Author: andywhite

There is a parable about a man from the country who goes in search of The Law. He arrives at the entrance to the Halls of the Law, guarded by a mean looking Gatekeeper who blocks his path, saying he may not enter at this time. The man from the country tries to persuade, then to cajole and finally to bribe him but the gatekeeper is resolute and will not let him in, though he does give him a stool to sit on.

Hours turn to days and weeks to years. The man from the country continues to badger the gatekeeper to let him pass, citing his right to know the Law, trying to wheedle snippets of the Law from the Gatekeeper himself, begging and pleading, even enlisting the fleas in the Gatekeepers beard to mediate on his behalf.

Finally, the man from the country lies dying. He beckons to the Gatekeeper for a final exchange.. ‘What now?’ asks the Gatekeeper, ‘you are insatiable.’ ‘Everyone strives to attain the Law,’ answers the man, ‘how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?’ The doorkeeper bellows in his ear: ‘ This door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

Its tempting to feel sorry for the man from the country but then his MO is precisely to get people to feel sorry for him so that no-one need notice he has wasted his life. The parable is told by Kafka in his novel, ‘The Trial’. The protagonist, Joseph K is inexplicably arrested for unknown crimes, charged by an unknown law and ultimately executed by unknown assailants. You quickly understand that his crime is this waste of his life, an endless stream of self justification besprinkled with pathological entitlement dressed up as a virtue. Its as though eternally importuning the Gatekeeper were some heroic venture. In this passive refusal to be himself he also forgets what others are for and so they become dehumanized, mere extensions of his determination to have his own way.

“Next time I come here,” Joseph K said to himself, “I must either bring sweets with me to make them like me or a stick to hit them with.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

The man from the country, who is Joseph K himself, cannot gain admittance to the Law because he cannot detail his own crimes, his failings and shortcomings, he cannot acknowledge his own shadow. His strategy for getting past the Gatekeeper is entirely based on the concept of his own innocence which, ironically, amounts to the crime for which he is finally condemned. The man from the country looks earnest but is actually the duplicitous weasel of you and me, more interested in the drama of how hard done by he is than in facing the elaborate strategy he has constructed to keep himself from the stream of life. Even his final end, murdered with a butcher’s knife, has the feel of orchestration to it. His final words, ‘like a dog…’ are as much stage directions as protest.

By the same token you can’t help wondering if the trial of the century about to unfold is really not the whole point of the Trump Presidency rather than its nemesis and whether it has not been brewing since the ink was still wet on the Constitution. My analyst Chuck always used to say, ‘you are possessed by whatever you are unconsciously identified with.’ The Man from the country was unconsciously identified with his own entitlement which then kept him trapped on his stool for a life time. The President is unconsciously identified with the trickster showman, which cares little for out come so long as there is a good crowd. PT Barnum’s genius lay in the recognition that for the showman ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity.’ Or, as Oscar Wilde put it. ‘There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’

It will be a perfect Trial. Like you’ve never seen before. The crowds outside will be bigger than any other impeached president. They’re already saying that its the greatest trial on the planet, ever. More criminal than Nixon. More lurid than Clinton. Believe me. We’re having a hard time tonight. Roll up, roll up.

What more exciting finale for the showman than to be front and center on the world stage for his own swan song, to have committed never before seen impeachable acts to dizzy the imagination and delight the senses. See the amazing bearded lady collude with a foreign power. Sit aghast at the clowns with-holding military aid as leverage over an ally. Thrill to the twisting and turning senate who risk their acrobatic necks in legal jeopardy whenever they open their mouths. Roll up, roll up.

In the meantime, clutching popcorn and snacks, the public settle into their sofas for the spectacle. The reality TV show host never disappoints. Whatever he says or does can be guaranteed to fire you up one way or another. Isn’t that what he’s for? Isn’t the real news here how we have grossly underestimated the extent of our collective need to be entertained.?

I recently heard corruption described as ‘improper dependence’. Its a great definition because it captures the ides that corruption can be psychological as well as financial. The man from the country is corrupted by improper dependence on his notion of being without stain coupled with slavish yet secret dependence on the Gatekeeper as arbiter of his meaning and purpose. It fails to occur to him that there is more to life than the satisfaction of his personal desires, even the virtuous ones.

Mr Trump’s financial corruption may be more evident than the corrupt loss of soul involved in passively giving yourself over to an archetype though it is the lion’s share of the complex. The Showman is guaranteed an audience just as the Man from the country may be sure of his stool and the Gatekeeper’s eternal gaze. It is arranged for you to be the center of attention with the same assuredness then presided over your demise.

And we millions on our softer stools, commenting one way or another at TV coverage which will make OJ look like a commercial break, are no different the man from the country berating the Gatekeeper or Joseph K eternally citing others as reasons why he cannot live. We are consuming what we paid for, the drama of a reality TV host with nuclear codes whose gonna entertain you in a whole new way. Future generations, if there are any, will refer to us as Homo Vaudvillus, identifiable by the reflexively hunched shoulders of heightened anxiety and lowered center of gravity associated with hyper vigilance and eternal sitting.

