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One of the most pernicious trends afoot these days, dwarfing even the aggressive stupidity of superpowers, is the embattled ailment between Narcissists and Empaths. FB is full of it. A wide spectrum of social media touts the means to identify the enemy not unlike the tell tale markings attributed to medieval witches. U tube has one video after another on ‘the signs’ of Narcissism, how the evil one operates, gaslights and turns sour the milk of human kindness. There follows a plethora of advice on how to manage, manipulate, arm wrestle and otherwise defeat the wily Narc in a variety of modern stocks and ducking stools. Most amusingly, an arsenal of information on how to know if you are dating one without the least smidgeon of reflection or inquiry into what the attraction might have been in the first place.

At the other end of the spectrum, in an orgy of self fellating congratulation are the sabre rattling virtues of the mighty Empath, noble, self sacrificing and armed with a check list of how to know if you have sufficiently scaled the ramparts of moral goodness. The list is as nauseating as it is long and amounts to the unholy trilogy of denial, splitting and projection which typify our most primitive psychological defenses, responsible for all kinds of interpersonal and collective tragedies.

When I found myself (see how passively that’s phrased) in a relationship with a malignant narcissist (adjective for extra emphasis) I was so distressed and identified with the victim in the equation that I sought out an analyst and dragged myself to the first session armed with kleenex and… a dream. I dreamed that she (the terrible one) was a broomstick, her face vaguely visible in amongst the besoms, which I was flying up through the night sky. My analyst, bless him, sucked his teeth and muttered, ‘well, you are riding her….and there is something witchy going on’.

What I learned over the next months, most painfully, was far from the noble ideal I had that one day my love, being so pure, would penetrate, transform and save this ungrateful wretch. It gradually became apparent that my endless and devout patience, unstinting affection and spiritual devotion intended to redeem the broomstick woman, lifting the spell which had enveloped her, was itself casting a spell, projecting my own dissociated material on to someone whose misfortune it was to be only too happy to receive it.

I discovered in me an anxiety which needed this unpleasant woman in my life to confirm to myself a much preferred image of who I was, in order to identify all the more fully with the polished and virtuous persona of one whom life had treated unfairly, who deserved better, who labored selflessly for the greater good whilst justifying a belly full of bitterness and riteous victimhood.

With her in my life I could sweep all my neurotic and inferior aspects under life’s carpet and ride high on the inflated fantasy that it was all for some great cause. I was saving her soul. My empathy was a super-power. I was on a divine mission.

The fantasy that you can save someone from themselves is like the first missile in a nuclear war. It can only get worse, engulfing both sides in a folie a deux unconsciously bonded together by the shared belief that they are special, rooted in a conviction of personal power sufficient to arm wrestle the other into submission.

The literature is full of dire warnings about how the vulnerable Empath must protect themselves from burn-out, exhaustion and scamming, forgetting that the compulsive driving force to sacrifice themselves is part of their own psychology. The greater part of this tragedy is not simply that the hapless Empath masochistically dashes themselves on the rocks of Narcissistic impenetrability, but that their efforts actually make their partner worse.

If you give your power away the other will become a tyrant. If you massage the other’s ego they will become inflated. If you project the shadow long enough, to paraphrase Jung, it will appear.

The most difficult thing for the Empath is not the terrible treatment thy receive from their grandiose spouse but to get to the bottom of their own moth-to-the-flame insistence in converting others to their own way of thinking as though life depended upon it and to renounce the delusion that their fierce persistence is an expression of love. The Narc/Empath symbiosis is a contract entered into by both parties to consolidate a delicate psyche and renounce the prospect of growth as a price worth paying for the privilege of staying with the devil that you know.

Both parties profit. The Empath gets to recreate the emotional deprivation of early childhood and polishes the strategy of compliance and goodness s/he used to mediate a loveless world while the Narc’ gets to be cast in the familiar and time worn role of ‘the bad one’ who gets to be looked after by one who will find their lack of responsiveness a challenge rather than a turn off. Both get to consolidate their self structure and both get to identify with an omnipotent variant of their otherwise fragile personalities.

Knee jerk sympathy for the tear stained Empath is to fall into a primitive Orwellian, ‘two legs good, four legs bad’, version of reality. Understanding is hobbled by the naive assumption that the poor misguided Empath is simply loving the wrong person that the situation might be resolved by moving on. Not a few comforters are to be found gnashing their teeth in a fury having listened endlessly to the complaints of the muddled moth who, having been persuaded with great effort to quit the flame upon which their wings were singed, just went and found another one burning even brighter.

Any ‘helper’ must begin by asking, ‘what is the nature of the ailment?’ Incorrect assessment renders all subsequent efforts fruitless. If someone is a poor shopper how did they get that hungry? What pain in themselves is ameliorated by focusing eternally on the wounds of others? How does it serve them to believe that some third party is responsible for and preventing their happiness?

The stumbling block, the rock upon which the Empath is broken, is the gut churning realisation that if the Narc’ did not exist they would have to be invented. The term ‘sado-masochism’ is so useful, even before you unpack it, because it denotes a system of interdependence which is lost when Empaths and Narcissists are considered in isolation. Without the Narcissist the Empath would immediately be stripped of righteousness, would have to take back their split off inferiority and renounce omnipotence. This of course is difficult and painful though it is the end of victimhood and enactment giving rise to an experience of the opposites being an inner phenomenon rather than an outer one, a stony path but one which leads to a disentangled wholeness rather than unattainable perfection.

Long ago and far away a king was once going along in his carriage when he overheard a woman by the roadside proclaim that if she was chosen as the king’s bride she would bear him twin sons with hair of gold. He was intrigued and stopped the carriage, inviting her up… They quickly fell in love and were soon married. Before long the new queen was with child..

In the castle there also lived a wicked witch who had long wished that her own ugly daughter would be queen. She was enraged that her plans had been thwarted. When invaders threatened and the king went off to war the new queen did indeed bear him two beautiful boys with golden hair. The witch then stole these infant twins and buried them in the garden, replacing them with two puppies which she then told the king about in a letter. He was so horrified he ordered his bride to be thrown into the sea where she were swallowed whole by a whale which then dived down into the depths of the ocean.

When the grief stricken and remorseful king returned he reluctantly married the witch’s ugly daughter. He then discovered that two golden pear trees had somehow grown up in the castle grounds. He found them quite delightful and liked to sit in there shade, little suspecting their origins. The wicked witch surmised their true nature and had the trees chopped down and burned. A passing goat ate a few leaves before the pyre was consumed and soon gave birth to two golden haired kids.

