the carthorse and strode around the yard, circling it seven times. Eventually, he dropped the horse, utterly exhausted, lying where he had fallen.

‘Well done!’ exclaimed starving Mathias, ‘but I will make the challenge for myself harder still by picking up the cart horse between my legs,’ and he leapt onto the horse and rode it round and round the yard carefully trampling the strongest devil every time he went around. ‘There! I went around eleven times carrying the horse between my legs! I win!’ And so the Devil, disoriented and crushed, returned to Hell utterly defeated.

The other devils were outraged. There was even some suggestion touted from the back that a committee should be formed to return the gold. Eventually, the meanest and nastiest devil stood up saying that he would succeed where the others had failed and slid up to the world where Starving Mathias had just finished a bowl of shiitake mushroom and asparagus soup seasoned with turmeric and coriander.’ ‘See here Starving Mathias,’ hissed the scariest devil, ‘two hundred pounds of gold is way too much. I challenge you to a wager, we’ll see who is the scariest. Winner takes all.’

‘Meh, okay,’ said Starving Mathias, ‘you first.’

‘Er, what if we make you drink poisoned ink?’

‘I’ll drink it if I have to…’

‘Er, what about if we strap you into a harness of stinging nettles and make you plough a field of burning coals?’

‘I’ll endure it if I must..’

‘What about, er, putting you in a vat and boiling you in molten lead…?’

‘Enough of this bullshit!’ cried Starving Mathias, ‘now I am going to scare you!’ and he called his wife to come out of the cottage. ‘Mildred!’

Midred emerged, rolling pin in hand, as fierce and determined as she was large and strong. She grabbed the scariest Devil with one meaty paw and began to beat him with the rolling pin, belabouring him meantime with the world’s sharpest tongue while she did so..

‘Why you greedy, degenerate, shiftless cockwomble of a devil!’ she yelled, beating his legs. ‘You good for nothing, woe begotten, harebrained oxygen thief!’ beating his rump. ‘ You hopeless, vagrant scrimshanker!’ beating his shoulders. ‘You worthless muckspouting mumble crusted loitersack!’ bashing his head. ‘Poltroon, saddle goose, ninny hammer.’

The scariest devil was so challenged in his preferred identity as a scurrilous and unsavoury degenerate, a putrid and reprehensible miscreant, that he shed not only his shirt but his skin as well and fled all the way back to hell. “Let starving Mathias keep the fucking gold! He is way more devil than all of us put together’. And so it was the Mathias and Mildred lived out their days feasting on whatever their hearts desired, taking it in turns to cook up delicious delicacies for one another and laughing their heads off at all the rude things to call devils.

Our story begins with Starving Mathias in despair. His poverty and his hunger are symbolic of what it might feel like to get ‘to the end of one’s rope’. It is the situation where the preferred identity of what Winnicott would call ‘the false self’ is no longer sustainable. The more alluring persona which you might like to present to the world just feels dry and hollow and no longer worth the candle. Starving Mathias has hit ‘rock bottom’. This is a state of mind often described as existential crisis. To live is not enough. There has to be meaning and purpose, whilst painfully acknowledging one cannot provide this for oneself. Moreover, Mathias keenly feels his inadequacies, his guilt, his failure and his helplessness.

A person’s independence is a stage on the path of individuation but is not its goal. Beyond independence lies inter-dependence, the realisation that we need not only one another but also ‘the spirit of the depths’ to quote Jung, a connection to the greater awareness embodied by whatever the divine is for you, in order to imbue ego-consciousness with real vitality. Giving up independence as an end in itself feels like a terrible blow, a kind of death, an humiliation, the renunciation of a once vaunted accomplishment. Nevertheless, this death of self-sufficiency has to be entered into if we are to make any spiritual progress.

‘A death blow is a life blow to some, who till they died did not alive become, who had they lived did most surely die… but when they died, vitality began.’ Emily Dickinson.

Another way of saying this is that transcendence happens via the inferior function, what is least developed in oneself, the stone that the builder refused. When we can accept and integrate what is most lowly in us then something wonderful happens. With the renunciation of a partial, jaundiced view which prefers only the syntonic propaganda of who-I-am, the ego as a warts-and-all experience then becomes sufficiently compendious to house a more fully fledged sense of self. Such a perspective is no longer afraid of its own devils and can therefore appropriate a goodly chunk of the spiritual gold which said devils keep to themselves for as long as we are at odds with them.

The Salmon Sweetheart.

A long, long time ago, way before you were born, way before machines, tarmac or income tax, there was a fisherman who used to paddle his wickerwork coracle out onto the lake where he lived at every full moon. On this particular night the moon was low and heavy, there was not a breath of wind and the coracle floated without effort into the night. After a while he set his line and waited, knees drawn up under his chin, wolfskin pulled down over his shoulders to ward off the cold. He waited and waited and waited. The coracle bobbed ever so gently on the still surface. His mind wandered…

All of a sudden the line snapped taught and the coracle tipped forward into the dark water. The fisherman quickly looped the line around one hand and braced his feet against the wicker as the small craft was pulled about. He tried to balance himself, leaning back so as not to have the coracle be swamped by surging motion, his heart now racing to the struggles of his hidden prey.

