Author: andywhite

A man goes into a bar. At the door he pauses and straps a large potato to his head. He then strides forward purposefully and orders a beer. The regulars look at one another doubtfully. One taps his temple. Another makes la-la noises. A third eventually asks, ‘Dude, why are you wearing a potato on your head? The stranger turns to him like he was sat in his own back yard and says in a lazy drawl, ‘to keep the tigers away, of course.’ The regulars exchange confused looks, ‘but there are no tigers in these parts, stranger.’ ‘Yep,’ says the stranger, oozing confidence, ‘mighty effective ain’t it?

Much of the current confusion about what it means to be a man has contributed to the malignant narcissism of our culture, currently spearheaded and symbolized by the fiasco of entitlement that is Donald Trump who daily does incomprehensible things whilst invoking the feeling in others that they must be the stoopid one.

We get so dazzled by what-Donald-did-next, so caught in the daily gut punch of crudity, corruption and orchestrated chaos that there is barely time to draw breath and wonder quietly how such a man ascended to highest office in the first place. The Kim’s of this world had power handed to them on a plate and so you expect them to be narcissistic babies. But how did the democratic process produce the same phenomenon?

Would you expect to find the Trump Administration at the end of two hundred years of fervent democracy? It is rather like the puzzle of the upstanding citizen who nevertheless harbors a secret and compulsive fetish behind closed doors. At first it all seems ‘mad’ but only because you do not have all the facts. There is an X in the equation for which a value has yet to be found.

I once knew someone who could not bear the sight of a number 6 bus. It turns out she used to ride that route which passed a road whose name was the same as an unmourned lover driven off years before by her foul temper. She could not bear her complicity let alone the loss. The bus route jogged her memory and so the psyche had leapt to her protection, parceling off unwanted life, preserving both her conscience and equilibrium in the process.

Collectively we do something similar. Patriotic self idealization requires the nation to split off it’s genocidal history, it’s greed, aggression and Imperialism. These have to be ejected beyond the borders onto Evil Others which must then be nobly warred against. This idealized group self then has to be rigorously policed and purged of self reflection, empathy, or care, all of which must now be regarded as ‘weakness’. Even this may not be enough. As the group unravels it may also need to demonize subgroups of its own members.

Like the story of the number 6 bus, whole swathes of collective awareness must be parceled off leaving us with the same split reality of competence and strength masquerading over fragility, emptiness and disconnection.

An iconic moment for this particular form of collective terror of ‘weakness’ came when Robert O’Neill, the former Navy Seal who claims to have been the one to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, tweeted a mask-less photo of himself on a Delta flight, captioned “I’m not a pussy.”

‘In the background of the photo was another, older man, wearing a fatigues-green United States Marine Corps hat — and a mask. When I saw his tweet I almost felt for him. What is it in our culture that has filled so many men with such an anxiety of impotence that even firing a bullet into the face of the most wanted terrorist alive and gaining the glory isn’t enough to reassure you that, yes, you are a man? Anand Giridharadas

From this point of view, the cultural crisis of male identity, the X in the equation, Donald Trump makes perfect sense. It’s much more than how to look rich when you ain’t. This particular deception is subsumed under the umbrella promise of being able to hide from yourself, regularly symbolized in the political tumult by hidden affairs, hidden payments, hidden grades, hidden tax returns, hidden connections and conversations, secret servers, hidden investments, hidden health details… hidden children.

When all else fails and you can no longer hide from horrible others you can take refuge in hiding from yourself and count on your buddy to do the same. The flaws in your personal character, the weakness, doubt and limitation can all be swept away by the warm and comforting tide of collective identity rooted in what RD Laing calls ‘alteration’, playing at being oneself.

‘The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are more subtle and far more dangerous.” ~C.G. Jung.

Our problem is not Trump. Our problem is that he represents a collective idea of a real man who, in turn, continues to feed the deification of persona which allows the rest of us, including many who outwardly oppose him, to hide from ourselves in good conscience.

Mother Goat had seven Kids. One day she left them at home while she went to the meadow to cut some fresh grass. ‘Don’t let anyone in’, she warned them,’ the big bad Wolf is hereabouts.’

Sure enough within half an hour the Wolf shows up pretending to be Mother. He puts on his sweetest caring voice, ‘oh let me in for I have fresh grass for you.’

The Kids laugh out loud because they can hear the gruff voice belongs to the Wolf and mock him from the safely shuttered windows. The Wolf goes off, educated in his error and eats some turnips to soften his voice. ‘oh let me in for I have fresh grass for you.’