Again, the witch pounced and ordered the kids to be butchered for the royal table. As their lifeless bodies were being washed in the stream two pieces of their innards turned into golden fish and swam away…

Years passed. One day a fisherman caught a most unusual catch and was doubly surprised when the fish began to speak, offering him a rich reward if only he would let them go free and introduce them to the king. The fisherman released the fish as he was asked and two handsome young men with hair of gold leapt up in their place. They were then bought before the king who was told the whole story of what had happened and that their mother was still captive in the stomach of the whale. The king ordered the whale to be caught and sure enough she was found inside, safe and sound. Everyone was overjoyed except the wicked witch and her daughter who were gruesomely and creatively put to death.

The term ‘shadow-work’ gets bandied about a lot these days with some controversy about what it actually amounts to. Still less obvious is the nature of the shadow itself, except perhaps, that it constitutes unacceptable aspects of the personality, the self we refuse to be, a conglomeration of perceived personal inferiorities or negative qualities. Though he coined the phrase himself, Jung offers us a fairly cursory definition of the shadow, confining himself in the main to discussion about its projection. We are, he says, less good than we imagine ourselves or want to be…

‘Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. Carl Jung

His protege Neumann follows suit. According to him the shadow is a Mr Hyde to the ego’s Dr Jekyll..

‘All those qualities, capacities and tendencies which do not harmonize with the collective values – everything that shuns the light of public opinion,’ Erich Neumann.

Though Jung pays lip service to the idea that creative attributes can also be a part of the shadow his view is generally that it is comprised of all that is socially unacceptable, requiring moral courage to face its shameful contents.

‘The only exceptions to this rule are those rather rare cases where the positive qualities of the personality are repressed, and the ego in consequence plays an essentially negative or unfavourable role. Jung vol 9.

Such definitions presuppose traits and attributes found to be at odds with societal values and summarily repressed. This somewhat fail to take into consideration the effect of traumas which occur earlier than ego formation and therefor without reference to social norms. Moreover, these definitions of the shadow tend to skip over the salient fact that what is most anathema to collective values is precisely our individuality. Thus, what first gets buried in the shadow tends to be comprised of those qualities and potentialities which contribute to a unique sense of self, the golden haired twins.

‘The frightened [infant] cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.” Erich Fromm

What this means is that the shadow, in its first iterations, is primarily made up of a person’s essential nature. What is given up to ensure going-on-being in the earliest years is not so much anti-social traits but our creative potential which is repressed out of the need to preserve the emerging self from repeated unmanageable blows of fate, the invading armies which defeat the king. The wicked witch in our story is the inner counterpart to these outer slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the hostile invaders breaching the nation’s borders. She responds to this attack on the realm by defensively burying the heirs to the kingdom, the personality’s future possibility.

In this way the diabolical figure traumatizes the inner object world in order to prevent re-traumatization in the outer one.‘ Kalsched

In the footsteps of post `Jungian analyst Michael Fordham (Defences of the Self), Donald Kalsched furthers our understanding of the shadow with the contribution that it is far more complex than previously understood. It is rather a complex comprised of an archetypal identification with the aggressor/invader coupled with the forcible encapsulation of the essential self. The wicked witch steals and buries the golden haired princes in the wake of alien conquest and puts her ugly daughter on the throne.

This attacking figure is an internalized version of the actual perpetrator of the trauma, who has “possessed” (invaded) the inner world of the trauma victim, though this diabolical inner figure is often far more sadistic and brutal than any outer perpetrator.’ Kalsched.

The perverse logic of such a malevolent ‘death mother’, to paraphrase Marion Woodman, is to prevent the repetition of trauma.

‘Those who carry the most ferocious manifestation of Death Mother may have been the most creative of children, [but] if there is unconscious hostility in the environment we will do anything to ensure that our life feels safe and secure, even if it is static, rotten, and dead.’ M Woodman.

To this end the wicked witch buries the golden haired princes and supplants their mother with her own ugly daughter, much as Donald Winnicott describes the process of the ‘true self’ being supplanted by the ‘false self’. The ‘true’ queen winds up in the belly of the whale, swallowed up by the unconscious, whilst the ‘false’ queen rules the land from the ego’s castle.

Never again,” says our tyrannical caretaker, “will the traumatized spirit of this child be this helpless in the face of cruel reality…. before this happens I will disperse it into fragments [dissociation], or encapsulate it and soothe it with fantasy [schizoid withdrawal], or numb it with intoxicating substances [addiction], or persecute it to keep it from hoping for life in this world [depression].” … Kalsched

The wicked witch and her daughter draw their power from the instinct for self-preservation itself, misdirected though it may be. As can be seen from our story, they are forces powerful enough to repeatedly kill off the efforts of self-realisation. The popular idea that growth is simply a matter of ‘letting go’ greatly underestimates the spell casting power of the witch and negates the reality of unconscious complexes that may well have you in their grip, against which no amount of ‘letting go’ is ever going to make a blind bit of difference.

Fortunately the golden haired princes are as tenacious as the wicked witch. They morph into ever evasive forms with every effort to kill then off. This motif of twins is interesting and instructive. Jung was of the opinion that the symbolism of twins suggested some creative principle on the cusp of consciousness. Edinger states it more succinctly..

‘The ego destined for individuation is born as twins.’ E Edinger.

Yet in order for this occur there must be some means, already established in consciousness, to facilitate this process. The princes are returned to awareness by the intervention of a particular quality of being, the ordinary fisherman, whose native simplicity is what’s required to redeem the princes and bring them before the king.

Hemingway says of this old man archetype..

‘He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility’. Ernest Hemingway. (The Old Man and the Sea)

Simplicity, as the condition sin qua non for the return of the Princes, is emphasised time and again in the annals of alchemy as being the essential component for the redemption of spirit from matter, ie for the reclamation of unconscious contents.

‘That wo/man is well qualified to complete the work because s/he possesses that which is simple.’ C Jung

and again…

‘that which is nearest to the simplicity of the soul is the bridge to spiritual transformation.’ ibid

The complex is resolved by the simplex.

This somewhat changes how we might traditionally view psychotherapy. Instead of wracking our brains wondering about the origin of anxiety, for example, we might do as the fisherman does and find out what the golden fish want to become. They want to become embodied aliveness. Perhaps anxiety is not so much a projection of guilt or aggression but what simply happens to spontaneous aliveness when it is dismembered and buried out of the need to protect ourselves from further invasion. If life’s excitement cannot be entered into it is going to assume pathological expression. The notion that there is any such thing as a ‘negative’ emotion tends to focus on the eradication of anxiety, or tries to reduce it to a fear of something without asking what the anxiety wants to become, what it’s ‘telos’, its ultimate object or aim, might be.