Just as it seemed the boat would be pulled under, a mighty Salmon burst out of the water towards him, arcing through the dark sky, moonlight glittering across its thousand silver scales as it slammed into his body. He tried to get a hold of it. Just for a moment he managed to grab it by the gills and the tail, just long enough to look into its yellow eye, just long enough to see its yawning mouth, just long enough to hear it whisper sweetly, ‘hello darling man, would you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman dropped the salmon back into the water as though it had bitten him. It slipped away and disappeared in an instant. He shook himself and yelled at the rippling wake by way of trying to assert he was somehow still in charge of events, ‘Are you mad? You are a fish! I am a man! Come back here …!’ But the salmon was gone.

The fisherman did the best he could to gather his wits. He told himself he must have imagined it all, or been bewitched perhaps. He set his line again by way of trying to organise his thoughts and soon recomposed himself. But not for long. Once more, just as the waters’ surface had regained their calm, the huge fish burst skywards, knocking the poor man clean off his feet and into the lake.

Though winded and suddenly freezing in the cold waters, he tried to grab at the fish, getting all tangled up together in the line which now seemed more like endless tresses of silver hair. With one hand he tried to hold her whilst clawing for the edge of the coracle with the other. The salmon wriggled against him, almost teasing him, her mouth gaping close to his ear, ‘hello darling man, would you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman spluttered and choked, struggling for coherence, ‘I, you.. what? No!’ And so the fish took him down, line, rod, and man, down down into the inky waters, until his lungs felt as if they would explode… ‘and what about now my darling? Would you be my sweetheart now?’

He tried to fight her. He tried to swim for the surface. He tried to speak, life bubbling out through his beard and up through the swirling mass of hair and flailing limbs. As consciousness dimmed he felt vaguely aware that she had wrapped arms around him, drawing him down and down, ever deeper into the cool dark depths of the lake.

The moon gradually disappeared from view as they sank, though it was not entirely black as you might imagine. Eventually they reached the silty bottom, landing softly and with exquisite comfort in the soft ancient mud. Being dead didn’t seem so bad after all. She held him gently, caressing his face and nuzzling his neck. He put his hands on her waist and then around her, holding her to him. ‘ And now, darling man? Will you be my sweetheart now?’

He thought about it for a bit. Being dead seemed to make quite a difference to how he felt about everything. It seemed not such a bad idea after all. ‘Okay, I will,’ and with that she gathered him up and swam strongly along the bottom, gradually rising up and up until they reached the surface and the edge of the lake where they found themselves in a sandy sheltered cove. There they rested and made gentle love together till morning.

When the fisherman woke he found she had been busy and built them both a rather lovely cottage with a garden and out buildings. A table had been set in the garden with breakfast things and coffee brewed on a fire. Their first child cooed and burbled in his cot. As the fisherman ate the child grew and then there seemed to be another and then another. For an age they dedicated themselves to the lives of the children. Eventually seven sons all shot up like weeds, grew beards and left home one by one, leaving the old couple with hoar frost heads, bodies bent, and just as they came to their last…. there was a mighty jerk on the line and the fisherman woke with a start, the coracle rocking wildly in the water.

The fisherman cursed himself out loud for falling asleep, trying to cast the seemingly stupid dream from his mind as he struggled to regain control of the line. The coracle dipped dangerously in the water and he had to lean back all he could to prevent the craft from being swamped.

As he held on, bracing himself in the wickerwork, the images of his sleep swirled about inside him, insisting themselves, scoring into his memory and imagination. He struggled against them as though against some hated enemy, desperately trying to reassert himself. He needed to keep his small boat afloat, to land his catch and have something to show for his efforts by morning. Mouths depended upon him after all. There would be hunger and recriminations should he fail. So he held on with all his might when suddenly a great fish erupted from the dark waters and careened, flapping wildly, straight into his body. They both fell to the bottom of the boat where he struggled to hold onto his prey which now fixed him with it’s yellow eye as he held her close and whispered, ‘hello darling man, will you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman is seeking something. He’s not sure what. Something to feed himself, something to keep body and soul together. The concept of seeking is central to many spiritual traditions, though what it actually means is not so obvious. Is it simply a matter of casting out your line and hoping for the best? The contemporary Christian tradition of ‘seek and ye shall find,’ cast in your line and something will surely bite, is rather different from the original version. This was found in the Gnostic book of Thomas, recently discovered at Nag Hammadi, unadulterated by two thousand years of kings and pontiffs with axes to grind and populations to keep in line. In Thomas this line reads, ‘He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All.. (para2)

Why will we be troubled and amazed? Perhaps the answer to this is best expressed by Rumi in the Sufi tradition, ‘ What you seek is seeking you.’ The divine is not just sitting there waiting to be discovered. It is actively engaged with us, trying to draw our attention to a greater reality than that bound by ego consciousness. Sometimes this is by visiting upon us the most difficult and painful situations in order to bring about the new perspective.