The Kids are about to open the door when one of them sees the Wolf’s dark paw on the windowsill. ‘Stop, its the Wolf; see his dark paw’. So they mocked him some more and the Wolf slunk off further educated. He went to the Miller and stole some flour, covering himself from nose to tail and tried again…’oh let me in for I have fresh grass for you.’

Sure enough, the foolish Kids let him in and all are gobbled up except the smallest who manages to hide in a cuckoo clock. When Mother Goat returns she finds the lone survivor who tells what happened. ‘So that’s who I saw sleeping off a heavy meal in the meadow.’ She took scissors, needle and thread then snuck up on the Wolf and cut him open. Out came the kids. Mother Goat then told them to fill the Wolf with rocks which she sewed back up.

When the Wolf woke up he had a mighty thirst. He staggered to the river but when he bent down to drink fell in and was drowned, much to the jubilation of the Kids who sang and danced and feasted on their grass.

So, what is the moral of the story?

Folklore is full of such simple tales, the good and the innocent triumphing over the seemingly greater figure of evil personified by the Wolf. It makes you wonder if folk are just trying to comfort themselves with the wish fulfilling idea that though life’s troubles cannot be surmounted, some brave soul will come along and save the day, a life stance of passivity which existentialist Irvin Yalom calls, ‘the myth of the ultimate rescuer’. Mother Goat will swoop into view and save us all from death anxiety.

But did the Kids learn anything along the way? The dancing and feasting suggests not. You can’t help but notice that they survived by pure luck which rather compels one to rethink what good and evil might be. After all, the Wolf is just doing what Wolves do. It is the inflated naivety of the Kids which is the author of their demise. In a parallel universe somewhere the Wolf gets to keep his prize. After all it seems like a just reward for discovering that if he can accurately fulfill the Kids fantasy expectation for just a moment they will let him in, all against better judgement which might caution, ‘he’s been twice before, don’t you think we ought to think twice before answering? Mother if it is you what did you give us for breakfast? List our names in order of birth. Tell the story of what happened to Father Goat. Lets see some ID….

‘The Devil comes to us not with horns and a tail but as everything you ever wanted..”

Why? Because everything you ever wanted is where the route of least resistance lies. You really will get tired of winning. The wish that the Wolf is Mummy is more compelling than the scary prospect of being breakfast which then cannot be adequately defended against.

The recent Presidential debate is a good example of this. The naive assumption that Trump was simply going to let Biden have his time on the basis of gentlemanly agreement displays a staggering failure to grock the situation. After three years of aggressive bombast and steamrolling falsehoods, the nation thought he would be nice and polite for TV.? Its like offering candy to a cornered wolverine and being surprised when it takes your arm off.

If you are to come to grips with evil then, like charity, it has to begin at home. The idea that it is enough to simply vote Trump out is as foolish as the notion that he will behave himself in debate with Biden. We, like the Kids, want it to be Mama at the door and so we forget it could be the Wolf despite the fact he’s already tried to get in several times. The unthinkable happens because no-one thought about it. They could not confer, nor talk to themselves about what was going on.

We prefer to think that big bad Trump has produced a culture of contempt and uncaring, conveniently forgetting that it is he who was produced, brewed, distilled and oak barrelled by us, by a culture so in denial of its greed and avarice that it had to get elected to be noticed…

Wanting to be rid of Trump is like the urge you get to pop a really ripe pimple, feeling somehow vindicated and triumphant when it finally coughs its load, the underlying conditions blinkered off by momentary victory. We forget that Trump was made like this, just as surely as pizza makes pimples and by the same wishing as the Kids wanting the knock at the door to be Mama. He was made by the ferment of instant gratification, by saccharine values that just wants what it wants, by our eternal stirring over celebrity, by giddily identifying with those who seem to be living-the-dream.

All of which is a kind of wickedness…

which somewhat relativizes the honest wish for bbq’d Kid.

When Trump said, ‘you knew I was a snake when you let me in’, he was telling the truth. He had openly and un-apologetically lied, cheated and grifted his way through life. It was all in plain sight and yet this still somehow made him the best man to run the country, voted into office by the same narcissistic streak in the electorate, who either lapped up the opportunity to regress or who were regressed already and then, in their millions, couldn’t be arsed to vote.

‘All that is necessary for the triumph of Evil is that good men do nothing.’ Edmund Burke.

The Founding Fathers were afraid of greedy men coming into power but they had not reckoned on the collective wolf in the electorate, invisible behind the white picket fence of constitutional ideals and moral rectitude. Discussion ceases because everyone thinks the same thoughts, so what’s to talk about? Kant reminds us that there is no synthesis, no progress, without thesis and antithesis, without dialogue. The Kids do not talk to one another and so they come to a regressive end, swallowed up by the Unconscious.