Sometimes we grow, not by valiant effort but by accepting defeat. You cannot change your husband. You job doesn’t satisfy even if you put smiley face stickers on your lunch box. No amount of entertainment ultimately satisfies your itch. You find yourself walking away from the spectacle. Life itself steers us to experiences of defeat in order to lay bare our improper dependencies, the corruption of being a mere audience or bystander to life.

The Devil became concerned his polls were tanking so he called his apprentices together for an emergency meeting to see what could be done to improve the ratings.

‘We are in serious trouble,’ he told them. ‘People are getting woke and seeing God everywhere, even in each other. They are beginning to care about the planet. They’re converting to Tofu. Before long we will all be out of a job. What bright ideas do you have?’

The first apprentice, who had advanced degrees from the Halls of Malfeasance in Pure and Applied Delinquency with minor subjects in Mischief and Annoyance, stepped forward. ‘We could tell them there is no God, Master,’ he slavered. ‘They will despair and throw themselves into debauchery.’

‘Not bad’, replied the Devil, ‘but then humanity is like that already. Something in them just seems to know about God even if its only by the fervor of their denial. You will have to come up with something better than that.’

The second apprentice, a hideous 8th dan black belt in Unscrupulous Roguery from the infernal dojo Egregious Perversion, now spoke. ‘Oh Great Master, we could tell them there is no Hell. They will get all emboldened and go out sinning without fear of consequence till they fall into your grasp.’

‘Hmm, better,’ mused the Devil, ‘but as before, humans just seem to have this inner voice thing which tells them about Hell and sin. What about you?’ he asked the third assistant who hadn’t been to Uni or worked out much but had grown up on the mean streets of Malediction in the district of Goings-On. He was seasoned in Fiendishness. ‘Well,’ he suggested, ‘you cannot tell them there is no God and you cannot tell them there is no Devil. What if you just told them there is no hurry? What cannot be achieved by sins of commission may be brought about by sloth’s indigence…’

‘Brilliant,’ exclaimed the Devil, ‘ nothing will ever get done. Entire governments will shut themselves down. With all the time in the world they will sit around and debate endlessly while everything goes to, err, comes to Hell. Without any imperative or any spur to action, they will lapse into apathy, divisiveness and partisan interests which will make it even more difficult for Good to intervene. Instead of saving the planet and each other they can all just watch ‘Naked Dating’. We’re back in business, boys!’

Something shared by the ‘mono’ faiths, despite their antagonism, is the idea that redemption may be had if only you are devout and acknowledge your transgression, at some point. Paradise is likewise, somewhere over the rainbow, at the end of your hard journey. There’s no hurry, provided you are sorry for your sins before they switch off the life support. There is no urgency, provided you can make your peace with God in the time it takes for someone to figure out how to work the defibrillator.

So we have this weird paradox, One God faiths with their emphasis on salvation-at-some-point rather than by deed-in-the-moment, can wind up proliferating the very evil they claim to stand against because everyone has permission to prevaricate endlessly, having magically found a way to project conscience into the future where it will not spoil the denial and double standards of today.

Forget about it.

When Gerald Ford took office in the White House in 1974 one of the first things he did was to change the way phone calls were monitored to and from the Oval office. You might think this was done to boost security and accountability in the wake of the Watergate debacle and Nixon’s disgraceful departure from office. After all, it was the all important tapes that sealed Nixon’s guilt, tapes that could have been ‘lost’ without specific security monitoring protocols being set in place. In deed, further oversight might have brought them to the surface much sooner.

So, you’d think the Ford administration would beef up the staff in the Situation Room and introduce state of the art technology to enhance the monitoring and storing of communications from the world’s hottest phone.

In fact he did the opposite. There was no hurry to respond to what happened. No urgency to change. There would be time enough for all that. Meantime the staff was reduced to a few stenographers and taping in any shape or form was stopped entirely. Accuracy of transcription since 1974 is ensured by comparing notes. Its like the Stock exchange using an abacus.

Ford was making sure what happened to Nixon would never happen to him. For as long as there was no hard evidence of a physical recording of anything there could always be the loophole of plausible deniability. Maybe three professional stenographers could all make the same mistake. It could happen to any body. That’s a nice suit you’re wearing, it would be a shame if it got all messed up.

Our not-being-in-any-hurry has got us a President, a man so unhurried he can’t finish a sentence, who doesn’t care about plausible deniability either, nor any moral qualm he doesn’t have an eternity, an omnipotent arsenal of magical rebuttals to resolve. The threat of impeachment has morphed from Nixon’s resignation into Trump’s campaign strategy in four short decades. How about that for a return on your nefarious investment?