On the entrance lintel to the Oracle at Delphi are carved the words, ‘Know thyself’. This had a rather different meaning to the ancients than it does for us in modern times. We tend to think of self knowledge as shadow integration, having a good grasp of the darker corners of the personality. Back in the day ‘mind’ or ‘self’ was equivalent with the entirety of the Psyche and so knowing oneself really implied having a relationship with the inner ‘Other’ which transcends ego awareness. ‘The Spirit of the Depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being.’ (Jung p232 Red Book)

This understanding helps us to grasp the symbolic meaning of what is often referred to in the literature as ‘ego death’. The western tendency to think concretely has stopped more than a few in their quest for spiritual progress because they imagine their egos have to be eradicated in the process. Nothing could be further from the truth. We need healthy egos to withstand the impact of self-realisation since the experience of the self ‘is always a defeat for the ego’ (Jung Mysterium para 778)

When we become aware of the ‘Spirit of the Depths’ it challenges and reconfigures the constructed identity we spend so much time trying to maintain and stabilise. This leads to the humbling and even painful realisation of how superficial and one dimensional life has been thus far. A sacrifice of ego-as-centre-of-the-psyche has to be made. The death is not that of the ego per se but of its primacy in the psyche. The ego is no longer that around which everything revolves but is itself a satellite of something more fundamental. ‘The Spirit of the Depths said: “No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction; sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come.(Jung p230 the Red Book)

The ego is then compelled to realise it is not master of its own house, but a servant to a greater power. The ‘death’ is that of the illusion that the psyche is what I know of it. The birth is that of realising that we don’t know the half of it, in the face of which mystery we can only stand in awe and wonder.

‘The Spirit of the Depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child: This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.’ (ibid p234)

Once the fisherman can renounce wanting the Salmon on his own terms he is introduced to an experience of life’s purpose he could not previously imagine. His life becomes simple and dedicated to the child(ren). Of course, once in a while, he lapses back into what Kierkegaard would call ,’the despair of wanting to be oneself’, the fantasy that he is isolated and separate. Perhaps there is purpose in such despair, to be reminded once more that, ‘even the enlightened person remains what s/he is and is never more than their own limited ego before the One who dwells within, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses on all sides, fathomless as the abyss and vast as the sky.’ (Jung, Answer to Job.)

The Fisherman’s Wife, part two.

This is a story which deserves another look, having already reflected upon it here..https://andywhiteblog.com/?s=fisherman%27s+ It seems like a simple story of a greedy woman who then gets her just desserts. But there’s way more to it than that.

Once upon a time a poor Fisherman pulled in his net to find he had caught the King of the Fishes. He lets him go in return for a wish. The fisherman runs home to tell his wife who promptly settles on wanting a larger house, though no sooner is it granted than she wants a mansion and then a castle and then a palace and then…

The King of the Fishes becomes increasingly peeved with all this wanting more and more. So when she changes her mind for the umpteenth time and wants a galaxy with added neutron stars and a warp speed sleigh carved from a single flawless diamond to get about in…. he returns both husband and wife to their tumbledown cottage by the sea.

It seems like an ordinary moral tale not to want too much. Yet we might wonder at the wife’s eternal dissatisfaction. She seems grasping and yet you can’t help but think she is also fleeing from some unnamed horror. There is something avoidant about her discontent and beneath the bullish exterior one begins to suspect an underlying anxiety of cosmic proportions.

Her eternal wanting the next bigger and better thing has a manic quality to it, as though she were in flight from some dread prospect, manifest as the inability to settle, to engage with, to really take in and enjoy. It seems like she is wanting to avoid the cardinal rule of good things, which is that all good things come to an end. Her project is to be a step ahead of death and decay by making sure she never does more than dip her toe into the temporary arrangements that are the hallmark of life.

Victor Frankl calls this a ‘no-ogenic neurosis’, refusing the loan of life because of the debt of death. Something has impacted the Fisherman’s wife so severely as to make the prospect of ordinary life quite unbearable. She cannot sit still. She has to rush from one situation to another. She is the person you know who is always on the go, has a million things to do, whose diary overflows, who is forever having to love and leave you. She longs for peace and quiet but somehow cannot give it to herself for more than a moment. For all the business and excitement there is no real joy. She looks strained and exhausted all the time.