‘Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny.’ CG Jung

The idea that we are more evolved ain’t so. In the absence of the Great Mother the Kids lose their individuality, their capacity for relatedness, the truth of their vulnerability, the flimsiness of their protection. The Kids fucked up, very badly. Like them, we have made a mistake. We forgot to take the Wolf seriously. We forgot his persistence. After all, it could never happen here… or to us.

Realizing you made a mistake is the beginning of change.

Pull over, don’t beat yourself up, learn to confer in the Wolf’s belly.

‘Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.” S Dali

When you face your own naivety, learn to ask for help and begin to value relatedness, then outer threats can be more adequately defended against because the Kids start pulling together. More importantly, the refusal to be seduced into the comfy notion of shared specialness will also keep the inner Wolf from the door and limit the chances of you being gobbled up by the idea that life should be easier than it is…

I read somewhere that the average adult, male or female, has a sexual fantasy every eight seconds. What I want to know is, what are the rest of you doing with your other seven seconds? ‘Cos it seems to me that most of mine last quite a lot longer than the time it takes for the next one to kick in; giving rise, if you will, to the frolicking joy of fantasy overlap. Or is it that everyone else somehow manages to compress the heaving bosom of their carnal saga into an infinitesimal sound bite, extrapolating, Zen-like, some quintessential erotic marrow, enough to sustain one at least until tea time, just a fleeting moment but one of buoyant reassurance….

Analyst Otto Kernberg makes the observation that the fantasies we have, our attitudes to sex and the extent to which we can let ourselves enjoy it largely depend upon and are recapitulations of early experience had at the breast. Both are potentially orgiastic, life affirming one moment, frustratingly autonomous the next, fraught with the possibility of denial and rejection, with-holding and manipulation.

We learn about life at the breast and not at the knee. It is the template of carnal experience. Complications at the breast will play out in the bedroom. Yes, its your mother…

or rather, the two thousand years of shit that’s been laid at her door.

When mother and child are ‘a bad fit’ then lining up your bits with an other in later life might well become problematic. Moreover, the otherness of the breast and just how that is experienced informs fundamental patterns of relatedness. So it is not just sexuality that is molded by it, our relation with the human other, but also our relationship with Nature and the Gods.

If there is no on-going orgiastic connection in infancy, where baby’s pleasure in receiving and Mama’s pleasure in giving merge in a love train of mutual feasting then its difficult to feel connected to or care about the wider world in later life. Sex and spirituality are all too often pitched against each other as if they were natural foes, yet they are both expressions of engagement with the other. Jung goes as far as to refer to the libido as, ‘the lower soul,’ a different form of the same thing, the transporting awesome encounter. Its no wonder our response to the sublime is all too often, ‘Fuck!’ nor that sex be attended by a litany of ‘OMG’s’.

Without some sense of sustainable between successfully negotiated with the earliest other, then none of the above unfolds too easily, leaving both lower and higher souls itchy and frustrated. The price the Patriarchy pays for the denigration of women and the desacralizing of motherhood is that we predominantly get to be cut off from life’s joys. In place of feasting we have consumption, porn instead of friendly pleasures and your inner compass traded for stone tablets.

So whilst Trump is hopefully removed from office without too much further bloodshed, the danger is that he is made into ‘the problem’, forgetting that he is the natural expression of a collective something which increasingly struggles to be part of life, that denigrates and demonizes the Other.

‘Even before Donald Trump entered politics America had clearly entered the most mediated, entertainment saturated, celebrity era ever.’ Ari Melber.

We have collectively achieved what any infant does in the absence of and denigration of Mother, we regress. Instant gratification and idealized grandiosity become the highest good. Truth becomes fluid in a pre-moral state of undifferentiated opposites, not quite so sophisticated as Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ or ‘double think’, which require annoying reflection, the intrusion of implied purpose.

Centralized power requires such regression. Huge collectives cannot hold together without the additional glue of a depressed and demoralised population carelessly sinking into magical thinking in lieu of being stuffed full of good things.

Political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along, admiring the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. The people were conditioned to..

“believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” The Atlantic.

These are not new ideas, from the sixth century in China you can find official advice in keeping a population pliable..

‘A ruler should on no account encourage ‘perfecting the individual life’, for should he do so his minister’s will apply themselves with alacrity. And what is this ‘life-nurturing’? It consists in feasting music and love.’ Kuan Tzu.

