Andy White Blog

The Healing Power of Fairytales.

These blogs are a tongue in cheek look at the underbelly of our modern world, using myth and fairy tale as templates to explore the themes involved.

The blog started out as a few sample chapters of my books on self destructiveness and the individuation process but soon became something else. All by itself it morphed into a safari through fairy stories from around the world. Fairy stories are like paths through millenial undergrowth. They help us to appreciate how we got here in a way that histories never can. They also give us clues about ways forward, what’s required of us in order to be redeemed or find meaning and relatedness….

Psychotherapy sessions on Skype.

If you have enjoyed my articles and think you might like to work with me then you can contact me, andy@andywhiteblog.com . I charge an hourly rate of between £75 and £125 per hour depending upon your circumstances.

After my degree, I trained with the Psychosynthesis Trust in London where I also did their teacher training qualification in addition to post grad studies with the Richmond Fellowship, BCPC, and Regent’s college. I have over thirty years experience as a psychotherapist in private practice. I am a qualified member with the Association of Jungian Analysts.

My main interest is in how we sabotage our own efforts and to what end. My book, ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’, is a psychology of self-destructiveness that follows the story of the self-destructive King Midas and how he resolved his golden curse.

My more recent publication, ‘Abundant Delicious’, tells the whole story of the much maligned Oedipus, whose life from cradle to grave passes across every developmental threshold until we arrive at what Sophocles calls, ‘the Secret and the Mystery.’ Far from the limiting use to which this rich tale was put by Freud, Oedipus symbolizes the journey of self realization with all its trials and pitfalls, its suffering and its joy. I also contributed a chapter to the recently published, ‘Depth Psychology and Climate Change’.

Both books can be purchased by putting the title in the search bar.

The Fisherman’s Wife, part two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fox and the Mule.

On the role of symbiotic omnipotence in the narcissistic character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It was a Lion,’ replied the Mule.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Prince who wanted to live Forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hans in Luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Pneuma and the Psychoid.

However life began, whether by accident or design, what we can be reasonably certain about, despite epochs of not very much happening at all, is that it was all of a sudden. Life is a binary arrangement, things tend to be alive or not without a great deal of dithering in between. Whatever it was must have happened in the blink of an eye.

The concept of Spontaneous Generation is probably way older than Aristotle who first put the idea on paper, suggesting that life sprang from inert compounds provided ‘pneuma’, breath or spirit, was present such that this sudden thing which happened could both duplicate and maintain itself at the same time. Louis Pasteur felt he could refute this idea by placing some inert matter in a sealed sterile jar and waiting to see what happened, which was nothing. Nor was it ever going to. Not in his life time anyway. Perhaps Aristotle would rejoin that Pasteur’s sample was clearly devoid of ‘pneuma’, which would be rather difficult to disprove since pneuma is, by definition, non-material and starting to sound suspiciously like divine intervention.

Let’s say for a moment that Pasteur was impatient by a factor of several trillion and that ‘pneuma’ does not necessarily imply godly meddling. What are we being asked to imagine? What does the idea of spontaneous generation involve? In order for life to exist it has to have a minimum number of components. Micro biologist Craig Venter discovered that the smallest and simplest life form had to have a minimum of 437 genes to survive. The simplest gene has about 200 DNA bases. One small DNA molecule is comprised of 50 million paired nucleotides each of which has a dozen or so atoms. This means that the most basic form of life has 1.75 billion atomic components. To get a sense of how much this is, imagine each atom was a grain of salt. The number of grains of salt/atoms required to make the simplest form of life would fill two bathtubs.

In the blink of an eye, nearly two billion particles fall into alignment with each other and then simultaneously get jolted into mutual co-operation. As an ‘accident’, this is infinitely less likely than the prospect of just the right kind of tornado hitting just the right kind of auto shop such that the ensuing chaos produces Kitt out of Knight Rider from the swirling maelstrom of mechanical debris. Unscratched.

Nevertheless, things that aren’t supposed to happen do. How creatures came to fly is about as unlikely as how life itself came into being because so many things have to line up for it to happen. You might say that the laws of natural selection themselves mitigate against this unavoidably slow and resource consuming process involved in developing wings that can only be used to advantage once more or less fully formed.