Of course this is going to be a dangerous process, the king is going to take some convincing. The fisherman’s revelation is going to involve a radicle shift in his mind set and some considerable rewriting of history which will bring with it memories of defeat, realisations of betrayal, confrontation with inauthenticity. Yet these trials seem secondary to those already faced by the persistent twins whose determination for expression, whose lust for life, whose willingness to endure, have already escaped the machinations and transcended the power of the wicked witch.

Once there was a great King who was also humble and wise. He liked to see how the people lived and would occasionally slip out of the Palace in disguise to see what was going on in the kingdom. One day he rode his horse a long long way, across a wide and barren plain, till he came to the dwelling of a Poor Man. The disguised King knocked on the door and asked for food and lodging which the Poor Man gladly gave. In the morning the unsuspecting Poor Man sent the King on his way with the last of his provisions.

When the King returned to the Palace he sent a messenger to the Poor Man inviting him to visit but did not say why. The Poor Man quaked in his boots at the prospect. What could such a great King want with him? He searched his conscience several times wondering what fate awaited. Then he got dressed as warmly as he could, packed an apple core into his meager bundle and set off across the forbidding landscape. The winter wind bit at his weary bones, the frost nipped his nose and fingers and toes. The miles ate into his tired limbs and the freezing nights robbed his sleep.

Eventually he arrived at the Palace, exhausted, frightened and weak with hunger. The guard at the gate of the palace treated him roughly, set the Palace dogs on him and demanded payment to let him in but the Poor Man protested he had nothing to give.

‘Then, whatever the King gives you, I will have half’, threatened the guard and only let him pass once the Poor Man agreed. Outside the King’s antechamber stood another guard, just as mean and horrible. He too tried to shake the Poor Man down, demanding the other half of whatever he might receive from the King. The Poor Man was compelled to agree and was finally let in before the King who sat at the head of a vast table laden with food and lined each side with important looking men. A place had been set for the Poor Man and so he sat down.

Servants arrived with bowls of steaming soup and all the guests began to eat but no spoon had been given to the Poor Man and so he sat there feeling anxious, wondering what to do. It was all made worse by the King announcing, ‘ what wonderful soup, only donkeys don’t eat it.’ The Poor Man was loathed to be the donkey at the table but then he had the idea to cut the end off a loaf of bread and use the hollowed out crust as his spoon, announcing once he had finished his bowl, ‘and only donkeys don’t eat their spoon,’ whereupon he wolfed down the soupy crust.

There was a moment of terrible silence before the King burst out laughing and revealed who he was, saying that he had played a joke on the Poor Man to see if he was as wise as he was generous. ‘How can I reward you?’ he asked. ‘Well,’ said the Poor Man, ‘can I have fifty strokes of the cane? And would you be so kind as to give half of those to the guard at the gate and the other half to the guard at the antechamber door? I did promise….’ And so the guards got their just desserts and the Poor Man got to be mates with the King.

For centuries philosophers and theologians have been asking the question, ‘why do bad things happen to good people while the wicked seem to prosper?’

‘I was envious of the foolish when I saw the prosperity of the wicked for there are no bands in their death and their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men.’ Psalm 73

All kinds of erudite and sometimes contradictory explanations have been given ranging from God’s punishment to God’s loving instruction and back again. This is particularly difficult to ‘the faithful’ since they firmly believe God cares and is able to alleviate suffering, yet he does not.

“If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures happy, and if God were almighty, he would be able to do what he wished. [Ergo] God lacks goodness or power or both.” CS Lewis.

Theodicy, the defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil is argued by Judaism’s Rabbi Kushner from the perspective that suffering is as a result of ‘the fall’ of man. So its all your own fault. In Christianity St Augustine agrees, though St Ireneas complicates it by arguing that humanity is imperfect and has to be given the opportunity to express freedom of choice…so still your own fault….though as a result of contemporary rather than historical sin.

These various versions of ‘you did it to yourself’, are recapitulated by much incipient psychoanalytic theory, particularly drive conflict theory (Freud 1905), which suggests it’s not what happens to a person that causes suffering but rather their failure to respond to it correctly. It seems rather ironic that Freud should hold religion in such contempt and yet use the same devices to explain the ubiquity of human suffering.

If we return to our story with the lens of Depth Psychology there emerges the possibility of a different explanation than those offered by either mono-theism or early psychoanalytic thinking. In Jung’s view the Self exists as an a priori fact of the psyche, unlike `Freud, but is also not necessarily ‘good’, unlike the church. The Self is something from which the ego must painfully differentiate in the first half of life and then to which it must painfully return.

Our story begins in what we could imagine as mid life where the ego, the Poor Man, has managed to establish itself as separate from the Self but is still struggling with the absence of meaning, the wintry wind swept plain. Though the Poor Man is kind he is not generative. Nothing grows around about and he is on his last resources, hence the need for the King, the Self, to pay him a visit and shake things up.

When the Poor Man receives the King’s summons he quakes with fear, he is about to be pulled out of the known if barren world of his cold and stony plain, off to an unknown fate beyond the compass of his imagination. Effectively, his reticence is a form of death anxiety. Life will never be the same again, whether the King rewards or executes him. His self construct will be teased apart one way or another, a known way of being, of self sufficiency, gone forever.

We find this motif throughout mythology. It is present in the story of Beowulf, in the Grail legends, and more recently in the Lord of the Rings…

”It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.

When you are thrown back on your own resources you may be unsure of future direction. Whilst apprehensively distrustful of former time worn and socially determined behaviors it may not be all that clear what might be more appropriate. It seems as though the personality has become less functional, less coherent, as though you are somehow going backwards, hesitant where previously certainty had lain, circumspect and uncertain after years of brash conviction. Moreover, there has grown a sneaking suspicion that your own very being is as yet unplumbed, that the ego is no longer the center of things, that something vast and unknown underpins what was previously the fixed immutability of Terra Cognita.

From such a vantage point suffering is the inevitable companion of a return to the Self, both in terms of the wrestling away from the fond and familiar and in terms of facing the unknown of that which transcends ego consciousness. The search for meaning which gives a context to suffering is paradoxically found beyond the borders of the known.

”Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.” Kahlil Gibran

Consciousness is thus faced with a cosmic dilemma, to find meaning it is necessary to journey towards that which would seem to dismember it.

Beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,
and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.
And so I grip myself and choke down that call note
of dark sobbing. Rilke

The Poor Man struggles towards the Palace, the stony road beneath him, the scowling sky above, the cold wind at his back, the incomprehensible majesty of the King seizing his imagination in front. Finally, the bewildering vastness of the Palace towers before him, the robber guards rifling his pockets, demanding any last scrap, final vestiges of his former values.

These guards both demand the remnants of his former ego-centered life and act as impediments to his audience with the King. They are representatives of what Donald Kalsched would call ‘the self-care system’, defenses against ego and Self becoming..