The larger the collective it seems, the more autocratic, the more both the lower and higher souls of all the individuals involved get eroded to make the wheels of faceless government turn more easily. You can lie and deceive openly those whose souls have been immured. It’s not that they no longer care, they haven’t begun to.. Alternative facts are pre moral, pre-fact. Right and wrong have sunk back into the primordial soup of it is what it is.

I had the most terrible nightmare. I was being chased through thick forest by a pack of hunting dogs. Though they were still a ways behind but there was no escape. They would find and tear me to pieces. It was just a matter of time. My trying to escape was futile. The only freedom, the only meaningful expression left to me was to prepare for my end. I lay down, held and comforted myself, half in despair, half in acceptance. As I did so the bank against which I lay gently swallowed me into a warm, dry, egg like chamber. The dogs could not get in.

Without the Earth womb of the Great Mother, life is a jungle of Running Dogs, the Sky God left to himself unravelling over millennia into a blind madness of tooth and claw. We’re asking the wrong questions. The issue is not whether god exists but whether or not he ought to have a fucking chaperone.

Sleep and wakefulness are not as easy to tease apart as you might expect or hope for. They sometimes seem to invade one another. In lucid dreams you find yourself awake in another world. Sometimes ‘reality’ can seem entirely dreamlike. Why is there a Christmas decoration in the bathroom soap dish? Or goons on the streets?

‘And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?’ DJ Trump.

How would it be to live as though you weren’t all that sure if you are awake or not, to shift the emphasis from the assumption you are awake to the more immediate challenge of addressing whatever you are facing without asking for its credentials. This seems to be the essence of Chuang Tzu’s parable about whether he was a butterfly dreaming a man or the other way around. Man and butterfly dreaming each other perhaps.

I once owned a narrowboat with a snug wooden cabin at the stern. I woke up one night from a dream that a great light was breaking through a copse of ancient oak trees. It was a stupendous sight. I got up to write about it at my desk further down the boat, tripping over discarded shoes in my half sleep. As I began to write, I woke up in my bed. Again, I got up and stumbled down the boat. This time to make tea and try to understand what had happened. Then I woke up again but this time in my flat in Streatham where I had lived for ten years. It was dawn. I felt exhausted and confused. I got up, dressed warmly for the chill October morning and headed up to Baldry Gardens to clear my head with a brisk walk. The early sun cast a brilliant light between ancient trees. At the top of the road the tarmac was strewn with five pence pieces….

This dream exercised me for decades because it seemed to pose a greater question than what the various symbols ‘meant’. It was more like an awkward blind date, which I could integrate no more than I could swallow down a person.

Asking what dreams ‘mean’ can be a good way of keeping them at arms length, implicitly colluding with the hegemony of Consciousness which wants to incorporate and intellectually triumph over Dream rather than introducing yourself nicely and tipping your hat, all of which relativises ego’s place in the scheme of things from being the house manager to having a short-hold tenancy agreement. Such deflation, however, does come with some perks….

Once, I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming so I searched about for some clues. It made sense that if this were ‘mere’ dream I would be able to see the sutured seams of something cobbled together. I searched the pitted surface of a brick wall, testing the abrasive surface with my finger tip which I then turned over to study the perfect whorls of my finger print. Then I picked up a sprig of three red leaves and followed the veins in it against the light. I still couldn’t tell if I were awake or asleep and concluded that it perhaps didn’t matter as much as I thought it did. It all felt real, regardless. At that moment I felt a tickling in my throat and coughed up a kilo of broken glass.

Better out than in…

You can spend years trying to digest things which are actually not yours, other people’s opinions, their projections and prejudices. Some things are to be spat out rather than swallowed down, the broken mirror of an unseen childhood, the clinical shards which divide us from mystery and wonder. The predominant opinion in our culture is that we are some how at some pinnacle of civilization. Yet the ruler of the Free World has the mental age of a three year old, whilst the rest of us, also three, bask in the omnipotence of ego jelly so freshly constellated it hasn’t quite set. Our monotheism of Consciousness is about as evolved as my son, aged three, running down the garden yelling to the sheep, ‘I am Jack, I am here.’

The Senoi people of Malaysia tell their dreams to one another every morning but no-one ever ventures an opinion. Its rather done in the spirit of an unfolding narrative, bearing witness to a journey beyond our ken. The emphasis in our culture has shifted from participating-in to knowing-about; the one step removed and somewhat schizy experience of believing you can examine, as if in a petri dish, that which has you on her lap.