The problem looks like Trump but he is only the head on the pimple. The real problem is that there is no urgency. Complacency has been drip fed to us for decades. ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good folk do nothing.’ JFK. To paraphrase the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, ”we have forgotten how to be anxious about the right things.” This failure, along with the magical fantasy that we have an eternity to remedy it brings a pall of deadness to life which is the psychological prefiguration of climate holocaust. It is the very opposite of urgency, the drive of love and involvement you see blooming in the youth and environmental activism of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion.

I once knew a man, getting on in life, who stayed in an idyllic country retreat. His main preoccupation was his loneliness, beneath which there lurked a silent yet unrelenting bitterness. Despite the fact that he had otters in his garden, the local women were apparently unimpressed and had failed to form an orderly queue at his gate. You’d think the otters would be enough to ensure a steady stream of romantic interest. Despite the failure of his game plan he never thought to revisit his premise. There was plenty of time. He wasn’t in a hurry.

There weren’t many at his funeral when he died. It’s said the otters did not attend.

There are times to sit back and chill. But sometimes life requires our urgency, our personal action, getting involved. Spirituality is not something you do on your own, like masturbation, or wait around for it to arrive, like public transport. The ego’s redemption depends upon relatedness today and not that we might be magically airlifted to safety tomorrow. It’s about renouncing the comforting narcissism which refuses to take responsibility for its actions and sacrificing what I want to do for what needs to be done.

According to the Arne/Thompson/Utter classification of fairy tales, ‘The Queen Bee’, is among the oldest in oral tradition, stemming from a time before the division of Indo-European languages and perhaps at the dawn of the division of I from Thou.

Three king’s sons went out to seek their fortune. The older two ganged up on the youngest, calling him a simpleton and keeping all the best food for themselves. One day they came to an ant hill. The older boys decided to rip it up and see the ants run about in terror but the Simpleton stood over the nest protectively having allowed himself to imagine what it might be like to have your house torn from the ground by giants.

Further down the road they came to a lake with ducks. The older boys wanted to trap and roast the ducks but the boy could feel how awful it might be to be captured and roasted and so he forbad it.

Further still they came to a tree with wild bees nesting in it. ‘Let’s light a fire under them and smoke them out’, said the older boys but the Simpleton could already experience the choking smoke and the horror of being driven away from home, so he made sure they came to no harm.

At the end of the road was a castle. The king welcomed them with bed and board, though at breakfast the next day he presented the Princes with three challenging tests, saying that if they failed even one they would be turned to stone. The first challenge to the oldest Prince is to find a thousand pearls scattered in the forest by sunset. He finds a mere handful and is turned to stone. The next brother did just as badly the following day and suffered the same fate.

The Simpleton was beside himself with anxiety when his own turn came. He found a few pearls in the morning but as the day wore on the realization gradually dawned that he would never make it. He was doomed. He sat down on a stump and wept. At that moment the King of the Ants, whose life he had saved from giants, turned up with five thousand of his mates. They found the pearls and still had time for tea.

The second test finds our Simpleton at the edge of a pond with a strange array of stone legs sticking out of the water. ‘Guess where the Princess’s crown is thrown in!’ asks the king of the castle gleefully. Of course it was impossible to know but the ducks he’d saved from capture and roasting knew where it was and took him straight to the spot.

The final test was the worst. The Simpleton has to guess which of three identical Princesses had just eaten honey and which sugar or syrup. The Simpleton hasn’t the faintest clue but the Queen Bee of the hive he’d saved from smoke and destruction knew exactly and settled directly on the honeyed lips. The enchantment over the stone figures is thus broken and all return to life.

The capacity to reflect is necessary for more than problem solving. In fact, trying to figure out the tests with his mental prowess brings the Simpleton to despair. What saves him is his feeling connection to others, his capacity to act without thinking at all.

‘What we feel before we can think is a powerful determinant in what kind of things we think when thought becomes possible.’. Jean Liedloff

Thoughtfulness itself is rooted in feeling, the capacity to emotionally connect with another’s need. You could call it the willingness to enter another’s world yet it is equally about being penetrated by it, experiencing the stone in someone else’s shoe as well as taking the trouble to walk a mile in it. The Simpleton is moved to action because he can imagine the other’s fate as his own and allows himself to be impacted by that wounding emotional reality.

The encounter with the inner Other is equally wounding which is why Jung says ‘the experience of the Self is always a blow to the ego’. We speak of conscience being pricked, ego being deflated and being spurred to action. Its not much fun. Increases in consciousness are also attended by disillusionment and the loss of the ‘old outmoded dispensation’. It can paradoxically feel as though everything is being taken away from you, as though you are being destroyed.

‘The Self is the sacrificer, and I am the sacrificed gift, the human sacrifice.’ C G Jung

The Principle of Relatedness requires something more of us than reaching out. It requires a willingness to be impinged upon. It is not enough to give. We have to sacrifice something of ourselves in order to endure being penetrated by the emotional reality of the other.