‘an object of knowledge and perception by the other, which has a wounding or violating effect. [The encounter] is both desired and dreaded. From a distance it is the source of all yearning, but knocking at the door it is an object of terror.’ E Edinger.

Once he has gained entry the Poor Man’s trials are not over. He must drink his soup without a spoon in much the same way as the hero Siegfried was tasked with banal trials by the Giants in the Norse ‘Hall of the Mountain Kings’, who challenged him to drink a cup of wine, or blow out a candle, or pick up a cat, seemingly trivial assignments which, however, were not what they seemed. The wine was the sea and so could not be drained, the candle was the eternal flame which could not be extinguished and the cat was Old Mother Death, who could not be lifted. Likewise, the task of drinking the soup without a spoon so as not to be a donkey has metaphorical significance.

The braying donkey has long been a symbol of inflation. The story of ‘The Golden Ass’ recounts how the protagonist is turned into a donkey in the process of trying to wield magic. In Greek mythology King Midas is given asses ears in the wake of his inflated wish to turn everything to gold. In the story of Pinnochio, he and his pal Lampwick are turned into donkeys after their arrogant dismissal of Jimmy Cricket and offending the ancient gods of Pleasure Island.

So the soup test is a kind of Zen koan to do with inflation, rather necessary when the ego is brought before the Self. Invariably the ego either identifies with the Self making a donkey of itself or, in a negative inflation, denies all connection and projects the Self onto others instead. The Poor Man does neither, he finds a way to eat his soup with the hollowed crust, in other words by means of his own humble ordinariness. He then pulls the leg of the fine gentlemen gathered to whom it would have been so easy to give away all his power.

The King is delighted, the reward, a trouncing of the impediments to their relationship which might have sent the Poor Man back to his neurotic life on the barren plain. It seems that the Poor Man, in dealing with the Defenses of the Self has managed to put his suffering into some kind of greater context, his trials seem to have become meaningful since they are in the service of the Ego-Self axis wherein suffering ceases to be the gratuitous pain we so often take it to be and can be re-dignified as synonymous with growth.

‘It is possible that you dislike something and there is good in it for you, and it is possible that you like something and it has evil in it for you. God knows and you know not.” Qur’an (2:216)

The difference between ‘the good’ and ‘the wicked’ is more fundamental than the issue of morality. It has to do with the Principle of Relatedness. Where there are connections they can be broken, where there is value it can be lost, where there is intimacy it can be betrayed. All of this evokes suffering and yet it is precisely this orientation to the Other which finally redeems the Poor Man.

‘People are never helped in their suffering by what they think for themselves, but only by revelation of a wisdom greater than their own. It is this which lifts them out of their distress.’ C G Jung

The Poor Man suffers initially because he doesn’t have the whole picture and is trying to provide his own meaning. Then, as a result of answering the knock at the door, he suffers out of fear and trepidation of the unknown as his limited perspective become apparent. Next, and with greater sophistication, he suffers out of dedication to the King on his stony pilgrimage to the Palace. Finally, and with greatest refinement, he suffers in his efforts to enjoy the soup without becoming a donkey.

In the end his suffering all falls away because it is given meaning, dignity and context through the restoration of the ego-self axis, because it is experienced as part of life and growth rather than as punishment or the product of malevolent intent. From such a perspective, ‘the wicked’ are not experienced as better off or somehow as having gotten away with it because they are still stuck out on the barren plain trying to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, attached to self constructs which time and tide are continuously gnawing at, isolated, numb, bereft of purpose.

Though the Poor Man finds himself afraid and discomforted he also makes himself available to the King’s table, to the prospect of being nourished and comforted, to camaraderie, togetherness and reparation.

Once there lived an old man and an old woman both of whom had daughters by previous marriages. The old woman hated her husband’s daughter and eventually threw her out saying she should go and find work. The poor girl was saddened and scared but did as she was told and set on her way.

After a while she came across a pear tree which begged her to trim its dead branches and though the work was difficult and hard on her hands she did her best before walking on. Then she came to a vineyard and the vines cried out to her to hoe around their roots so they could be replenished and though it was hot and dusty work she completed the work before setting off. Then she came to a broken oven which asked plaintively to be repaired and though it was heavy graft to make up the mortar for the job she managed it. A little further on she encountered a well which begged her to freshen its brackish waters.

Eventually she came to a large house which was occupied by seven fairies. The fairies took her in and gave her work saying that she should sweep and clean six of the rooms daily but never enter the seventh. The diligent girl did as she was told and after a year and a day the Fairies took her to the seventh room which was full of treasure and invited her to help herself.

On the way home she passed the well which gave her sweet water to drink, she passed the oven which was piping hot and full of bread and cakes. The vines had prepared wine for her and the pear tree was laden with fruit.

When she got home her step mother was furious to be so upstaged and sent out her own daughter to profit likewise but this girl was ignorant and stuck up, thinking she knew everything. When the pear tree asked to have its dead branches removed she refused least it roughen her pretty white hands. She also snubbed the oven saying that all that treading of mortar would dirty her dainty feet. The vines received their own dismissal and the poor well was left all fouled.

When she got to the House of the Fairies they took her in and gave her the same work admonishing her not to go in the seventh room but she was far too inquisitive and peeked in whereupon she was attacked by all manner of biting and stinging creatures. As she fled home she begged the well for water yet it had none to give. The Oven was full of bread and cakes but burned her when she reached in her hand. The vines slapped her pretty white wrist when she tried to take the wine and no matter how high she jumped she could not reach a single pear…

One way of understanding this parable is simply at the level of social morality, an instructive tale on how to behave with good things happening to good people and a bad end for the selfish and deceitful. Closer examination reveals deeper significance, more pertinently the story seems to be about the meaning of life and the means by which some degree of enlightenment might be found.

The story begins with injustice and loss. Deserving none of it, the diligent girl is thrown out into the world to fend for herself in what has to be felt as a terrible calamity. The first steps on the path of individuation are invariably beset by crisis and the sense of having been cast down.

‘The freeing of an individual from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of development. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations.‘ S Freud.

This painful separation and the feeling of being rejected is also something you can see in the animal kingdom. The lioness cuffs her cubs, the blackbird chick is ejected from the nest, Mama Labrador barks at her pups. For growth to occur the original Eden-like bliss of oneness must be ruptured…

”In individuation the self starts by performing the opposite function (of nurturance); it, so to say, attacks and eliminates the ego’s position of pre-eminence which, as an illusion, it never regains.” M Fordham 1958.

This involves a process that Fordham describes as ‘deintegration’, which is bound to feel like a fall from grace..