In our story the heroine hops from one situation to another, trying to stay ahead of the ravages of time, wanting to be the author of endings rather than being at the mercy of them. It looks like mania but actually its phobia. She is not greedy, she is conducting an anxious rearguard action against catastrophic loss. Anais Nin once said, ‘the secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow.’ This euphemistic ‘as if’ pays only lip service to the harsh yet deeper truth that the secret of a full life is to live and relate to others knowing full well that they will not be there tomorrow.

It’s often puzzling to the casual observer that people stay in relationships which clearly do not work, or that they trade a poor relationship for another just as bad, or that a match which seems compatible is not allowed to last. You can’t help wondering whether the reason behind these vexing quandaries might be the same. The ill matched pair, whilst full of frustrated dissatisfaction, manage most effectively to avoid the heart ache of a truer love lost to the open grave and its handful of dirt. The gratuitous affair, or otherwise inexplicable devaluation of the beloved in a far better match, serves a similar purpose. A moment’s pain is traded against the horror of irreplaceable loss and grief further down the line.

Analyst HG Baynes gets to some of the underlying factors of our heroine’s attitude, her ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ mentality with its narcissistic preoccupation for all things bigger, better, brighter. Baynes describes such restlessness as ‘the provisional life.’ It is inculcated by early experiences of a mother who fills her child with apprehension. ‘Every attempt made to launch her [own] individual life [is] undermined by fear suggested to her by her mother.’ Such a pattern of mothering intrudes so vigorously into her daughter’s private life that she cannot enjoy or settle down with what she has since it is being eternally usurped, compared or spoiled. Mother is ‘a passionately interested eavesdropper in the erotic intimacies of her daughter.’ Nothing is allowed to be hers. Nothing is sacred. There is no privacy. So, of course she feels entitled to compensation kept safe from maternal intrusion by having it be firmly embedded in the safety of tomorrow, all too reminiscent of Dorothy’s longing in the Wizard of Oz.

‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow, its only a moment away…’

To invest in what she already has, her man and her little cottage by the sea, is to place her destiny in the service of the Self rather than in the service of the spell casting witch mother.

‘This means to be shaped and transformed by an unknown power’. This is the core of the neurotic fear of life, ‘that she might be seized, carried away and delivered over irrevocably to an unknown fate.’

The utter dread of such an eventuality must be defended against at all costs, just as strongly as the toxic domination of a possessive mother complex. Caught between Scylla and Charybdis she retreats into fantasy and magical thinking. If only this were a rarity. Sadly her wishes are those of everyone of us preoccupied with winning the lottery, having the ideal wo/man, the next house, the next car, the next gadget, the next ‘must have’ beauty product. It seems like rampant materialism, but is in the fact thinly veiled terror of being here, now.

The Fox and the Mule.

On the role of symbiotic omnipotence in the narcissistic character.

Once upon a time there was once a poor starving Mule. She was kept in a barren paddock where not a single blade of grass grew. There she stayed in a miserable state, day after day.

Nearby there was a jungle in which lived a ferocious Lion, though she could no longer hunt because of wounds sustained in battle. So the Lion called to the Fox saying, ‘go and find me a Mule, charm her with your spells and specious talk, beguile her and bring her here for me to eat.

The Fox, having been habituated to its subservience replied, ‘I will serve you obediently, oh Lion. I will rob the Mule of her wits with my cunning and enchantment for it is my business to beguile and lead astray’. He followed the Lion’s instructions and went in search of the emaciated Mule.

Soon the Fox came upon the Mule and began to seduce her. He flattered her saying how such a beautiful creature deserved so much better than her barren field and painted for her a grand picture of fields he knew, with grass so high a Camel could get lost in them. But the Mule would not budge and so the Fox had to raise his game, praising the Mule’s beauty, persuading her of his noble intentions and of the delicious meadow which awaited them.

The Mule, in her modesty, was eventually convinced that she lacked the power and perception of the Fox’s true belief. Weakened with hunger and bedazzled with cunning patter she let herself be lured into the jungle where the Lion lay in wait.

However, the Lion was so famished that when she saw the Mule being led forward she rushed her charge, springing too early. So the Mule escaped with no more than a few scratches… and the realisation she’d been duped.

The Lion was furious and sent the Fox back to try and lure the Mule once more, persuading him to use all his guile to muffle the Mule’s reason, making her vulnerable to persuasion. The Fox found the Mule alert and suspicious but began to undermine her directly, ‘you ignoble creature! What did I do to you that you bought me in the presence of a dragon? How could you do such a thing? Why have you reacted so harshly?

‘It was a Lion,’ replied the Mule.

‘No, you fantasised it. You’ve really missed the point, and after all I have done for you. Why won’t you believe me? You’re being over sensitive and clearly have trust issues. Perhaps you have unresolved traumas from your past to be reacting like this. I only wanted you to be happy and this is how you repay me. Don’t be so silly you foolish Mule, you saw no Lion, it’s all in your imagination.’