This sacrifice is of one’s own security, the narcissism of self sufficiency. It lays bear your dependence, your vulnerability and incompleteness. The getting naked of ‘letting in’ is very different from the armored resolve of ‘letting go’, or its addictive cousin, ‘giving up’. It involves renouncing the desire to be normal and then the wish to be the author of oneself, not to mention the omnipotence of having the answer to everything.

I dreamed an alien queen was coming to Earth and it was up to me to provide Her with the right environment. She breathed an atmosphere which was nitrogen rather than oxygen based. I worked hard at it and when she arrived she seemed reasonably satisfied. I am too terrified to look at her. ‘Very good’, she says, ‘now, why should I keep you alive?’ Years of ducking and diving, dodging and weaving, came to my rescue, ‘to be of further service to your majesty.’

It might seem like arse licking but it felt like an ethical decision. It was necessary to adopt a propitious attitude in order to move forward despite my lose of status and authorship. She came with the authority of imperative.

‘Out of the natural state of identity with what is ‘mine’, there grows the ethical task of sacrificing oneself, or at any rate the part of oneself which is identical with the gift.’ C G Jung

When I was a kid growing up in Africa a bunch of us had gone down to the River Mchabezi on a summer’s day and dared one another to swim up to the weir and touch the wall whilst a foot of over-spill crashed down from the recent rains. The youngest of our party hadn’t the body mass to sustain the hit and he was swept out of sight. The seconds ticked by. I could feel him, pinned to the bottom of the river bed by the waterfall, stuck like a bug in syrup.

I dove in and swam the four meters down to the bottom boulders, feeling around in the churning water. Eventually, lungs bursting, I found a flailing arm and pulled him out. What I remember most is that when he thanked me for saving his life I couldn’t let it in and pretended not to hear what he had said.

I could not let myself be penetrated by his gratitude for the sake of staying with a fragile self structure still split between the omnipotence of being all things to all men on the one hand and a bumbling fool on the other. I could let in the drowning boy’s distress sufficient to save him but not the thanks which might confer new identity upon me, which might peg the event as remarkable. I could rescue him but not myself. So for years the feelings connected to that day had to be denied and with them, paradoxically, the values associated with courageous action. My own bravery was pushed into the shadows so as not to be wounded by the enormity of what had just happened.. so as to minimize the contradictory expectations of a mother who felt heroics were simply expected of me and a father who felt I couldn’t possibly be up to the task.

Letting the other in, whether it be the emotional reality of a third party or the marginalized self of your own inner world has a reorganizing effect on the personality which might well experience moments of its own developmental initiation as being agonizingly intruded upon.

The Simpleton allows himself to be transfixed like this, both by the distress of the creatures on the road and then by his own honest despair at the impossible tasks set for him by the king.

Once this has been endured, the piercing contents of the Unconscious become useful. They mobilize themselves to compensate the ego’s felt lack and insufficiency giving him not only a moral compass but also material assistance. The Kalahari Bushman identifies with his quarry to track it once the spoor has disappeared. A parent may respond to dangers it is consciously unaware of because it is identified with the child. Lovers anticipate one another’s needs because their psyches as well as their bodies have interpenetrated and so there is a flow of information between their inner worlds which exists beyond what is said or gestured.

Sometimes such knowing can be inconvenient. I once fainted on a military parade ground and had to be carried off to the medics tent. The doctor looked me over, sucked his teeth, then asked, ‘do you have a girlfriend?’ ‘Yes’ , I said. ‘Is she pregnant? he asked. ‘Err, I don’t think so. Why?’ ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘you have the worst case of morning sickness I have ever seen.’

The story of Rapunzel begins with her father stealing the herb Rampion from a witch’s garden for his wife’s pregnancy cravings. He is caught and the witch demands the child yet to be born in payment. She locks the child in a tall airless tower without company or stimulus. The witch visits by climbing up her long tresses having called out..

‘Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your golden hair…’

A passing Prince overhears all this and becomes curious. Once the witch is gone he calls out…

‘Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your golden hair…’

and is soon cooing sweet nothings with Rapunzel who, before long, is visibly pregnant. In a later iteration of Grimm’s story, toned down somewhat for a delicate audience, Rapunzel complains about the Witch’s weight, saying she is heavier than the Prince. Either way her secret is betrayed. The Witch cuts off her hair and banishes her to a far off desert spot where she had to live, ‘in great grief and misery’. Meantime the oblivious Prince arrives at the foot of the tower and calls out..

‘Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your golden hair…’

The witch lets down the severed locks and corners the Prince once he has climbed up. ‘Aha’ screeches the witch, ‘ you would fetch your dearest but the bird sits no longer upon the nest. The cat has got her and will scratch out your eyes as well. Rapunzel is lost to you and you will never see her again.”