The challenge is not to understand but to be curious and awed in the face of the unknowable with its stream of images and stories from which understanding may trickle down in the fullness of time if sufficient sacred space can be created to contain it.

‘If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. For consciousness is just as arid as the unconscious if the two halves of our psychic life are separated.” C.G. Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, CW 10, p. 163

The sleep of Reason produces monsters because its denigration of the Unconscious forces the latter’s use of guerilla tactics in order to keep its seat at Psyche’s table. One way or another it will be represented. Our task, it seems, is not to understand but to enter into a fresh partnership with the Unseen from which meaning may be found as well as made, meaning which might be something objective to stub your toe upon as well as something subjectively ascribed. Perhaps some of the figures in your dreams are not part of you at all but rather a glimpse of transcendent reality of which you yourself …. are a part.

Horus had been seduced by his wicked uncle Seth. Confused and outraged he went to his mother Isis to tell her what had happened. Isis didn’t believe him. In fact she cut off his hands by way of both accusation and punishment, then threw them into the Nile where they sank into its deepest trench.

Fortunately, Ra, the Sun God, had seen all of this from on high. He wondered what he might do for Horus and approached Sobek, the Crocodile God, asking him if he might swim down and retrieve the severed hands. Sobek didn’t fancy the job. Naturally grouchy, he was also reminded of the dangerous Chaos Fish which swam in that region. By now they most probably guarded the hands. They were the one thing Sobek feared. Their speed and ferocity could drive a poor Crocodile God quite mad.

Eventually Ra persuaded Sobek to help by offering him an exquisite gold signet ring. It was so beautiful Sobek agreed. He dived down and down into the deepest part of the Nile, searching about for the hands. Eventually he saw where they lay but just as he was about to retrieve them the Chaos Fish snatched the hands away and led him such a dance he began to feel quite turned around.

Sobek retired to the banks of the Nile to ponder his dilemma. The Chaos Fish would always be one step ahead of him, always be driving him mad. He had to find another way…. something other than strength and speed.

Sobek began to gather up the rushes which grew by the Great River, weaving them this way and that. He worked long into the night. Next day he set out as before and chased the Chaos Fish up and down the Nile. He seemed a little off his game, though secretly he was simply biding his time. When the moment came Sobek sprung the trap he had made, a great net against which the Chaos Fish were helpless. He retrieved Horus’ hands and took them to Ra who gave him the precious signet ring he had promised. For the first time ever, Sobek smiled.

The failure to have abuse acknowledged as such is as damaging as the abuse itself which, having been split off into the unconscious, continues to wreak havoc on self esteem with the belief that the child is somehow responsible for its suffering. The child is pronounced guilty and the authorship of that guilt, the filthy touching things, expunged. The child is compelled to identify with the aggressor and must sacrifice his capacity to engage with and come to grips with the world in order to continue being able to experience Mother as good.

This Wound of the Unseen is, by its very nature, difficult to spot. After all, the cut off hands repair the relationship between the rest of him and Mother, so everything seems peachy. The ‘wicked’ part of him is at the bottom of the river. Nobody really notices the boy’s newfound incompetence, his failure to embrace life, the loss of curiosity and wonder. Aberration catches the attention more easily than absence, loss or separation. He doesn’t bond. He simply exudes a kind of helpless molasses which sticks him to others in lieu of relatedness. No wonder Horus’ legacy is the ‘Eye of Horus’, counterpoint to the coldness and envy of the Evil Eye, a protective amulet symbolizing witness and the concrete reality of the other.

In our story it is Ra’s witnessing and his subsequent intervention on Horus’ behalf which initiates Sobek’s descent into the depths. Horus cannot do this for himself, nor Ra on his own. There is a tendency to think of the hero’s journey as being equivalent to the ego boldly asserting it’s intention and carving a deliberate swath through the undergrowth. It is just as likely to be initiated by helpless despair, which then serves to initiate compensatory activity in the Unconscious symbolized by Ra and Sobek’s private arrangement.

Under [extreme stress] the ego complex ceases to play the important role. It is just one among several complexes which are all equally important, or perhaps even more important than the ego. All these complexes assume a personal character… ‘ Jung CW 3 pp 521

The opening dialogue between Ra and Sobek is a poetic rendering of how autonomous complexes within the Psyche, as different as sky from swamp, come together in response to the split occurring in Consciousness. Ra has to overcome some of his celestial prejudice in order to call upon his scaly cousin, the ‘lower soul’ which transcendence always wants to leap over. Sobek has to overcome his fear of the Chaos Fish. His first smile is the evolution of the God image. He has wider expression by virtue of his involvement with Horus’ hands. ‘Man is a gate through whom the God’s pass.’ [Jung. The Red Book]

The ring which Ra offers to Sobek is a signet ring, a gift which confers recognition, authority and belonging. The signet ring, pressed into sealing wax, makes documents official. It legitimizes the bearer and makes him the right hand of higher power. Sobek’s status is raised in the quest to restore Horus’ integrity. The boy has a chance if something of his instinctual life can be honored.