The Mule was outraged at the Fox’s audacity, at the treatment of her as if she was a fool but the Fox would not be put off and berated her for daring to be so offended. He gradually wore down the Mule’s faith in her own perspective and ultimately persuaded her back into the jungle where the Lion tore her to pieces.

Part of what makes addressing the Fox’s entitlement and refusal to be accountable so difficult, is that the Mule fails to hold onto her suspicion there is a Lion lurking in the wings. It is the Lion from which the narcissistic Fox derives all his confidence and bravado. The reason the Fox is so unrelatable, so absorbed in his agenda, is that his commitment and fidelity are already spoken for. Analyst Masud Khan calls this toxic bond ‘symbiotic omnipotence’, the Fox is identified with and enthralled to a hidden third, the devouring Lion mother.

In this dynamic the early bond between the Fox and the Lion is typified by a split reality in which the needs of the Fox are entirely marginalised (you can have the crumbs from my table) but then compensated for by indulging his entitlement and magical thinking (‘beguile the Mule with your spells’) making it legitimate to treat the Mule as an object to be used and abused.

The Fox’s real needs, to have his own hunger validated, are supplanted and compensated for by the borrowed might of the Lion. This is why the narcissist can so rarely face themselves, take responsibility for what they say or how they behave, because to do so would be to renounce the support and power of the Lion. This leaves him alone and unprotected from devouring maternal wrath.

In place of relatedness, the Fox is given the opportunity to treat the Mule as the Lion has been treating him. The Fox is then able 1) to deny the devouring nature of the Lion, 2) split off his feelings of subjugation onto the Mule and then 3) get her to identify with and embody all of the subsequent confusion and disorientation which finally culminates in her evisceration.

Moreover, we all know what will happen to the Fox if he returns empty handed. He will wind up on the menu instead of the Mule. The Lion is not only Mother, but a terrifying image of the dangerous aspect of the Unconscious itself and so the prospect of being gobbled up is something the Fox is going to guard against as though his life depended on it….

By way of a postscript to this sorry tale we might well wonder about the psychology of the foolish Mule. You can’t help feeling sorry for her but it’s not as though she didn’t know what was happening. She absolutely failed to learn from her earlier narrow escape. How did she allow herself to be wrestled away from her own experience? Her gullibility is staggering. Even the most rank stupidity is not enough to erase the instinct for self preservation. So how does she permit herself to be led away so readily? Her betrayal by the Fox is certainly preceded by betrayal of herself.

Fairbairn’s moral defence, in which a child holds itself responsible for its own abandonment and abuse, might help here. Learned helplessness and the idea that negative attention is better than nothing doesn’t seem enough to explain the Mule’s seeming masochism. Paradoxically, she tells herself she must be party to her desertion and neglect in the barren field. She must have deserved it somehow. This conviction reinstates her as a significant player in a dismal scenario where she is in fact unbearably helpless. So, agency is restored but then so too is she guilty and guilt, after all, must be punished…

The Prince who wanted to live Forever.

Once there was a Prince who had lost his mother. He seemed rather unaffected and even sang at her funeral, though, thereafter, he developed a terrible fear of death. He went to his father the King and said, ‘Father, I do not want to die, I’m going to take refuge with the Queen of Forever, where no time passes.’ After much travail he reaches the Queen’s castle and finds the way barred by three massive gates, each guarded by a fierce monster. A servant bakes magical loaves of bread which tempt the monsters to quit their posts and so the Prince passes through, finds the Queen and lives happily for thousands of years.

One Saturday afternoon, or maybe it was Tuesday morning, the Prince decides he might go back to Reality for a visit. The Queen gives him a pair of special shoes saying, ‘when you get there you will be attacked by a very bad man. Put on the shoes to get away from him’. The Prince returns and is immediately accosted by the spectre of Death. ‘I’ve been looking for you…’ The Prince hurriedly puts on the magical shoes which speed him back to Foreverland as promised. At the gates they meet the Queen who halts Death saying, ‘Let’s throw the Prince into the air, we’ll see which side of the gate he lands’. The Prince lands within the gates and so is saved, apparently.

Our Prince has received a great fright he cannot process, the loss of his Mother. He has no-one to whom he can take his grief. It’s enough to terrify him into avoidant re-action. He cannot proceed in a world where such terrible fears exist, without anyone to validate or mediate them. He cannot go back to Mother, nor forward to Father. His autonomic nervous system shuts down and he flees to a psychic realm akin to Jung’s ‘Spirit of the Depths’ instead. In order to do this he has to collapse the process of ego/self separation and skip past the three Guardians whose job it is to keep these worlds apart.

The Guardians are bought off with bread, synonymous with the body, so that normally unavailable thresholds can be crossed and the terrors of the world left behind. But at what price? In Chinese medicine ‘the three gates’ are described as ‘obstacles in the body which prevent the full circulation of Qi’. The emotional terrors have had to become physical problems.