Some versions of the story have the Prince throwing himself from the tower in despair, others have the witch shove him out. Either way he is blinded by the vicious thorns which grew about as he fell to earth. He is compelled, like Oedipus, to wander as a blind beggar for many years.

One day, in a remote desert place he hears someone singing. He recognizes the voice. Yes! It really is Rapunzel who runs to him, splashing his face with hot tears which magically restore his sight.

And so they all lived happily ever after, except the witch, who hears about the news and is crushed by the agony that Rapunzel and the Prince have found contentment despite her best efforts.

How does this all happen? Not by heroic effort. The protagonists are miserable wretches, a suicidal blind man and a beggar woman whose sin is no greater than wanting to be fully alive.

If sin is to be apportioned it belongs with the thieving father who hasn’t the balls to knock on the witch’s door with his cap in his hand and his shoes shined, all creased up with worry whilst he asks ever so politely if he might have a handful of Rampion for his dear pregnant wife for which they would both be eternally grateful. And what might he do for her by way of recompense…ma’am.

So the young lovers are paying for the sins of the fathers. Rapunzel loses her thoughtful tresses. My analyst Chuck told me he often cropped up in people’s dreams as their barber, shaping what came out of people’s heads. But the witch does not come to Rapunzel as an alchemical hair dresser. She is an envious mother complex determined to sever her from her own thoughts and ideas. Moreover her Prince is blind and lost.

The counterpoint to the heroic story is Fate’s intervention when all hope is gone. The ancient Greeks called it ‘Enantiodromia’, when things turn into their opposite because of the extremity of the situation.

Another way of saying this is that the psyche is an autonomous self-regulating system which doesn’t care too much about the intentions of the personality. In fact, it’s likely to oppose the personality if it gets too out of whack, too one sided. What this means is that extreme situations constellate the tendency for a counter intuitive outcome. Stuff that shouldn’t happen does. Its chaos theory at work from one point of view, the intervention of the Gods from another.

Last month a Chechen rebel leader was assassinated by a Putin operative in broad daylight as he took a stroll through a leafy park in Berlin, within walking distance of Angela Merkel’s office. Whilst news pundits focus on the repercussions for international relations and discuss the ramifications of totalitarian hitmen operating freely in democratic capitals, there is an element of the story so dreamlike it might give cause for hope despite the circumstances.

The killer did not get away. Against all the odds, he was caught, not because of any counter intelligence operation or outstanding police response but because the killer was so wrapped up in the theatrics of his secret agent identity that he entirely bungled his escape.

This is how it happened. The killer, ‘Vladimir Sokolov’, approached his victim from behind on a bicycle. He put two bullets into the back of his head with a 9mm Glock 25 and then sped away. So far so good. Assassination successful, killer pedaling away at twenty miles an hour and already out of sight. What could go wrong?

Everything had proceeded according to plan. Only the worst kind of luck could now ensnare the killer; well, that and his own unconscious processes, his secret need to gild the lily. Apparently, Vlad was not happy with the mere success of his mission. He wanted more of a story to tell, one more about flair than it is about murder, one that will make people shake their heads and mutter, ‘what a guy’.

So, two hundred meters from the scene of the crime, he gets off his bike and ditches it dramatically into the river Spree, blind to the several onlookers, followed by his wig, the pistol and a bag of Paprika just in case any sniffer dogs were out for a swim that day. Then he dove into some bushes and began to strip, changing into a pink t-shirt and sandals plus fake mustache during which time the police had arrived and bust him as he was making his 4mph denoument on a kiddies scooter.

Police recovered an authentic Russian passport made out to a fake name and address which immediately pegged him as an FSB operative. He was carrying proof of being a Russian agent, whilst conducting a political hit on German soil. Its like carrying a go to jail forever card.

Justice was served, not by heroic action or valiant effort, but by the unerring tendency of criminal activity given free reign to still somehow fuck itself up, or to evoke forces which will happily do it for them.

‘The Psyche does not merely react. It gives its own specific answers to the influences at work upon it.” C G Jung

This is what lies behind the calamity of Trump off the auto cue, he goes on auto pilot, seemingly egotistical but actually being progressively sabotaged by his own complexes. He passes it off as bullish aggression but it is actually self destruction. The principle of Enantiodromia can be seen perpetually at work. Every time he opens his mouth he makes enemies and offends some block of his own voters.

Just days after the unanimously unpopular gesture of inviting the Taliban to Camp David on the eve of 9/11, he holds off the economic disaster of Chinese tariffs for the worst possible reason, the 70th grand anniversary of communist dictatorship. You couldn’t make it up. Still less might you believe that, rather than bluster, its actually Trump’s unconscious working hard to make sure that he fails in his stated endeavour, in order to balance the scales of his inner world.