 ‘a sense of loss of contact with feeling fed and contained, a deep sense of disappearance, perhaps even of non-being ensues.”ibid

Alchemically, this is synonymous with ‘the nigredo’, the first stage the work, also described as ‘melancholia’, a dark night of the soul in which the vastness of the world beyond the garden gate, and the corresponding vastness of the unconscious are first experienced, not only as something potentially dangerous which might at any moment swallow you up, but also as something upon which the ego must anxiously depend.

In order to reach the House of Fairies our heroine has to pass several Herculean kinds of tests. These four tests correspond to the ‘tetrameria’, a quaternary of elements which comprise the alchemical opus. These four ‘elements’ of the unconscious (air, fire, earth and water) correspond to her four trials. Firstly she must get up in amongst the branches of the pear tree (air/intuition), then she must till the roots of the vines (earth/sensation). Then she must mend the oven (fire/thinking) and lastly she must repair the well (water/feeling). Each of these tasks involve hard physical graft but are also tests of compassion and relatedness. Is she able to make sacrifices? Can she defer her own egotistical agenda for the sake of another?

A mistake that greatly impedes spiritual progress is the idea that you can be the author of your own happiness, meaning and purpose. They say ‘life is what you make it,’ and nod sagely yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the effort to be the captain of our souls, to strive forward according to your own plan is largely responsible for much of life’s misery and depression. The lonely void within that much of modernity’s striving, achieving and compulsions aim to fill is no more attainable than pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Even the idea of ‘connecting with yourself’ is still about I and me.

What is actually required is that we tend to the spirit in matter, that we care for the planet, for the stranger, for the shadow, the ‘other’ in all its manifestations and only then does the year and a day in the ‘House of Fairies’ produce any sense of reward. The irony of the treasure hard to attain is that it is not really attained in any kind of heroic sense but rather tangentially, given as a grace.

The Seven Fairies are agents of the Unconscious dedicated to the process of self-realization which is managed not by resolving conflicts, to paraphrase Jung, but by outgrowing them, a process which requires time, a year and a day.. The seven fairies are also..

”the alchemical seven-petalled flower, symbolizing the seven planets and seven stages of transformation, (they) relate psychologically to “evolution in time,” the slow process of becoming conscious.” M. L. Von Franz

”Our heroine submits herself to this slow process and to the authority of the Fairies. She sacrifices her own will (and curiosity) to this higher power and is subsequently rewarded for her diligence.

”Sacrifice is more than the act of giving, it is the forgoing of any claim on reciprocation or result and most often entails an experience of profound loss.” J Feather.

The step-sister’s peremptory efforts to be the mistress of her own fate with a litany of ‘positive thoughts’ and self affirmations ends in disaster. Her refusal to be involved, her preoccupation with her lily white hands and dainty feet, her fixation upon the materialization of her own will and her disavowal of relatedness turns the unconscious against her, manifesting in its most punitive and attacking form. Sadly, we are collectively well and truly cast in her role.

Once there were two estranged brothers who lived on different sides of the mountain. Both were dirt poor and had loads of hungry kids. One day the eldest brother decided to go out into the forest and see if he could find some nuts but all he found were oak apples. He decided to go down into the village and try to sell them anyway.

Meantime the younger brother had gone out in search of poppy seeds. He came home empty handed but filled up his sack with ashes, thinking to go and dupe some poor fool in the village below and so off he set.

Half way there the brothers bumped into each other. Both decided it best to seem pleased at the meeting and so they clapped one another on the back, boasted a bit about how wonderful life was on their respective sides of the mountain and finally came up with the brilliant idea that they would swop sacks and save themselves a journey down into the village which surely did not deserve them in any case. So each returned home chuckling about how they had outsmarted the other.

When the older brother got home he opened up his sack of poppy seeds to discover nothing but ashes. He was furious at being cheated and ran around the mountain armed with a rake to teach his brother a lesson. When the younger brother got home he opened his sack of nuts to find only oak apples. Enraged, he grabbed a hoe and rushed around the mountain to demand justice. When they met each cursed and remonstrated with the other, beating one another to a pulp before dissolving into hysterical laughter.

”I never could cheat you brother!’

‘No, and I never could cheat you….’

So they decided to go cheat someone else together, two heads being better than one, and hired themselves out to a rich man for a few days thinking that when they got paid they might ascertain where he kept his money. Sure enough when the time came the rich man drew up some gold from his well and so that night the two brothers sneaked into his garden to steal the rest.

The older brother lowered the younger one down into the well where he filled up his sack with gold but not to the brim. He knew full well that he would be left behind if he sent the gold up first so he left room for himself and climbed in after the gold. Sure enough, once the gold was hoisted up, elder brother set off at speed. Dreams of fabulous ventures rushed into his mind, dousing all conscience and he gave no more thought to younger brother till he popped his head out of the sack, thanking him for the ride. Older brother was so exhausted from all this effort of carrying both gold and man that he set down to rest and soon fell asleep whereupon younger brother shouldered the gold and snaked away.

When older brother woke and found them missing he gave chase. He tied a thread to a stick and cracked it like a whip as though leading an ox and cart, knowing that younger brother would wait for the prospect of a free ride and sure enough around the bend of the lane sat younger brother with his thumb out, so tired from his exertions that he had fallen asleep with all the waiting. So older brother now took back the gold and ran all the way home, telling his hungry kids to bury him in a shallow grave so that younger brother would think him dead.

When younger brother arrived all the children were crying that there papa had expired but younger brother was suspicious and asked to see the grave, making sounds like an angry bull about the mound of earth until older brother cried out in fright and leapt up from his pit.

”I never could cheat you brother!’

‘No, and I never could cheat you….’

While older brother shook the earth from his clothes, younger brother ran off with the gold and to this day those two poor fools are stealing still.

The absence of the feminine in this story is overwhelming. There is no Principle of Relatedness whatsoever. For the want of it these two brothers exhibit almost every trait of mental derangement it is possible to imagine, a heady cocktail of the manic sociopathic, narcissistic, compulsive, psychopathic. They utilise primitive defences galore, denial, splitting, projection. Do these factors go together? Most certainly.

With the banishment of the Divine Feminine we find not only God becoming slowly unhinged but humanity as well. The earliest ever novel, the Epic of Gilgamesh details how the hero, having cut down the sacred grove of the Goddess loses his mind and kills his brother Enkidu, In their wake Cain slaughters Able, and Isaac goes to war with Ishmail in a bloodbath that rages still. The erosion of the Principle of Relatedness breaks bonds of fellowship between one other and loosens the coherence of our inner lives to the point of fragmentation. Meantime God becomes ever more grouchy, vengeful, weakened and sick until, by the early 19thC we find first Kant then Hegel anticipating his demise, perhaps from lonliness, until finally pronounced dead by Nietszche in 1882.