Sobek may not be very pretty and he lacks bedside manner but he is creative and can be placed in the service of order. The Unconscious contains a great deal more than the repressions of individual experience. It also contains responses to it from ‘the spirit of the depths’….,  

“from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time [ ie Horus]” p.229. The Red Book

Sobek does not persist in trying to beat the Chaos Fish at their own game. They represent Horus’ defenses which guard the traumatic event and prevent painful memories associated with the disenfranchised abuse from surfacing. They cannot be taken head on. They have to be creatively contained rather than outmatched.

Meantime Horus is paralysed with depression and helplessness. For some reason he just can’t get his act together. He doesn’t seem to be able to seize the day or put his hand to anything. Nor can he co-operate with others very well by way of shaking on a deal.

Fortunately the ego is not the only player in the game. The trauma and its poor reception from Mother have not gone unnoticed. Sobek’s subsequent contribution may well be difficult to detect, being mostly by night or deep in the waters of the Nile. You’d be mistaken for thinking there’s nothing going on. Perhaps that’s what faith is, the idea that something is working on your behalf even in the midst of adversity, a living sense that the implicit order of the Universe will kick into action all kinds of counterbalance when things get out of whack. Perhaps this is also at the heart of the idea that evil destroys itself from within, that it contains the seeds of its own undoing.

This is not to say that one should do nothing or that your own personal efforts are futile by comparison, but rather that for such efforts to be effective they have to be in the service of a greater principle operating below the water’s surface. Moreover, in order to employ Sobek’s services he has to be propitiated with the insignia of office and included in the soul’s caucus.

It is not enough to comprehend. Knowing the facts is only the beginning. They must also be apprehended, from the Latin ‘to lay hold of’, made emotionally one’s own. For that you need a grasp of things, and for that…. you need Sobek.

The Snow Queen is a story which charters an heroic journey to redeem a traumatized and divided self resulting from a very specific kind of emotional wound.

Our story begins with an evil hobgoblin who is commissioned to create a terrible, magical, mirror. It’s special power is to reflect back distorted images, leading those who look into it to believe they are ugly and without worth. Worst of all, the mirror is broken by clumsy underlings who then inadvertently shower the world with enchanted shards and slivers which can get into your eye causing you to see everything in a negative light, or into your heart, turning it to ice.

Two splinters manage to get into the heart and eye of Kay, a young boy. He turns on his playmate Gerda, whom he had loved dearly up until that moment, making her cry with his sudden hostility. He announces rudely that he’s off to play with his sled in the square where the big boys hitch themselves onto passing farmer’s carts for a free ride.

Kay attaches himself to a pure white sleigh which immediately heads out of town. He tries to get free but cannot. The sleigh runs faster and faster, over hedges and ditches, while snow storms whistle and roar. Soon the boy is frozen with cold and fear.

Eventually the sleigh stops and out gets… the Snow Queen. She takes Kay under her fur, kisses his head, lulls him into deathly sleep and drives on.

” They flew over forests and lakes, over many a land and sea. Below them the wind blew cold, wolves howled, and black crows screamed as they skimmed across the glittering snow.”

Meantime, Gerda is beside herself with worry. Kay has been acting strangely and has now gone missing.

One morning Gerda goes down to the river to ask if it has seen Kay. She offers the river her red shoes if only it will help and throws them in. The shoes are washed back so she stands in the prow of a rowboat for a better go but the mooring works loose and she is carried off down stream.

What on earth has happened?

The Snow Queen and her devastating ice splinters are a representation of what M. Woodman calls the Death Mother whose icy look..

”kills the imagination and cuts off from metaphorical thinking, compromising the process of psychological integration.” M. Woodman.

Normally we think of symbiotic relationships as unhealthy but its actually a stage you have to go through, one which is bound to find problematic expression if you get stuck in it.

When the child emerges from identification with Mother, how budding autonomy is received will be crucial. If Mother needs the special bond of his dependence for her own purposes, needs him to be a repository for un-lived aspirations, then a bid for the child’s own destiny is going to be construed as betrayal.