The Psyche is self regulating. Those who will not be contained from without, who feel that they are above the law, will be contained from within by the autonomous Psyche which is effectively trying to heal a cramp in the personality deemed to be living too narrow an existence. This is why corrupt person’s will always say and do all the things designed to get them caught. Slips of the tongue and physical tells work against conscious intention. Strange encounters, million to one chances, like the recent American operative who had to be extracted from the Kremlin having had the chance to photo Putin’s desk with documents related to the election meddling sat right on it. Own goals and corrosive gaffs from out of the blue begin to provide the checks and balances otherwise unavailable.

The Principle of ‘Enantiodromia’ compensates Rapunzel and the Prince for the witch’s efforts to deny them life. Sokolov had his pretensions compensated with humiliating capture. Trump cannot help but shoot himself in the foot. None of which is to say that individual efforts are ever wasted. Sometimes it might seem as if you have to wander in the dark for ever and endure being cut off and cast out. Yet it is precisely these experiences of suffering or inflation that evoke the Gods attention, manifest as Grace or the Raven’s Claw respectively, which descends by itself and when least expected.

When I was a young kid in boarding school, White Africa’s version of Eton, I had been left there over a half term, along with a scrawny gaggle of other doubly rejected scum whose loving parents hadn’t the time to bring their kids home for the holidays. Matron had taken pity on us one miserable afternoon and invited us into her flat to watch TV, an unheard of privilege.

I sat there on her carpet, wriggling with the strain of reconciling the rarity of the treat with the circumstances which had led to it. Deep down I knew what I had been sold as privilege and prestige, the very making of my manhood, was a hideous lie. It was no more than a feather in the Old Man’s cap, the means by which my father could climb the social ladder. He pranced with glee when my acceptance came through and ordered three new suits from his tailor to celebrate.

But you can’t let yourself know you are a sacrificial lamb when you are twelve years old. In fact you must learn not to join the dots. To be alone in such a dismal place with such a truth would just be too much for a lad and it was for some. One boy died of a heart attack. Another slit his wrists with a broken bottle. Only one, my friend B—— K—– got away. He ran home, sixty miles through the African wilderness, thick with wild animals and armed men.

The rest of us regressed into pack animals, the worst into rape gangs. There was a war on. The staff carried FN762 assault rifles and the senior boys were armed with Lee-Enfield 303s. There were blast walls, grenade screens and terrorist drills. We were all in a permanent state of fear.

As we watched the otherwise forbidden TV, and listened to actual music, Matron came in with a plate of biscuits. I ate the entire lot without even noticing, much to the annoyance of my equally starved fellow zeks. My desperation for mothering had condensed itself momentarily into Ma Landman’s creamy biscuits and I had eaten the whole lot as if in a dream, though I had not tasted a single one. The empty plate was testimony to my crime. So I further went to war with my hunger, my need and dependence, making an enemy of quite justifiable feelings of abandonment and loss which only ever passed when I made friends with them after years of trying to purge myself of this ‘weakness’.

It would take years for me to discover the value in my authentic experience, to realize it connected me to my own reality, ugly as it was, and hence to others and through them to some of the sublime mysteries of life.

In the meantime I became mean. The problem with suppressing yourself is that it cuts a swathe through your basic values as well which can get you into a lot of trouble, not just because others are likely to take offense, or even that you then become divided against yourself, the redeeming aspects of soul cast as an enemy to be vanquished, but because it is via this ‘crazy’ or ‘negative’ part that the transcendent function tends to show itself. The bit you thought was worthless is what connects you to the divine.

Many years later a very elderly lady came and knocked on my door. ‘Are you the ‘psycho-something’? I confessed that I was and let her in. She explained that she didn’t want therapy, anyone could see time was against her. ‘I don’t buy green bananas anymore.’ But she was afraid she might be mad and wanted me to verify the matter one way or another. She’d had an experience which caused her to doubt her own mind and began to tell the most remarkable story.

She had been making jam in her farm house kitchen. All at once, out of the blue, she became acutely anxious for the safety of her grandson who was working in a barn out of both sight and earshot, some several hundred meters away. Heeding the inner impetus, she dropped her ladle and ran out of the house, through the garden, down the lane all the way to the barn where she found her grandson unconscious on the floor having been hit from behind by a falling hay bale. He wasn’t breathing.

She gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation and the young man came to. The question was, how had she known what had happened? This venerable lady had lived nine decades in a very practical down to earth kind of way. She believed in what she could see. Miracles were things that happened in the Bible. The events of that day had sent reverberations through her world that threatened to splinter and crack it open.

I wasn’t much help. I didn’t know what to say except to offer bland reassurance that these things did sometimes happen and that they were indeed un-nerving. She was decidedly unimpressed.

Soon thereafter I made a trip into town to do some shopping. On the way back I passed the turnoff to her home. All at once I felt an inexplicable force compelling me to change my course and with a squeal of tires worthy of a B movie I flew down the narrow lane. The impulse was as undeniable and full of urgency as it seemed irrational. I fought myself the whole way.