‘We think we can congratulate ourselves… imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters… We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases… C G Jung

In between God taking to his sick bed in 1830 and his death in 1882 you find a wild proliferation of madhouses being built across Europe and in the USA. Though the County Asylum Act was passed in 1808, which allowed counties to levy a rate in order to fund the building of County Asylums it was not until the passing of the County Asylum / Lunacy Act in 1845 that widespread construction began to take hold with the most famous efflorescence of this collective preparation, the Burgholzli, being completed in 1870 just in time for God’s final breath a decade later.

Of course Nietszche was speaking metaphorically. His claim that God was dead is to be understood in the sense that the three monotheisms had really ceased to be containers of the numinous, ceased to be collectively meaningful as vehicles for transcendent experience. Despite his own atheism Nietszche was none to happy about the death of god. He feared it would give rise to despair and Nihilism, the alternative to which was not much more inspiring, The Last Man, alone on his mountainside. A “most contemptible thing” who lives a quiet life without thought for individuality or personal growth: “‘We have discovered happiness,’ — say the Last Men, and they blink.” 

If mental illnesses can be broadly divided into the Psychoses (including schizophrenia), the Personality Disorders (including narcissism) and the Manias (including Bipolar) then there is a sense in which we can consider all three to be an aspect of our collective response to the death of God, a poetic reaction to divine demise. With psychoses the ego is fragmented and broken up by the archetypal forces no longer contained in a living god, a tsunami of unconscious powers flooding the land mass of consciousness. In our story both brothers loose their human connection to each other and the villagers. With Personality Disorders, there is an identification with divine energies and subsequent inflation of the ego. In the story this is represented by the theft of ‘the rich man’s’ gold. The Manic-Depressive is alternately inspired by enthusiasm (from enthousiazein ‘be inspired or possessed by a god’) followed by the receding tide of depression felt in the absence of the transcendent, (exhaustion and the sudden loss of the gold).

Whilst it’s certainly true that a considerable degree of mental illness is down to maternal neglect we shouldn’t underestimate the influence of divine loss which exacerbates and perhaps even provokes a deficit of maternal care. We might imagine that such an archaic and apparently irrelevant detail from religious history as the Divine Feminine being branded the Whore of Babylon and drowned in the sea (repressed into the unconscious) with a millstone around her neck, has nothing to do with us and yet the spectre of such loss casts a long shadow. If the male counterpart of the banished goddess then expires with loneliness in the wake of his jealous impulse then we are doubly endangered, not only in our individual mental health but in the collective madness of our attack upon Mother Nature who is then bound to show us her teeth.

“Omicron” is an anagram for “Moronic”…which is Mother Nature’s way of mediating our ignorance and incompetence in the absence of a more conscious relationship. Stay safe.

One day Pot had become very bored. It seemed to be no life at all to be merely making porridge and so it confided in Walking Stick that it was off to seek its fortune. Walking Stick decided to tag along since it felt that to be a Walking Stick was likewise no life at all and so the two went out into the world.

On their travels they came across the Old Man of the Mines who took fright at such an uncommon sight and ran off to take shelter. As he ran the gold he carried on his back spilt out onto the path where Pot and Walking Stick discovered it, to their great delight. Pot filled himself up with the illicit gold declaring that he would weave a thread of wire round himself with these new found riches so that he would never break and be immortal. Walking stick had a better idea and smashed Pot to smithereens, taking all the gold for himself. He paid the local blacksmith to fashion himself a great golden crown which seemed very grand until he got to the river and tried to cross over but was dragged to the bottom by his fancy hat and drowned.

The use of the Old Man’s gold for their own purposes is a form of wielding magic that gets both our heroes into trouble very quickly. Normally we think of magic as something involving eye of newt and toe of frog, witching hours and windswept heath. It suits us to construe it like this so we can distance ourselves from the taint of such practices which are often closer to home and way more common than you might like to imagine, requiring neither lonely moor nor a motley assortment of unlikely ingredients.

If you give the traditional definition of magic, ‘the use of supernatural forces for evil purpose’, a modern interpretation, ‘the use of unconscious contents for egoic motives’, then it becomes easier to see the proliferation of magic in modern times.

In the practice of psychotherapy its rather usual to witness the way in which children are used/coersed into shouldering parental troubles..

‘The greatest danger to the child is the unlived life of the parent.’ C G Jung

Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, it is also contagious, making life not worth living for there next generation as well. Black sheep are invariably the victims of a form of black magic, laden down with the bad conscience, the shortcomings, misgivings and anomalies of parental projections which children embody only too readily.

Yet just as bad is the idealisation of children. This leads to inner splitting between the ego ideal and the shadow which is then free to act out its own mayhem in the world.

‘In the outer world the child may choose in accordance with expectation, in the inner world he lives a life evermore at variance with it…’ Frances Wickes

In our story what gets our heroes into so much trouble is the inflation of arrogating the Old Man’s gold to themselves. The Old Man is an archetypal figure, a denizen of the Unconscious which Pot thinks he can contain and Walking Stick believes he can wear as an ornament. The result is disaster. Walking Stick loses all sense of morality and is suddenly and violently possessed by the shadow. His subsequent inflation leads him to be directly swallowed up by the Unconscious.

One of the most common proliferations of this tendency to split oneself and drive the shadow even further into the Unconscious where it is bound to grow horns and a tail is the new age philosophy of ‘positive thinking’, which aligns the personality with an ego ideal at the expense of wholeness.

‘When the ego assumes that it is sovereign of the psyche, the gulf between conscious and the unconscious widens producing an increase of emotional chaos that shuts out understanding compassion and tolerance.’ ibid

The spiritual materialism of garnering the Old Man’s gold to the personality of Pot and Walking Stick is a form of pernicious magic because it attributes the power of the unconscious to the ego ideal making it insensitive, immoral, greedy and power hungry in the process. A good example is the misuse of the ideas contained within ‘The Secret’, a best selling book whose fundamental message, that gratitude generates abundance, was almost entirely distorted by its readership into the notion that you can manifest whatever you want if you give it enough attention. Such use of perennial wisdom for personal gain is tantamount to a regression into the infantile omnipotence of ‘wishing makes it so’, which not only concretises the persona making further growth impossible but generates a kind of god-almightiness capable of perpetrating all kinds of wickedness in the world.‘

‘The gods have become diseases. Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but rather the solar plexus and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting-room or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics upon the world.’ Carl Gustav Jung.

On this Remembrance Sunday, and as a Veteran myself, I cannot help but reflect, not only on the sacrifice of the dead, but upon the way in which the inglorious servants of Empire filled the minds of fresh faced youth with archetypal notions of valour and glory, each one made Wotan’s Siegfried for the sake of making the rich more powerful and the poor more destitute. It’s said that if all the dead lads from the Great War were to file past four abreast it would take a full five days for the column to pass by. And why? So that fat men in expensive suits could carve up the third world like a plump turkey. Was that not wicked? Was that not a psychic epidemic let loose on the world? The watchword of Remembrance is ‘never forget’, and yet we have just slept through COP26, dozing with gustation’s after dinner nap while the Forests burn, while Skies choke, while Children die of malnutrition in Yemen and Madagascar for the sake of the Dow index and Corporate tax bonuses. Is that not dark magic? Is that not disastrous appropriation of the Old Man’s gold?