A smattering of feathers won’t do. You have to have a full set for them to carry your weight and constitute an evolutionary advantage. So, why would early birds go on consistently produce feathers if it would be a few million years before they ever got round to using them? Why would natural selection allow the initial emergence of non-functional feathers to persist as a desirable trait? Yet the skies teem with life. It rather suggests that Evolution has an aspirational goal. It seems quite happy to saddle a species with curious and apparently useless appendages so that one day a dream may be realised and some distant descendant benefit from the resources sacrificed by their forebears.

From this we might infer that Evolution involves something other than reactions to circumstantial constraint or the avoidance of ‘un-pleasure’. Life seems to anticipate what’s possible and then heads in that direction regardless of the un-pleasure or how long it takes. The adaptation of flight has its eye set on the future. It is rolled out despite the encumbrance of the initially insufficient proto-feathers to those earliest generations as yet unable to make use of them.

Evolution knows what it is doing. Those first useless feathers are kept as desirable traits and passed on to successive generations because they will be useful one day, a thousand generations hence. Flight wants to happen, which brings us back to our two bathtubs of salt grain/atoms. What if the missing bit of Aristotle is that ‘pneuma’ is always present, awaiting the fortuitous moment? Or, it exists/makes itself felt, where it perceives conditions are sufficient? Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say. Maybe pneuma is matter-wanting-to-happen. One way or another the bathtubs of grains organise themselves, or, are organised; then kickstarted into co-ordinated activity by something which cannot be measured nor said to be in the tubs along with the atom/grains. Even if you exclude god you still seem to have to reckon with some teleological agent.

A teleological view on any subject is the argument that the purpose of something is intrinsically linked to its design. Things are headed towards possibility as well as away from constraint. The difference between these two very different ways of thinking is that teleology implies sentience and intention. Why involve God in the story of creation when Nature already knows perfectly well what She is doing?

All kinds of weird stuff that shouldn’t happen does. Nature has a way of defying the laws of Nature. Bumble bees shouldn’t be able to fly at all but they do. Alaskan wood frogs shouldn’t be able to be frozen for months at a time but they do. Atomic particles shouldn’t blip in and out of existence but they do. They shouldn’t be both particle and wave but they are. You’d think nocturnal seagulls would get de-selected along with vegetarian vultures, yet they thrive. Cheeseburgers in vending machines shouldn’t be a thing but it is. Statistically improbable events seem to occur way more than probability likes to admit.

Our tendency to think of psyche and soma (body/matter) as distinct from one another forces us into the corner of having to explain Creation by either accident or design, by random events or by the hand of god. How would it be to think of spirit and matter as being at the ultraviolet and infra-red ends of the same spectrum? Perhaps Psyche is an expression of Nature and intrinsic to it which is why there are things that shouldn’t happen but do.

In much of Jung’s work you get the sense that he is trying to heal the Cartesian rift between spirit and matter which has made the circumstances of Creation and the generation of our own smaller creative efforts so mysterious. Jung’s ideas on the ‘Psychoid’, matter infused with pneuma, expresses ‘the essentially unknown but experienceable connection between psyche and matter.’ (CW vol 8)

According to `Jung the Psychoid possesses three different aspects. First, it is inaccessible to consciousness. Second, located in the meeting place between the psychological and the physiological, it can manifest in the relationship between a person’s psyche and their body. Thirdly it refers, “to the relationship between a person’s psyche and the physical world beyond that person’s body” (Main, p.26). We could add from Collins that the Psychoid is ‘the innate impetus to perform actions’. Intention does not have to be added to matter. It’s potentially already there. This is the principle behind the phenomena of synchronicity, which not only tend to occur against the odds but are invariably meaningful.

The separation of spirit from matter in western thought leaves those arenas of life where they clearly overlap unintelligible. This hatchet job on Being bequeaths an impoverished sense of soul to modernity. In Gnostic thought soul is like the radius of a circle, joining the circumference which is the body, to the centre which is spirit. If spirit and body are separated, the experience of soul is ravaged, reduced to a mere concept, inhabiting the body like a fugitive. ”The Spirit of the Times (Aristotle’s Pneuma) considers the soul as a living, self existing being and with this contradicts the Spirit of the Times (Descartes’ intellect) for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man ” Jung’s Red Book p232

Nearly two millennium before Descartes, Greek philosopher Plotinus taught that ‘the psyche is not in the body, rather the body is in the psyche.’ This means that psyche is also ‘outside’, in matter as well as in the body. You could call it a projection but the psyche doesn’t care much for ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. The alchemical opus of freeing spirit from matter means recognising just how tangled up it can be in the first place and therefor the meat and drink of psychoanalysis whose very name means ‘soul-disentangling’.