This collision of interests is going to be traumatic. It’s the immovable injunction to hitch your sled to Mamma’s sleigh for all eternity vs. the unstoppable push for individuation. Rather than being encouraged to fly the nest it seems that spreading your wings is something shameful, a failure of sacred duty which will cost all you hold dear.

The shadow side of being special is that symbiosis can’t be worked through towards inter-dependence because of subterranean hatred at the child’s autonomy which now threatens a bond on which identity has been built.

Of course, hating your child for wanting to fulfill it’s own ambitions is completely taboo. It has to be driven underground where its expression may be limited to passive with-holding, euphemistically called ‘maternal deprivation’. These veiled attacks upon the child’s competence are internalized as the icy splinters, against which the child maintains going on being by splitting its reality and becoming dissociated. Kay, the wounded self, falls into a trance whilst Gerda, the healthy self, sets out to find him.

The first thing Gerda does is to offer the river her red shoes, ‘her dearest possession’, as a sacrifice for Kay’s sake. It seems the river responds directly and carries her off to the first part of an adventure which will eventually reunite them.

What does it mean for Gerda to sacrifice her red shoes?

The red shoes are an iconic symbol with a multitude of associations and meanings. Just four months after publishing ‘The Snow Queen’, Hans Christian Anderson wrote ‘The Red Shoes’, a story of a wayward girl who dances herself to destruction. So the meaning is ambiguous, though in this context they seem to have some positive resonance with Dorothy’s red shoes from the Wizard of Oz in that they are instrumental in revealing routes of self remembrance. As her most precious possession, something with which she is identified, she has to sacrifice an ideal which then initiates a journey into the unknown.

”The red shoes are treasures but they also separate the sole/ soul from the natural world. They are also a narcissistic object  – ”oh look at my wonderful shoes – see how rich I am””. D. Mathers

This would seem to support the view of Clarissa Pinkola Estes who regards the red shoes as representative of a psychologically undervalued life, creating addictions. The red shoes are symbolic of a sophisticated persona which, though it might be very grand, is not the whole person and therefor have to be renounced as a nucleus of identity.

The magical mirror at the beginning of the story is a metaphor for what we learn about ourselves from others, the reflection/response to our own being from which we learn who we are. If mirrors can be either light or dark, bright or obscure, then that gives us four basic ways of being mirrored by the Great Mother; dark/obscure, dark/bright, light/obscure and light/bright.

In our story Gerda must encounter each of the four mirrors in the guise of four ancient crones in order to reconnect with Kay, her split off inner world.

The first is the Cherry Witch who, like the Snow Queen, is dark/obscure. She too pretends kindness, emerging from her riverside cottage to pull Gerda in to the bank with her crutch. Her motives are not to help Gerda but to satisfy her own loneliness. She invites her in and locks the door behind them….

Then she feeds the girl with endless cherries while combing her hair with a golden comb whose magic gradually makes Gerda forget about Kay. The witch also makes the roses in her garden shrivel up into the ground so that Gerda will not be reminded of the rose bower between their bedroom windows back home…

The cherries are interesting. Where I come from your cherry is your virginity, a symbol of innocence and unworldliness. Like Kay, Gerda is also drawn in to a make believe fantasy of how marvelous things are at the expense of her own quest, but unlike Kay she is able to respond. One day she notices a rose in the old lady’s colorful hat.

‘Where are all the roses?

And with that she remembers and grieves for Kay. Her hot tears fall upon the shriveled rose bushes which come back to life and reassure her that Kay still lives since, had he been in the ground, they would know about it.

The spell of the Dark/Obscure is broken. Not by being able to change circumstances but by paying the closest attention and letting herself ask the right question which leads straight to authentic grief and loss.

The flowers in the Witch’s garden try to beguile Gerda with cryptic stories to deflect from what the Dark/Obscure is actually doing, immuring the soul of the child, but Gerda has had a glimpse of her own separate destiny and knows it does not include the old lady’s woes..

“That’s nothing to me,” said little Gerda. “That does not concern me.” And then off she ran to the further end of the garden.

and out of the rusted garden gate into the great wide world.

With the misguided help of a precocious crow, Gerda tries to find Kay in a nearby castle. It comes to nothing but the Prince and Princess of the place are in good shape which bodes well for the next leg of the adventure, being captured by the Robber Queen.

The experience and remembrance of loss not only reduces the malign influence of a Dark/Obscure mother complex. It also transforms it. The Dark/Obscure becomes Dark/Bright in the form of this chaotic yet honest incarnation of the Great Mother.