31st October, All Hallow’s Eve

There was once a man who had three sons all of which wanted to get married . Their father decided to set them a task, saying that whoever could bring him the most beautiful flowers would be the soonest wed. The two older lads already had brides-to-be in the village and between them they quickly produced beautiful garlands.

The youngest had no paramour as yet and set off into the dark forest despairing of how to find any bouquet worthy of attention. In the depths of the forest he found an ancient crone all gnarled and horrible who lived in a frightful cottage which wandered about the forest floor all by itself on rotting chicken legs.. She asked him why he despaired and so he, being unafraid, told her his story. She quickly rustled up the loveliest bunch of flowers and he easily won his father’s favour once he returned home.

The older brothers were peeved and begged their father to set another test, which he did saying that whoever could produce the most beautiful handkerchief would win the right to marry first. The two elder sons quickly got their sweethearts to crochet intricate designs and again the youngest wondered forlornly into the dark wood not knowing what to do since he could not sew a stitch and knew of no-one to help him. Again the ugly old lady helped him, again he won the day and again his father set a further test, ‘bring me your fiancés, the loveliest will win the right to marry first.’ This was easy for the older sons but the youngest still had no-one and once more he wandered into the dark forest not knowing where to look or how to proceed.

The ugly witch took the young lad into her loathsome cottage and told him to light a fire. ‘When the fire begins to spark, each spark will become a witch, each uglier than the last. Do not fear. When the ugliest of all appears with a bunch of keys between her teeth, grab them in order to prevent the other witches from tearing you apart. This the lad did, not flinching as each witch appeared. When the ugliest of all come out of the fire with the keys between her teeth he grabbed them and suddenly all the witches were transformed into beautiful maidens. He chose the most beautiful who was, of course, the ugly witch who had helped him throughout. He took her home to his father who blessed them and announced the wedding.

People often ask, ‘what is shadow work and how do you do it?’ The most important thing is to disabuse oneself of the prejudice that there is any such thing as a negative feeling. Our hero wins through because he is not put off by the ugliness of the ancient crone. He accepts her and relates to her as he would any other. The two older sons have much more comely companions but they are both from the same village, already part of an established persona, so they cannot enrich the young men in the same way as does a venture into the unknown of the dark forest.

This venture into the forest is a journey into the depths of oneself where all kinds of difficult situations are survived so long as you refrain from judging the figures encountered as ‘negative’. How can you work with the shadow if you are prejudiced against it? If you try and dismiss or suppress it?

You cannot engage in shadow work whilst simultaneously attempting to run through thought and feeling deemed as negative with your trusty sword. In fact there is nothing more likely to get you turned into a frog, dividing the psyche against itself and entrenching inner conflict.

This unfortunate notion that you should combat ‘negative emotions’ is no more than an invitation to suppress and feel guilty about yourself without enquiring into such experiences or asking how they may have arisen in the first place. The precondition for all psychological healing is that all the feelings/ thoughts/ memories associated with past traumas/difficulties find some acceptance and validation. There simply is no recovery without the compassionate tending of rage/despair/pain. The suppression of oneself in the name of ‘being positive’ is a form of tyranny leading to the shallow and provisional of absurdity of Monty Python’s Eric Idle in ‘The Life of Brian’ singing ‘always look on the bright side of life’.

More seriously, feelings are intimately connected to values. They always..

‘bind one to the reality and meaning of symbolic contents which in turn impose binding standards of ethical behaviour from which (we are otherwise) only to ready to emancipate ourselves.’ CG Jung

If you suppress the ugly witch for the sake of a sunnier self image you also forgo the associated values which enable you to live well. At the root of anger you invariably find the reality of injustice which can then give rise to an instinct for fair treatment. Beneath jealousy there invariably lurks memories of being unloved, which, once accepted, can then expand your capacity for love. Beneath feelings of inferiority there often lies recollections of having been shamed which, once explored, can give rise to a truer sense of self-worth.

The trick with ‘negative emotion’ is not to expunge it but to take your jackboot off its neck. If you can withstand the sparks from the fire and not be afraid of the ugliness in your inner world then that which you ordinarily prefer to burn at the stake will give you the keys to personal transformation. We forget that the worst exigencies of human wickedness are invariably perpetrated by those convinced by their own moral rectitude.

The best defence against enactments of evil is to get acquainted with all those aspects of oneself which lie outside the easy homogeneity of village life, which defy the riteous self image of being ‘good’, which accepts oneself warts and all… Hence the need for Halloween; the opportunity, if only for one day in the year, to identify with the not-so-nice, the malefic, the dreadful, a spontaneous collective expression of psychological hygiene which aspires to the humility of wholeness rather than the tyranny of perfection.

A story from Japan tells the tragic tale of the diligent man who had a terribly lazy wife. She was so lazy that he had to do absolutely everything on her behalf. One day he had to go away for a few days. He was really worried about this, concerned that she would fail to feed herself. So he devised a plan and cooked a donut shaped loaf of bread which he then put on a string and tied around her neck. Several days later when he returned he found her sat in the same chair he left her in, stone dead, with a single bite out of the donut loaf which was as far down as she could be arsed to reach her mouth. He let out a howl of despair, exclaiming ‘if only the string was a little shorter..!’

For what purpose is this story told? Is the moral simply that you can’t take responsibility for others if they are determined to destroy themselves? Or does it go deeper? It’s tempting to focus on the psychopathology of the lazy wife, to wonder about her self destructiveness and what might have been underlying her refusal to help herself. Yet you have to wonder about the husband and what his deal might be despite the less obvious disturbance. On the face of it he just wants to help, right? He was diligent and hardworking so how could any fault be laid at his door?

In ‘Memories, Dreams and Reflections’, Jung describes an encounter with just such a diligent man, a guru in fact, reputedly without stain or blemish. Jung describes stalking this man like a bloodhound for four days in search of some sign of his shadow side which he simply could not find and was ready to abandon his theories,… ‘until I met his wife’.

The diligent man has a hand in his wife’s laziness. His ‘If only’ makes him seem even more diligent than he already appears and yet garnering all the dynamism in the couple to himself really has contributed to her death. His ‘if only’ is a further bid for omnipotence whilst washing his hands of the fact that the donut loaf he made may as well have been a millstone to drown her in his own self fulfilling prophecy.