What we think of as objectively happening out there in the world is very often an inner event. Dreams seem like the quintessential inner experience and yet they come from somewhere beyond our ken. Something unknown is doing I don’t know what, seemingly unintelligible because of the narcissistic wound to ego’s pride in having to take seriously the autonomous existence of those layers of the unconscious from whence such things flow, consciousness beyond either body or mind which has the power to make things happen. Pneuma wants form and embodiment. ‘Eternity is in love with the clocks of time.’ to quote poet laureate Elias Cannetti. The Spirit of the Depths longs for the Spirit of the Time. It manifests in every niche available not because it has to but because it wants to and then revels in its infinite variety. Life on Earth began because it could. Life, like love, finds a way, one the mind is unable to imagine.

The Little Walnut.

Once there was a very poor man with a dozen hungry kids. Full of despair he wandered into the forest to see what he could find to feed them all. There he encountered a rather strange little man who smelled of burnt chicken feathers and had hooves instead of feet. The Devil, for that’s who it was, asked after the poor man’s situation and when the story was told he reached deep into his pocket and drew out a Little Walnut.

‘Here, take this walnut, ask anything of it and it will provide.’

‘But, you must surely want something for it..’

‘Oh well, if you insist, let’s just say, whatever you don’t know about back home.’

The Poor Man wracked his brains to think about all the things he didn’t know about but because he didn’t know about them the wracking did no good. So he agreed, thinking that what he couldn’t think about could not be such a big thing.

When he gets back he tells his wife about what happened and she erupts.. ‘You fool, the thing you don’t know about is that I am pregnant and that you have forfeited our child. WTF? Its not as though you don’t know about how these things happen..’

Yet what was done was done. The Poor Man became rich and bought a grand house for his family. The babe was born and was loved, yet their joy was palled by the prospect of the Devil showing up to claim his due. One night, two simple sages emerged from the forest and knocked on the door. The announced that they knew about what had happened and they had come to help save the baby. The Poor Man was amazed and asked what they should do. They told him to bake a loaf and leave it on the window sill, for the Devil would appear that very night.

Sure enough just before dawn the Devil arrived and called over the window sill..

‘Yo, my man.. I’m here to collect what you owe.. bring out the baby.’

To his surprise, to all our surprise, the Bread then spoke up, saying..

‘You are having to be patient and wait as I once had to be patient and wait..I was sown in Autumn and waited patiently in the soil the whole winter long as you wait patiently now. I was cut in my prime and threshed and beaten, just as you suffer now. I was ground down and pummelled into dough, then roasted in flames just as you now sit and roast in your own flames…’

The Loaf quietly expounding their mutual suffering until dawn broke. This particular Devil had no power by day. In any case he felt so tired out by the Loaf’s harrowing story that he crept quietly away and never returned.

In the more commonly known story of ‘Rumplestiltskin’, there is also the theme of a baby who will be forfeit to ‘a strange little man’ unless the protagonist can tell his name. In both stories the power of naming resolves the crisis. In Rumplestiltskin it is the little man’s name itself. In The Little Walnut, the naming of shared suffering.

You might say the Poor Man was not so deserving. The situation was of his own making. Yet he was desperate for his children. Moreover, he loved the new child and suffered the prospect of its loss. This love evokes powerful transforming energies from the deep psyche despite his foolishness, symbolised by the two wise men emerging from the forest just in the nick of time..

The Poor Man’s strength lies in his relatedness. His willingness to throw caution to the wind for the sake of feeding the family, despite its unfortunate consequence, also sets in motion the means to redeem the situation because his actions have not gone unnoticed by the Gods. The Principle of Relatedness, personified by Demeter as archetypal fairy godmother, well known for her love of her child, intercedes on behalf of the Poor Man in the form of a loaf of bread. As Goddess of grain and provision she speaks with the Devil and manages what Devils are generally starved of, tea and sympathy. She identifies with him without losing her own point of view. ‘You are suffering as I have suffered. You are having to wait as I waited.’ I really sympathize and you are not having the baby.