I arrived at her remote cottage and ran inside. She was on the kitchen floor where she had fallen, her ankle swollen like a football and unable to move. She’d been there for hours. On the way to the hospital she started to chuckle, ‘well, if I am crazy, then you are too.’ And so we both had a good laugh about things that are, despite the fact that they shouldn’t be.

Sometimes experiences get labeled as negative or crazy simply because we do not understand what is happening. When events either lack context or challenge our world view it is a kind of knee jerk response to demonize them. It is even fashionable to urge one another to let go (get rid of) anything vaguely whiffing of ‘negativity’. And yet, “in stercore invenitur aurum nostrum” as the alchemists say, ‘The gold is found in the shit.’

This lady had crossed a developmental threshold in emotional sensitivity and a quality of relatedness decades after her own prejudices had told her there was nothing new to be discovered in life. Her views about how relationships are supposed to be were those of an orthodox collective and so she had underestimated the power of her own open heart.

The heart is healed by honoring whatever it offers us, whether it is the pain of the past or a greater connection to Life which, like the uninvited guest, has both the power to curse and to heal.

When the lame and the unlikely are refused they curse life with isolation, hyper vigilance and the gradual erosion of values which must be rooted in authentic experience whatever it is. When they are accepted, no matter how rude or contrary, life opens up, energy begins to move, and a new connection to meaning can be made.

Healing is not about getting help. It is about asking for it, owning your own lack, even if it is to the wind. My analyst Chuck always used to say, ‘95% of the work is done when the patient picks up the phone.’

A naive king gets lost in the dark, slumberous forest. As night falls a hairy dwarf appears on the path ahead and offers to show him the way out for the price of his favorite daughter, whom he must deliver in eight days. The king readily agrees thinking the little fellow could be no great threat to him, despite his bristling beard. He will simply renege on his promise once out of danger..

The king emerges from the forest in a trice and immediately forgets the dwarf who is now way behind him and can surely do nothing even as he calls out faintly, ‘see you in eight days, oh great king..’ The days slip by. The king becomes more and more distracted, eventually blurting out what happened to his daughters, including the salient detail that the youngest has been forfeit, even though the dwarf has no chance of ever really claiming his prize, right?

Between them they devise a cunning plan. On the appointed day a goose girl is dressed up in royal robes and made to wait on the castle steps having been told to go with who ever should come to collect her. A fox appears and tells the goose girl to sit upon his tail, whereupon he carries her swiftly into the forest. There he stops, asking her to get down and louse him, which she happily does. This shows she is no Princess and so the fox returns her, calling over the castle walls that the real Princess must be ready and waiting by the same time next day.

This time a shepherdess is dressed up and similarly made to wait for the fox who whisks her away on his tail until they’re out of sight when he asks her to get down and louse him with the same result. The fox is angry by now and returns the shepherdess, calling some dire warnings over the castle wall if the Princess herself is not presented the next day.

The Princess, being brave and wanting no harm to come to her father, persuades him to let her be sacrificed as agreed and so she dresses in readiness for the fox who tells her to sit upon his tail till they are out of sight before asking to be loused once more. She refuses and so the fox knows that this time she is the real Princess. He takes her to a little house in the woods where she is to sleep that night. ‘In the morning,’ says he, ‘three doves will fly into the garden. You must catch the middle one and cut off its head. Do exactly as I say’, he adds, by way of warning.

The Princess does precisely as she is told. She catches the middle dove and cuts its head clean off. In a flash a handsome Prince is suddenly stood before her. He explains that a spell had been placed upon him turning him into the dwarf, a spell which could only be broken by one who respected his wishes. They get married and the Prince/Dwarf inherits both crown and kingdom from the now dispossessed and humiliated king who thought he could outsmart an aggrieved dwarf in his own back yard. .

Sun Tzu (544-496C), a Chinese general and author of ‘The Art of War’ advises his reader never to underestimate the enemy.

‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.’
– Sun Tzu

One of my favorite stories from the days of colonial Rhodesia, where I was raised, concerns the way in which the fourteen year bush war for independence was finally won. The belief of colonial powers in the inferiority of the indigenous population was what finally defeated them. This was not simply because they underestimated the military strength and resolve of the enemy but because they lacked the imagination required to attribute the locals with either strategy or cunning.

African intelligence agents could then get un-vetted jobs as ‘kitchen-boys’ at the Rhodesian high command where they spied upon their employers as they served them. Much of the information which lead to victory came from the careless talk of pompous colonial generals and politicians incapable of the belief that their black waiters and drivers could possibly understand let alone co-ordinate the valuable snippets gleaned from their ‘superiors’. So they had to learn equality the hard way.

Whilst Sun Tzu’s treatise is a military manual, it contains much that is useful in ordinary life, predicated on a single, simple principle; under all circumstances treat the other as an equal.

Anything remotely related to ‘first and only’, is doomed to failure. It contains the seeds of its own undoing. The refusal to attribute others with any intelligence or culture means you no longer know what is going on around you. The resulting paranoia will be the least of your concerns.