In his writings on hysteria, Freud’s associate Sandor Ferenczi describes three gates through which psychological trauma can create psychosomatic symptoms. First is the child not being loved; second is that excitation persists at the bodily site of trauma (1932, pp. 80, 123-124) or is displaced onto other body parts (1932, pp. 23, 80); the third is that psychosomatic symptoms are a reenactment within the body of dissociated traumatic experiences.

The Prince’s foray back to Reality is immediately met by the figure of Death, the end of identification with Timelessness, the painfully surfacing memories of intrusion and loss, the felt experience of his inner conflicts. Both Spielrein and Jung refer to the anxiety of the unknown fear which haunts hysteria. The body, sacrificed as a repository for traumatic memory, then becomes a new source of fear in the form of either unwanted impulses or somatic symptoms. The enemy is now within, ‘before which you may vainly attempt to flee to an uncertain future’. (Spielrein 1955)

Analyst Sabina Spielrein talks about the need for the destruction of old forms, distorted self-concepts, so that the new can emerge. Though, what if the destruction feels unsupported, when separation and loss do not lead to new growth but prove too momentous to undertake? What happens when the loss of oneness does not lead to twoness, when the child’s autonomy gets in the way of prohibitive harmony, when participation mystique has to give way to body odour and hairy legs?

If part of a family dynamic is that a withdrawn mother is briefly bought back to life by the new life with which she can then identify and upon whom hopes of lasting happiness are pinned, then the child attaining any kind of autonomy is a threat to such expectations. The child protects itself from this hijack by identifying with mother’s views more strongly than her own, the true self now subjugated and forced into hiding by what has had to be swallowed down as ‘love’.

I wonder if the malignant ‘secondary personality’ typical of hysteria referenced by Spielrein isn’t internalised maternal hate at the child’s nascent ego, what Marion Woodman would call ‘the Death Mother’. The child internalises a hard unresponsive emotional core, ‘an unconscious identification with the dead mother,’ (A. Green 2021 p150) its own suffering stuck in the timeless symptom of some poor afflicted organ, whose sovereignty must be renounced at the castle gates of the Queen of Forever.

Woodman adds, ‘If we are not wanted and intuit that we are a threat to our parents, our cells will have been imprinted with the fear of abandonment, the terror of annihilation.’ (Woodman 1980) Such a scenario gives rise to what Woodman calls, ‘possum mentality’ playing dead to survive but with the danger that possum ‘becomes a feature of the body/psyche which ultimately may turn against itself.’. ibid

The image of the Prince being thrown up into the air like a rag-doll to see which side of the gate he lands is just this possum mentality.. Jung puts it like this, ‘Whoever relinquishes experiencing a risky undertaking must stifle an erotic wish, committing a form of self murder.’ (Jung in Spielrein 1955)

In our story the Guardians are bought off with magical loaves, sops to Cerberus. Bread has long been associated with the body which is then given over to the Guardians to gnaw on as they will. ‘An unconscious contract of sorts is signed in which it is agreed that sexuality and the body debase the purer aims in life. A sacrifice takes place, as the rejection of the body is one’s own bodily being..’ (Bollas 1999) This rejection of the body also finds expression in rejection of the other.. ”Auto-erotic means not conscious of the presence of other people. They see only themselves and that is why they have panics.’ Jung. My Mother and I. p189

If there is an embargo on engaging with the other, or where, ‘mother’s libido is demonstrated on rather than with the infant, (Bollas ibid) then the body is objectified and relatedness tabooed. Individuation of the child is secretly construed by mother as a form of betrayal. Such mothering often paints the world as too scary to live in whilst failing to protect the child from real dangers. It is then safer for the child to be depleted, to stay fused with what is life denying and relegate suffering from psyche to soma, from the feelings to the body.

Bollas says hysteria is a defence against intimacy, finding the erotic through the internal object. Fairbairn emphasises it is a compensation for an absence of closeness. The symbol of the Prince escaping Death with his hermetic shoes in order to get back to the Queen seems to include both these interpretations, since it contains the flight from the other/body and thus the refusal of life as well as giving himself some small measure of peace in the arms of the Queen of Forever. He chooses the mortification of the flesh over the unbearable mortification of not knowing where to go, what to do, or how to live.

The Queen seems to know about this dilemma and prepared the magical shoes ahead of time. They help the Prince evade a transformative encounter. The magical shoes are like Hermes’ winged sandals. Like Hermes the Prince is also moving between worlds, between an ideal alter-ego, Spielrein’s ‘hypertrophied self’, and the much more difficult and death dealing realm where symptoms once again become feelings.

Hermes is patron of thieves. Hysteria robs bodily aliveness; words get stolen, feelings get fleeced, memories are pocketed; organs stripped of proper function. Over solicitousness and eternal understanding of others is robbery of one’s own point of view. “Understanding is eo ipso identification” (Ferenczi 1932, p. 183). and so actually a part of the psychopathology rather than the empathy it’s dressed up to be.