So too is it with our own Devils. If they are not to become neuroses then they need a maternal touch rather than heroic intervention. They need to be spoken with, at great length. Demeter intuits that the Devil’s wish for the child is ultimately the wish to identify with and be the child. She generously gives him the good stuff, the good maternal mirror. He is held and filled up without quite knowing how it happened, and so loses interest in its mere symbolic representation.

The shameful fury of all Devils, that they are rejected, has to be spoken to and soothed for them to begin to settle down. They feel demoted and are surly on account of it. In the absence of dialogue they’ll take the baby, the creative moment, instead. The way forward is not via heroic effort but by the invocation of Demeter to act as daycare for a while.

So, the Devil is contained by the relatedness of the Old Religion. The mysterious wise men from the forest who appear just when needed are the representatives of the Old Ways. They understand that if the situation is going to be helped it will have to by something other than a prejudicial sky god with an axe to grind.

In certain African tribes the village deals with transgressors in a very similar way. The person is made the centre of everyone’s attention. Then they take it in turns to remind the errant one of all their qualities, their good deeds, their shared experience. This repairs and vitalises tribal relations which they assume must have been damaged in some way for the person to transgress in the first place.

Once the Principle of Relatedness is restablished the danger passes and the scales of justice balanced without the need for sanction. Imagine if we approached the shadow like this? In our story the Devil is not vanquished. It’s not necessary to cast him down or out. Demeter has a way with him even if the Poor Man does not. His skill is rather in getting out of his own way, faithfully heeding and placing himself at the service of the two wise men.

Analytic Alchemy.

Overheard on a train. A man was talking about his experience of being in analysis to his friend. The friend asked, ‘so what do you think is the main difference that psychoanalysis has made in your life?’ The first man replied, ‘well, beforehand every day was just the same old thing.’ ‘And now? asked the friend. ‘Well now’, he perked up, ‘its just one thing after another’.

The Torah says, ‘you do not see the world as it is, you see it as you are.’ The World is moulded and filtered by the psyche; world as projection-receiving Matrix which we then fondly imagine to be an objective reality, ‘the same old thing.’ The problem is not that life keeps repeating itself but that we only have one string to our bow and thus a limited number of songs to sing about it. Much of life’s suffering is inversely proportional to the conduit through which we permit ourselves to experience it. The narrower it is, the more shielded, the more the monotonous and consuming grind of ‘the same old thing’.

This dawning awareness is distasteful to any part of the psyche habituated to the notion that experience has something to do with events themselves. Psycho (soul)- analysis (disentangling) aims itself in part at the notion that a person can discover not only their truth, and thus separate from others, but also all their many and diverse truths, their inner complexity. Beyond that, like distant peaks beyond foothills, the Spirit of the Depths (Jung), the ‘Not-I’ of the objective psyche, which has its own truth and its own point of view, often somewhat contrary to the wishes of the personality.

As diverse aspects of the Self are able to be acknowledged and related to rather than simply sources of unconscious identification people tend to get much lighter with their stories. It’s no longer the clutching at straws of the drowning. Anxiety and paranoia decrease as this internal ‘elbow room’ increases, which is why a sense of humor often indicates favorable prognosis. If a person can pull their own leg then there is a new way of experiencing the same old thing emerging alongside the time worn habit. If a person can laugh at themselves without it being humiliating then so are they liable to be able to talk to themselves, to reflect, to consider, to take in all the angles.

Humor is the relief and freedom of being able to experience the old stuff in a new way. Contrary Others can stretch themselves out across a broad swath of your inner landscape and have differences of opinion without it necessarily leading to open warfare. The problem with this growing inner multiplicity is that life then gets messy whatever your story. Suddenly things just become complicated and the narrower point of view must be sacrificed along with the identity derived from it.

When you are a kid you want to be something definite, a Fireman, a Dancer, but then you discover you also fancy being a bank robber or Wolverine from X-men, inner gremlins which don’t fit your adapted world, caught now between the suffering of expired developmental sell-by dates and the suffering of not knowing who you are anymore. Not to mention subsequent encounters with all things ‘Not-I’ which, it turns out, also have an influential point of view, though sometimes horrible to address.