The Robber Queen waylays Gerda as she rides along in her coach provided by the folk in the castle behind them. Her intention is murder and robbery with maybe a bit of tasty young girl to chew on at dinner. Only her daughter biting her ear prevents Gerda from going on the menu.

The Robber Queen seems worse than the Cherry Witch, but actually there is some improvement despite her ferocity..

and her beard…

which is that at least what you see is what you get. So even though she is a bitch from hell at least she doesn’t lie about it. Her licking her lips is at least congruent…

“How plump, how beautiful she is! She must have been fed on nut-kernels,” said the Robber Queen, who had bushy eyebrows that hung down over her eyes. “She is as good as a fatted lamb! How nice she will be!” And then she drew out a knife, the blade of which shone so that it was quite dreadful to behold.

The Robber Queen is an improvement on the Cherry Witch because the child does not have to sacrifice her integrity or perspective into the bargain. She doesn’t have to pretend or deal with distorted reality and so even though the old bag is horrible, Gerda is still permitted her own authentic response, which is that she really is in serious shit.

Luckily Gerda is befriended by the Robber Queen’s daughter, a girl of her own age who is almost entirely feral. She is the survival self, streetwise and handy with a knife. In order for poor Kay to be rescued, Gerda has to negotiate a relationship with her captor.

”The trauma self holds the split off and frozen experience; the healthy self is still there, but is ‘managed’ by our survival self which comes into being as a means of maintaining the split structure… ensuring that the trauma stays out of our consciousness.” V. Broughton.

The survival self holds life captive. Gerda is given a guided tour of all the caged creatures in the robber’s camp, particularly a reindeer whose neck the Robber Girl likes to tickle and torment with her knife.

Gerda and the Robber Girl get to know each other. When the wood pigeons corroborate Gerda’s story, saying they have seen Kay, the Robber Girl changes her mind and hatches a plan to help Gerda on her way. The survival self is made receptive by entering it’s world, acknowledging how it has protected you, being straight with it, but needing a different arrangement, all made possible by having the Cherry Witch out of the way.

The Robber Girl frees the Reindeer which carries Gerda to Lapland where the Snow Queen is holding Kay. On their way they stop at the humble cottage of the Lapp Woman who is the Great Mother in her Light/Obscure manifestation, a transformation achieved by Gerda’s managing to befriending the survival self.

The Lapp woman is an ample, salt of the earth matriarch, sympathetic but in a way that is still somehow in your face. She’s politically correct but able to argue for the validity of other points of view in a way that seems to be at the expense of your own point of view. She’s Polyanna crossed with Nursey from Blackadder. So even though she gives them shelter, feeds them and writes a note on a codfish for the final crone, the Finn Woman, she cannot help Gerda to find her way to Kay directly.

The Finn Woman is the fourth and most benevolent mirror of the Great Mother in our story. She is the Light/Bright mirror, brought into consciousness by Gerda forming a healthy symbiosis with her spirit animal, having had herself tied to Reindeer in order to make the difficult journey,

The Finn woman has no door to her cottage. Only a chimney. Inside it is so hot she goes about almost naked. Reindeer pleads for an elixir that will give Gerda the strength of twelve men but the old lady says that will not do.

“No power that I could give could be as great as that which she already has. Don’t you see how men and beasts are compelled to serve her, and how far she has come in the wide world since she started out in her naked feet?

The Finn Woman is Light/Bright because she has faith in the child. She both loves and believes in her, which gives Gerda the strength to endure. She tells Reindeer that Kay is indeed close by and what it is that ails him. When Gerda finds Kay her tears melt the ice in his heart. His own tears then wash out the splinter from his eye.

He has been trying to piece together icy shards at the Snow Queen’s behest, trying to spell ‘Eternity’, in order to gain his freedom, symbolically trying to make sense of that which does not and driving himself mad in the process. When Kay acknowledges Gerda the shards fall to the ground spelling out ‘Eternity’, all by themselves. Kay and Gerda leave the Snow Queen’s palace and are joined by the Robber Girl. Finally, all three aspects of the self are reunited.

The relationship between the personality and the Unconscious is dynamic. When we make strenuous efforts rooted in the desire for wholeness it is not just consciousness that is transformed. The face of the Deep Psyche also evolves, changing its adversarial attitude towards the personality into something life affirming and supportive. For this to happen you need Gerda’s longing, her willingness to sacrifice what is special, the courage to grieve her loss and the mystery of animal helpers.

Grateful acknowledgments to Dale Mathers for introducing me to the work of Steven Joseph on the four kinds of mirror and for first telling me the story of the Snow Queen thirty years ago.