In Freud’s ‘Studies in Hysteria’ (1895 p4) we find this opening remark, ‘In the determination of the pathology of hysteria the accidental factor evokes the syndrome.’ What this means is that hysteria is a response to something terrible, the accidental factor, happening to the child, experiences which cannot be integrated and wear away at the body/psyche of the child concerned. In his case history of Emmy von M, Freud is quite clear she has been overwhelmed by a number of fearful shocks, though he is careful not to suggest any of these might have been sexual even where the narrative might suggest it. Why does Emmy scream repeatedly, ‘don’t touch me?’

Further to these shocks or fears of violation, Ferenczi adds the introjection of guilt. The child makes itself a party to events by feeling responsible, an idea taken further by Fairbairn who frames the need to take in the perpetrator’s guilt as a form of counterintuitive protection from feelings of unbearable impotence in the face of overwhelming situations. If I am guilty I am at least in control. Bollas then reminds us of the power of the Mother to negate sexuality specifically and the body in general. For Bollas it is not so much the seduction of the Father which is problematic but Mother’s failure to do so, a failure rooted in distaste for the embodied Otherness of the child, all the more reason to make a sacrifice of the body to the Guardians seem like a good idea.

The Queen of Forever seems to be a kind of Anima Mundi figure, an archetype of Mercy at whose feet the Prince throws himself. But since the Prince has forcibly gained access to Her with his sacrifice to the Guardians, having Her ‘at-hand’ like this is an act of inflation and so she cannot serve in her usual life affirming capacity. His flight from reality results in a stasis of specialness, which has its own deadly effect on aliveness.

Spielrein describes Hysteria as a ‘hypertrophy of the ego,’ the overblown-ness of which reflects this inflation. The Prince’s identification with Transcendence at the expense of ego differentiation can often produce revulsion of the body, a pronounced tendency towards an identity with with ascetic practices, stringent regimes to take the place of embodied autonomy, now sacrificed to the Guardians. Bollas seems to feel that the entirety of organised religion is a collective form of hysteria rooted in hatred of the body. ”It was not only Jesus who left the earthly world to join his Holy family; he paved the road walked by all hysterics, who renounce (the bread of) carnal interests to testify to their nobler existence.” (Bollas 2000)

The end of our story is not a happy one. The Prince gets to stay with the Queen of Forever, forever. But…, by definition, nothing new ever happens there. So it feels safe but also dull and un-nourishing. I wonder if Freud’s own frustrated and somewhat varying perspectives on hysteria never quite gel because he could not find a way of describing this flight into transcendent reality. His lexicon had no entry for the Queen of Forever .

For Freud, in 1895, ‘symptoms disappear if memories of the causal process are awakened with its accompanying affect… and given expression.’ Jung concurs, ‘the blocking of affect is transmuted into physical symptoms.’ (CW4 206) Jung takes Freud’s ideas that hysteria could be thought of as a foreign body further by describing it like this,. ‘In hysteria the complex has become autonomous and leads to an active separate existence which progressively degrades and destroys the constellating power of the ego complex.” 1906.

You could think of this as a rogue super-ego, or as an internalised devouring mother, gobbling up the child, or as Thanima (P Goss), the death dealing aspect of the psyche, Kali-like, which feeds upon the child’s vitality. The gradual return to life of feelings, the grounding re-establishment of the child’s subjective reality, changes the relationship, and the face, of the unconscious, which then serves to revalue the hated body, the dirt to which Earth has been relegated. There it can find meaning in dark embodiment and invest in ordinary life. Practically speaking, in therapy, this entails having ‘disturbed self esteem as the focus’, (C Asper). This exposes the shaming which has led to hatred of the body and makes it possible to turn the old question, ‘why do I have such little value?’ into a new question, ‘why have I been so devalued’?

Hans in Luck.

Hans had completed seven long years of work for his Master who rewarded him with a great lump of gold. The gold was very heavy and Hans was soon utterly worn out from carrying it. A man passed on his horse and asked what the trouble was, kindly offering to swop his horse for the gold so Hans could ride along. Hans was well pleased though when he mounted up the horse bolted and threw him down. A lady with a cow passed and helped him up, generously relieving Hans of the troublesome horse for the amazing cow which would supply him with milk and cheese for all eternity, though when he tried to milk her she kicked him in the head.

A most benevolent man gave his pig for the horrible cow and now he had more bacon than he could imagine, though more fear too since it seemed that the pig was stolen and so he quietly swopped it with a very helpful man for his plump goose. Having said that, all these fortunate events gave him no coin in his pocket and so he swopped the goose with a knife grinder for a grinding stone that was only a little damaged. It would be a great living but it was pretty heavy and so when it accidentally fell in the well when he went there to drink it seemed he was now entirely free and so he went happily on his way.