The idea that you cannot change the past misses the point. The important bit is not so much what happened but what meanings are ascribed to it. This is not to say that one simply needs a different attitude but rather that having different perspectives on the same situation is what you discover if you sit with it long enough and pay it sufficient attention.

Much of life’s seemingly gratuitous suffering often proves in the end to have been necessary for something. Adversity evokes consciousness, yet being cast adrift from the known, the one and only way of seeing things, is a threatening prospect. What if there is a storm? What if you get lost? Allowing such an anxious inner conversation is to grasp the tiller, to respond, to be less at the mercy of emotional entanglements, group think, compulsive knee jerk reactions, ‘the same old thing’.

The greater freedom of experience in ‘one thing after another,’ is to do with a kind of dissolution of fixed opinions of ‘how things are’, which allows them to be what they are more or less independent of your prejudices. We all have a few, some tucked away better than others, needing to be named in order to hold them in some kind of abeyance. Judging things ahead of time is the hallmark of a psyche dominated by a single story. Where there is only one possible interpretation of events you always know what happens next.

The man on the train was describing a journey the philosopher Heidegger would describe as the transition away from having the world ‘ready-to-hand’, as the one story that a breast might be to an infant, towards a multiverse where the breast also has its own life. Things as they are in relation to me somehow also become things in themselves, things ‘present-at-hand’, ‘Not-me’ and somehow autonomous; all of which has a way of making you question and doubt stuff which used to be carved in stone. It’s all a bit unnerving.

Being at the center of things is very grand but its also tiresome and undignified, a single story which suffocates the multiplicity of soul. To experience ourselves as the ones in orbit is much more complicated, full of insecurity and yet a Copernican revolution of the psyche which turns the lead of the same old thing into the gold of one thing after another.

Sloth.

Once upon a time there was a poor old woman whose husband had died. She had a son, Lazy Tom, who might have been a help but the boy was so lazy he simply added to her burdens. Lazy Tom would not lift a finger to help himself or anyone else. One day his mother begged him to go down to the river and fetch some water. ‘I would gladly go, but I am far too lazy,’ he replied. Only when she began to leap up and down and go a dark shade of purple did he agree to help her, slouching down to the river in self-pity and dejection.

On his reluctant journey a small fish, gathered up with the water, spoke to Lazy Tom. ‘Oh let me go kind sir and I will reward you”, but the boy felt far too lazy and only once the fish had entreated him and splashed a good amount of water from the pail did he agree. ‘If ever you need help,’ called Fish, ‘just call for me saying, ‘Little Fish, Little Fish, come grant my wish.”

When Lazy Tom arrived home he found that there was nothing to eat. He remembering what the fish had said so he called out as he had been instructed and immediately there appeared a table groaning with food. They ate so much he fell into a deep sleep in the meadow woken much later by the passing by of the King’s daughter who was so beautiful he called again on Fish to cause her to be with child and wonder of wonders she bore a son before the year was out.

The King was none too pleased, demanding to know who the father might be. He called together the wise sages of the kingdom, who advised him to collect all the local men and see to whom the child might give a rosy apple, for he would surely be the child’s father. And so Lazy Tom was found out even though he was last in line. The King put him and the Princess and their child in a barrel and tossed them all into the river but of course the Little Fish was ready to hand and rescued them, not to mention rustling up a fine castle with all the trimmings.

The story poses a number of questions. What ails Tom? What light does the story shed on the nature of ‘laziness’. How is Tom’s affliction resolved?

The word “sloth” is a translation of the Latin term acedia which means “without care”. Spiritually, acedia first referred to monks who had become indifferent to their duties and obligations to God. Mentally, acedia is a lack of any feeling about self or others.

On closer inspection acedia is much more than a sin of omission. It seems to contain a subtle animosity towards the Gods, a dissatisfaction with one’s lot, the entitlement that goes with having been dealt a disappointing hand which can then become so easily a kind of bitter withholding and a refusal to play.

The original ‘acedia‘ could be translated as ‘angry indifference towards god (or the gods)’, a loss of connection to higher power leading to inflation and disconnection form self and world. The synonym ‘dejection’ is rooted in the latin deicere, thrown down (by god), ‘downcast’, with corresponding feelings of isolation and loss of relatedness.