The essence of such fundamentalism is that there is only one way of interpreting the world. This mono-mentality may comfort in the short term but it entails long term costs that are inestimable. The reason is that everything else must be hived off and projected into the world where it becomes a dragon which must be defeated not once or twice but over and over again until life itself becomes one massive battleground.

The cultural expression of this has been a thousand years of crusades and persecution, against Islam/women/minorities in the outer world; against the devil and his ilk on the inner. These days we may not subscribe to explicit religious sentiment, believing we are free of all that old mumbo-jumbo. In fact we are still as dominated by it in the form of a mono-theism of consciousness which might have shed its ecclesiastical robes but still has us in its grip.

Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower. 

The intolerance of others, constellated as the idees fixee of monotheism, are not limited to folk out-there-in-the-world. It is equally dismissive in its underestimation of the Other within, to the Ground of Being. It’s attitude is ‘the psyche is what I know of it’. It scoffs at the thought that there is anything left to discover, any frontiers of the soul as yet unexplored, as though the unconscious were at best a bin in the basement, the prejudicial conviction that we are simply masters of our own house.

Unfortunately, as the king in our story discovers, development does not stop with becoming a proficient member of society. Aspects of the collective psyche which prefigure consciousness are liable to intrude into life whether we believe in them or not, as part of growth itself. We think we know what our inner worlds are made of and feel offended at the prospect of losing our way, more offended still to find such terra incognita peopled with figures and forces beyond conscious control.

I had a terrifying dream last night. I was walking up the lane and saw a huge Yeti like creature sitting on the side of the road waiting for me. I backed away in fear but then he got up and came towards me. He was about twelve feet tall, maybe fifteen, covered in long matted hair with a ‘necklace’ of slightly paler dreadlocks. His face was not human, more like an orangutang but with great intelligence in his eyes. I yelled and made gestures to keep him away but it was no use. Then I broke a branch from a tree and tried to fend him off but my efforts were to no avail. I was completely defenseless. He could have torn me limb from limb without any trouble at all. I lay down and curled up in a fetal ball, waiting for death. Then he picked me up, like you might a kitten, and began to bound across the countryside with me clasped to his shoulder, delirious with  terror.

Getting acquainted with such forces involves the ego becoming deposed from its place of primacy in the psyche and embarking on a ‘night-sea journey’ an experience of isolation, loneliness, and despair that the king is determined to prevent. He wants the story to continue to be about him which he cannot do except by making an enemy of the Dwarf who is then likely to have an axe to grind in addition to insisting on their bargain.

These mythologems will have their way. The dwarf returns time and again, refusing to be fobbed off by imitation, growing vengeful at the kings inflated efforts to deceive.

”Many who do not comprehend the significance of these new states of mind look upon them as abnormal fantasies and vagaries. Alarmed at the possibility of metal imbalance they strive to combat them in various ways, making frantic efforts to re-attach themselves to the ‘reality’ of ordinary life.’ R Assagioli.

The king tries to claw his old life back by a series of lesser sacrifices justifying this counterfeit as being in the interests of the state. His old life continues for a while as it was, though now it is imbued with a feeling of inauthenticity, of being anxiously fake, even though nothing outward seems to have changed.

Existentialist Viktor Frankl coined the term ‘Ur-anxiety’ to describe something peculiar to modern consciousness,. This is the anxiety of groundlessness, which manifests as feelings of alienation, of not belonging, of having no context. Our monotheism of consciousness involves paradoxical emancipation from the gods which then robs life of meaning and replaces it with vague ‘Ur’ fears.

Ur anxiety is well named. It comes from the story of Gilgamesh, the first great king of Ur in ancient Sumer, whose severance from the gods had to be mediated by the wild man of the forest, Enkidu. It is only by taking Enkidu seriously in both combat and friendship that Gilgamesh can evolve. Only by acknowledging and coming to terms with the objective reality of those which live beyond the castle walls does the king grow in wisdom.

‘Psychological monotheism tends to regard difference and diversity as irreconcilable opposites and reduces all psychological life to moral issues, providing the justification for all types of action and violence against whatever seems ‘outside,’ a prescribed idea of ‘unity’. D Latifa

This can have a profound and immediate affect on daily life in so far as you begin to divide your emotional life up into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feelings, for ever pursuing one or avoiding the other in an orgy of attachment with all its concomitant suffering. Such insistence on uniformity and life having to look a particular way before you’ll let yourself live it, is just a shade away from being a delusional disorder and the author of much misery.

Conversely, the Princess has learned to take the rough with the smooth and treats the Fox Prince respectfully. Her willingness to take him seriously is what redeems the situation. She evolves, not by heroic action or great cleverness, but by being able to bend with the times in co-operation with the other.

( story adapted from Grimm’s ‘Hurleburlebutz’.)