A cynical view of Hans might be that he is the classic ‘puer aeternus’ who doesn’t understand how the world works and yet each one of his exchanges are right for him at the time. His luck seems to be that he accepts misfortune when it happens and refrains from having to dress it up or blame himself. Fair trade depends on your perspective as well as market forces. Because he can hold onto this, let himself feel burdened, bucked, kicked, accused and penniless, all manner of what looks like misfortune becomes something else.

I was on my way to an exciting and long awaited meeting. The sun was out, my new motorbike rumbled effortlessly down the highway. Everything was perfect. Suddenly, the bike begins to splutter, intermittent cutting out, then loss of power and an emergency search for a safe spot to pull over. I let the bike cool down before trying again. Nothing. I wrack my brains trying to figure it out. I’d changed the battery the day before, was there a loose terminal? A hairy bloke on a Silver Wing stops and waggles the cables, ‘yeah, look, a loose terminal’ He regaled me with stories of his own roadside mishaps while we waited for the RAC. I felt better. I was going to make it even if I had been the author of my own bad luck.

One offer of help comes after another. An old boy on a massive BMW stops and prefers a tiny clasp knife to see if that might help. I dig at the terminals with the one inch blade to honour his gesture. Gimley’s big brother turns up in a van, red beard to his belt, ‘I got cokes if you need.’ A Hell’s Angel on a chopped Harley with nitrous canister out front and skull engraved into the tank pulls up, confirming the consensus of opinion and we tell tales until the RAC show up.

The RAC guy really wants to help, wishes it was just a loose wire but it’s not the battery. It’s the alternator. Very expensive. Also, the bike is dead in the water. The policy I took out that morning didn’t cover having to be towed. That would be extra, a lot extra. Oh, and more time. Another hour, then two and then three. Night fell.

Yet I felt strangely buoyant. It wasn’t my fault. Alternators corrode and burn out especially when you live by the sea. My California Vintage was by definition an old lady and prone to senior moments. Shit happens. Its not your fault and maybe even the other stuff that you think is your fault, is not your fault. What if it had been the battery connection? Replacing the battery on a machine that’s new to you is like a squirrel tackling a nut for the first time. You make mistakes. Maybe it doesn’t work first time. This is how we learn. Without trial and error you cannot move forward. You make mistakes, the same old ones and if you are lucky new ones in glorious technicolour. If error becomes blameworthy fault or responsibility heaped where it does not belong then learning stops, branches droop and the tree withers.

Blame gets inside you easily and threatens quality of life. What very often contributes to trauma is the conviction that you deserve what befell you, rehashing what the East has to teach us about karma back into a more Judeo Christian interpretation. We tend to embrace self blame, as pernicious as it is, because it is in fact a form of paradoxical self defence. Fordham reminds us that self blame makes a person party to events and therefore a significant player, mitigating against feelings of inferiority and helplessness. Kids blame themselves for parental woes, for the abuses suffered as a result, blows of fate you must omnipotently ‘deserve’ to keep from being a mere pawn on the board.

Gaslighting yourself makes the thing that happened and your feelings about it difficult to lay to rest. The problem with this is that happiness and things that happen go together. The two words ‘happiness’ and ‘happen’ have the same etymological root, Old English ‘eadig‘, wealth, riches, luck. When certain happenings aren’t allowed to be what they are, random undeserved blows, then happiness also suffers because now you are not only to blame but also unlucky.

How would it be to think of what is happening around you as having absolutely nothing to do with you? Paradoxically, it allowed me to watch the evening settle, to count my blessings for the hard shoulder I had to get off the highway, the Costa coffee house across the way, street light, folks slowing to see if I was okay, stopping to talk. So when Jung says, ‘what happens to a person has something to do with them’, he suggests that what we think of as ‘happening’ is not simply about events themselves but about how we are conditioned to interpret them; not just what they mean but what they have to mean.

The recovery guy is a young Russian bloke, interspersing chaotic efforts to load up the bike with frantic phone calls from his mate whose own recovery vehicle is stuck in a ditch somewhere with its back wheels in the air. Somehow he begins to talk about luck and whether he believes in such a thing. He didn’t like the idea because it implied forces greater than himself and he wanted to believe he was captain of his own ship. Things happened because of things which went before. He was in control… though he did have anxiety attacks… and it had taken him many a sweaty palmed year to get his licence.

‘Perhaps’, he mused, ‘luck happens when you experience yourself as lucky. Its not so much the shape of the journey but what you do with what life presents you.. though,’ he added reluctantly, ‘the Universe responds to expectation…’ Does fortune not favour the brave? He slowed right down as he realised the conundrum with which this now faced him, the corner into which he had just talked himself. ‘So, if I am to be lucky then I must renounce the desire to be in control and not mind what happens….’