Lazy Tom is experiencing the enervation of a rather particular kind of spiritual condition, one where ego and Self are furthest from each other. You can see Tom’s ‘laziness’ writ large in the concepts of sociologists Durkheim and Weber collective phenomenon of anomie and alienation, social conditions concomitant with a phase of history characterised by over-civilisation and a mono-theism of consciousness.

Mostly we tend to fall into the camps of either being either dismissive and reductive about the gods on the one hand or God fearing and devout on the other. You get to be zealous either way. But there is a murky, hesitant kind of in-between stage where you secretly suspect that the gods might be real but really wish they weren’t. Privately, you feel really pissed off at having to deal with them and all life’s aggravation which is failing to turn out as planned. ‘Laziness’ is never lazy on its own. An intrusive and dejecting Other is always implied, to whom one is reluctant, by whom you feel displaced, to whom you would then peevishly refuse co-operation.

If ‘laziness’ can be viewed as one end of an interpersonal dynamic it becomes remarkably reminiscent of analyst John Bowlby’s observations about ‘insecure attachment’ in the behaviour of abandoned infants. He identified three stages of separation response in these infants, firstly protest, then when that doesn’t work, despair, and finally ‘detachment’, all the clinical manifestations of which seem to be Lazy Tom personified. He is disconnected from the world around him, unmotivated and unresponsive. Given the ubiquity of this experience throughout our times it makes me wonder if it is not a collective expression of the final stages of separation from the Great Mother as detailed by Bowlby and the attachment theorists. The curse of over-civilisation with its disavowal of the Gods is listlessness, boredom, entitlement and enervation.

Apathy is not simply a state of being. It is relational. It’s about what exists between me and not-me. The etymology of ‘apathy’ is from the Greek meaning ‘freedom from want’ (a- without, pathos -suffering) which detaches you from the bonds of obligation and reciprocity with your neighbours, eroding fellow feeling. Behind the moral judgements on the lazy child is a story of isolation and loss. Lazy Tom has lost his father and through her despair perhaps Mother’s loving presence as well. He’s angry but his detachment makes it impossible to express other than by the resentful armoured passivity of refusing to join the world.

‘Behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.’ Bowlby 1946

The Little Fish in our story seems to know this about Lazy Tom and so it doesn’t give up on him. You can’t help but assume Little Fish is the representation of divinity or higher power, one which didn’t get itself into the pail by accident. Tom’s small gesture of relatedness is enough to catch the God’s attention and restore a living and fruitful connection, the child born to Tom and the Princess, new life out of the stagnation of ennui. Of course the old dispensation, the dominant structure in the personality, the King, is not going to like all this new-fangled energetic aliveness and will try to destroy it but Tom’s new relationship with Little Fish means the threat of annihilation is transformed into one of freedom and abundance.

On the Unintelligible.

Once upon a time two seafaring travellers were shipwrecked by a great storm and thrown ashore with nothing more than their lives and the clothes on their backs. They climbed the cliffs and staggered into a nearby village going from house to house begging for help and food. The local people were mightily put off by their ragged appearance, by their desperate eyes and unintelligible language. One after another they rebuffed the strangers, saying that they could not understand the guttural words or the wild gestures.

Eventually the travelers reached a ramshackle cottage and knocked on the door. An old lady answered. She too could not understand the words of the strangers nor the gestures they made, but it was clear to her that here were men in dire straits who must be cold and hungry so she invited them in. She and her husband built up the fire and served the guests the last of their food. The travelers, impressed by this generosity, reveal themselves as Jupiter and his son Hermes. They bless the elderly couple and invite them to name their own reward.

This story of ‘Philemon and Baucis’, told by Ovid in his ‘Metamorphoses’, is ostensibly a moral tale about how to treat others ‘because you never know who they might be’. Yet it seems to go much further. The old couple invite the gods in regardless of who they might be, happy to see the divine in any who might pass by, caring little for whether they are comprehensible or not, seeing past all the differences to the essential unity of I and Thou.

The danger of our modern dualism is that the Other becomes incomprehensible. If the Other is demoted from a Thou to an It, then I must also become an It. To depersonalise the Other is to eradicate your own humanity. This means that love is not simply an emotion but also an identity and a way of knowing the world. This preserves the intelligibility of the stranger which in turn brings us to self-knowledge. You cannot know who you are in the absence of the Other. This is why solitary confinement is such a terrible punishment. You are not just deprived of company but of the capacity for self-reference. You cease to know who you are.

This is why love is so healing, it connects you to yourself as well as to the Other, puts the ground back under your feet as well as the glint in your eye. That Descartes’ ‘Cogito’ should have attained such a pinnacle in Western philosophy is really an indictment of Western thinking and suggests we have been collectively regressing since the time of Ovid.

The idea ‘I think therefor I am’ is no less self absorbed and isolating than masturbation. Descartes, like the child’s recourse to self-pleasure, arrived at his conclusion via the negation of everything outside his own frame of reference, essentially that everything was incomprehensible except his own preferred organ.

This has given rise to the idea that independence is our greatest good and that the fulfillment of personal happiness our most basic right, which in turn has led to a culture of narcissistic encapsulation, the demonisation of anyone that is not-me, and the proliferation of arms required to defend the sacrosanct white picket boundary of self-hood. Meantime the reality of the Other is demeaned to the point that they can be invaded with impunity and perhaps for their own good, sovereignty lost in the Nationalism of ‘First and Only’. Such godlikeness eradicates our own humanity as much as that of the Other, creating wars, famines and ecological disasters for which no-one seems to be responsible or accountable because it is all so ‘incomprehensible’.

This rather suggests that the story of Philemon and Baucis is about something fundamentally different from do-as-you-would-be-done-by. Theirs is not simply an expedient or moral act but rather a way of being born out of a recognition of themselves in the Other. Their act of service is not in anticipation of reward, nor an insurance policy set against their own future misfortunes. Their kindness is absolutely grounded in the present moment out of the understanding that such charity is the chief source of meaning in life, that to give is to be enriched and to bestow is to find one’s own place in the world.

Even when the Gods invite Philemon and Baucis to name their own reward they choose to serve in the local temple and to die together. Their focus is still on the other, not because they are morally good but because they realize that their own fulfillment and purpose depends on it.

It’s as though Ovid was anticipating the erosion of the Principle of Relatedness in Western culture and doing his best to forestall it with his simple tale. Had he been able to gauge the extent of this collective regression he might have had more to say. Descartes is not alone in his material dualism. His philosophy extends itself to our entire view of nature from Darwin’s survival of the fittest, a model rooted in the idea of eternal conflict and competition, to Newton’s view of the cosmos as a giant mechanism in which we are all but cogs. By the mid 17th century Western separational philosophy had exiled the soul to the pineal gland and by the 19th century it had been even further demoted to a mere neurotic or hysterical symptom.

Separation from the Other renders that other incomprehensible and therefore a source of fear, insecurity and mistrust. Relatedness sees oneself in the Other which naturally gives rise to care and nurture without the need for moral pressure. Descartes’ narcissistic ‘Cogito’ needs reframing, ‘Estis, ergo sum’. You are, therefore I am. Perhaps James Hillman’s complaint that ‘we have had 100 years of psychotherapy and nothing has changed’, might then be resolved as the artificial unintelligibility of the other is allowed to collapse back into reverential awe and wonder.

Inspired by Satish Kumar’s book, ‘You are, therefore I am.’

The Poor Man and his Horse.

Once there was a Poor Man whose sole possession was his horse. He earned his wages by carting others’ goods about. They rode out in all weathers to keep themselves fed and kept. The Poor Man was a kindly sort and loved his horse. One day Horse spoke saying, ‘I know you love me, though my loads are heavy… so I want to help you. Set me free and I will return with the means to change our lives.

The Poor Man was a bit dubious. Would Horse ever come back having tasted freedom? What if something bad happened? How could Horse discover the means to change their lives? After a while the Poor Man began to remind himself that Horse was a noble and good creature who loved him dearly and would not leave him to fend for himself and so he agreed and took off the halter. Horse galloped twice round the yard and then shot off into the forest at high speed, leaving the Poor Man standing there perplexed and in some disbelief at what had just unfolded.

In the forest, Horse found Fox’s lair and lay down in front of it, blocking the entrance. Fox was rather annoyed by this but then thought to herself that there was a lot of prime rib on Horse so she went off to see Wolf and persuaded him to come and help shift the prospective winter stores.

They pushed and pulled and heaved but all to no avail. Eventually Fox persuaded Wolf to tie his tail to Horse’s tail and try to pull him away like that. So they tried and Wolf pulled and the knot got tighter and when it was tight enough Horse leaped up and chased off back to the Poor Man’s cottage at high speed with Wolf howling behind. Wolf’s pelt was sold and with the proceeds a new life began.

If the question, ‘how does consciousness evolve?’ was discussed as fiercely as the straw man of whether we have free will or not, as though we were incapable of paradox, then Psychology might be in a happier state. Something which prevents us thinking about this is that we think we already have the answer. It seems obvious that we evolve by our own efforts. Yet such a point of view is rooted in the idea that the ego is captain of the ship not to mention the delusion that we know what’s best for ourselves.

Our story challenges the prejudice that individuation requires such great heroics. Perhaps Horse speaks to the Poor Man because he is unencumbered by all the trappings of conventional opinion and become sufficiently receptive to hear what Horse has to say.

The transformation of their situation comes about as a result of the Poor Man paying a particular quality of attention to Horse, and making a decision which seems to be against his own self interest. Its decidedly un-heroic and his friends would think he had gone mad.

The Poor Man’s gift seems to be his understanding that he cannot help himself by his own efforts. He has been driving carts for a long time and never makes more than he needs to sustain them both. He realizes Horse is his only hope even though he cannot imagine how. Yet still he obeys some deep impulse to trust Horse, his animal soul, to resolve their situation and sets him free. Horse then journeys in the Underworld where he uses guile and trickery to capture Wolf, the dangerous aspect of the Unconscious and return with his enriching pelt.

Horse seems reminiscent of Pegasus, a spiritualized instinct brought to consciousness by virtue of the hero Perseus paying a a particular kind of reflective attention to Medusa, her reflection in his shield. Buraq, the Islamic Horse, carries the prophet Mohammed through the seven Heavens serving as a bridge between worlds just as Horse in our own story acts as a bridge between the Poor Man and the Forest.

Paying attention is an underrated pastime. Jung described it as the sin qua non, the precondition of transformation..

”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.” C.G. Jung, CW 10, p. 163

In an Eastern meditation technique called ‘the Secret of the Golden Flower’, the meditator allows a spontaneous fantasy to evolve in the mind’s eye which, given attention, unfolds by itself revealing a Consciousness which is non-ego, Atman, the Self.

This makes paying attention a big deal. If the Poor Man had tried to go into the forest on his own Wolf would certainly have had him. When the alchemists say, ‘not a few have perished in our work’, they are referring to the ones who went into the forest by themselves, the ones who had not yet come to love Horse and pay attention to her.

Unfortunately paying attention these days is often associated with pedagogical imperatives which can kill off curiosity and wonder. Having to pay attention all too easily becomes a power struggle, taking all the pleasure out of the flowering which occurs when we give out attention to someone or something freely.

The Poor Man is saved by his poverty. He knows he doesn’t have the resources to go into the forest alone. He understands that he is not the agent of transformation unlike many who are convinced that change comes about by mighty effort and determined action. Listening to your hunches, your gut feelings and the taste in the back of your mouth, is sometimes as important.

Perhaps this is why Marie- Louise von Franz says that the success of an analysis rests entirely with the analyst and whether or not they can pay sufficient attention.

Wilhelm’s edition of the I Ching (Hex 61) says that change in even the most difficult situation can be bought about by relatedness, by paying a particular kind of attention.

‘One must first rid oneself of all prejudice and let the psyche of the other person act upon us without restraint, then one will establish contact..’

This might make the Poor Man seem like a passive player in the drama but really his skill is the difficult art of not interfering. His relinquishing control over events has the Taoist quality of Wu Wei, ‘doing nothing’, which is is at the heart of what it means to follow Dao or The Way. According to the Dao De Jing: ‘The Way never acts yet nothing is left undone’.Wu wei doesn’t mean not acting, it means a particular kind of paying attention and not getting in the way.

This kind of receptivity creates change, allows things to unfold. It is to the psyche what warm rain and sunshine are to the garden. The secret seems to be that what prompts Horse to speak at all is the Poor Man’s good heart, his love and respect for the Other, which then enables Horse to act on the Poor Man’s behalf.