Parents often do this with their kids, making themselves into paragons of virtue, whilst the children carry the shadow for them and subsequently fail at school or get themselves in trouble with the law.

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” CG Jung

One of the standing jokes in the village I grew up in was that the kids of the minister and his wife were out back of the club house getting hammered whilst the children of the town drunks were polishing the church candlesticks.

This damaging dynamic of ‘if only’ is almost as pernicious for those who survive it as it is for those who do not. The reason for this is that as soon as you indulge in ‘if only’ your fate immediately lies beyond your own grasp. You are no longer the captain of your ship. Personal agency is undermined by the idea that life has to be a particular way in order for it to be fully lived. I would be happy if only xyz. My marriage would be a success if only s/he would do abc. My career would be satisfying if only my boss was etc… ‘If only’ makes victims of anyone who utters it.

Not only can I do nothing to help myself. I need do nothing, for it is the world which has to change and not me. Lurking beneath the victimhood is the arrogant inflation and moral conviction that I have not contributed anything to my situation. What’s holding me back has nothing to do with me. I need not examine my own soul. My conscience is pristine. I need not evolve. It’s up to the Universe to get in line.

Most of us have a whole raft of ‘if onlys’, which both cosset and justify misery, making individuation impossible. The absolution of any responsibility for your situation means there’s nothing to be done. Your fate is set in stone. Everything lies outside you. Wishful thinking is not just a waste of time. It stops you growing.

One of the favourite ‘if onlys’ has to do with having more money and often, more specifically, the ‘if only’ of winning the lottery. The lottery industry is a multi billion dollar affair worldwide and preoccupies much of our collective imagination. Who has not spent great swathes of time in discussion about what you’d do with the money and how it would seemingly make all your dreams come true? And yet you have to ask why it is that lottery companies never use their winners to advertise their product beyond the honeymoon, cork popping, hand over of the outsize cheque.

Once you begin to follow up the lives of all these lucky folk you begin to realise why. Their lives invariably descend into chaos with ubiquitous stories of divorce, addiction, mental breakdown, murder and suicide. Why is this? Why should you be careful what you wish for? Perhaps the simple answer is that life is not meant to be handed to you on a plate. We just don’t value what we haven’t worked for, but more pertinently, even if our ‘if only’ is realised, its still all about what the ego wants for its own self-consolidation which means that what life would otherwise have had in store for us cannot be realised.

‘Unlived life does not sit idly on the shelf, it will turn round and bite you.’ ML von Franz

When connection to the Self is broken it gets antsy. Hence the advice of the I Ching to maintain an ordinary life for as long as possible. The alternative is a conditional life in denial of the fact that you already contain within you everything needed to realise your essential nature.

In the story of the Golden Fleece, the last impediment to the goal is the Dragon-who never-sleeps, curled around the roots of the tree in which the fleece is hung. I wonder if this devouring monster is not precisely the voice of ‘if only’; the regressive, self pitying, poisonous force which continuously attacks the hero/ine with seductive fantasies of somehow deserving a ‘better’ life, anything other than this shitty life, which then of course consumes the quest inches from its accomplishment. If only weed were legal. If only the government weren’t such bastards. If only I had a better job, better parents, more opportunities. If only I could get so-and-so into bed, if only I had no acne, if only I were a little taller, thinner, better built. Every one of these is a dragon’s tooth sewn into the earth of our being which then rises up to attack and disable even the bravest and most noble.

There was once a poor woman who had a single son. One day she returned home to find he had gone. Little did she realize that he had been spirited away by Devils who had taken him down to Hell where they made him work and slave in torment for seven long years. After his time was up they assigned him seven rooms for himself to clean and dust and sweep. In the seventh room was a magic lock in which lived twelve more Devils. He worked and worked on the lock until he freed it from its chains, then tucked it under his shirt and escaped home to Mother.

When he arrived home he sent Mother to the King to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The King laughed out loud when he heard all this, though humoured her by saying, ‘If your son can uproot the forest which surrounds the village so that not even an acorn remains, I will agree.’

The young man barely flinched when told of the task he must perform and set off at dusk into the forest with the lock. When he got there he turned the key and out came the twelve Devils to whom he gave the necessary instructions and by morning the forest was gone.

The King was impressed but had further conditions. ‘If by morning you can replace the forest with a fine field of green corn, I will agree…’ This was no problem for the lad who again instructed the Devils to help him. Once more he went to the King who set him a third and final task. ‘If by morning you can make me road of diamonds leading up to the palace lined with trees full of birds, the Princess shall be yours..’ By morning it was done and so the King was compelled to keep his word. The young couple were married and went to live in a spanking palace rustled up by the Devils.

One day the Prince went out hunting. In his absence an Old Witch approached the Palace shouting up that she had new locks for old… The Princess didn’t know about the magic lock and swapped it for a brand new shiny one… Suddenly their new home became a tumbled down shack. When the Prince returned he went to the King and told him everything. The King advised him to go and visit Old Mother Moon who was a hundred years old. She would know what to do.

Old Mother Moon couldn’t help though she gave him a dog and sent him off to see Old Mother Sun who was two hundred years old. She couldn’t help either, though she gave him a cat and sent him off to see Old Mother Wind. Old Mother Wind likewise shrugged, gave him a mouse and sent him off to an island in the middle of the churning sea where an even more ancient crone lived. He did as he was told and though it was a hard journey, they eventually arrived where the dog, mouse and cat conspired to steal back the lock. With a turn of the key all are safely home and, yes, live happily ever after.

The idea that you could be summarily carried off by Devils is as old as the hills. People in ancient times were suitably afraid of such possession which could grip both individuals and whole communities alike without reference to their upstandingness or moral rectitude. Even before early Christian preoccupation with baptismal protection against unclean spirits the ancient Greeks practiced the deliberate evocation of ‘daimons’ which possessed participants in the Eleusinian mystery schools and in the Bacchic rites of Dionysis. The oracle at Delphi made her pronouncements under the influence of daemonic possession as do Tibetan Buddhist oracles. In Islam these entities are called ‘Djin’ and in the Talmudic tradition, ‘Shedim’. In earlier societies practicing shamanism, demon possession and abduction was sufficiently feared to necessitate the extensive use of protective amulets and tattoos.

In a 1969 study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, spirit possession beliefs were found to exist in 74 percent of a sample of 488 societies in all parts of the world. I wonder if the others simply considered themselves too ‘sophisticated’ for such things, behaving..

‘like some one who hears a suspicious noise in the attic and thereupon dashes down into the cellar, in order to assure himself that no burglar has broken in and that the noise was mere imagination.’ CG Jung.

Modern depth psychology understands this phenomena in terms of autonomous complexes which really do have the power to overwhelm consciousness and carry it away. We even say, ‘I got carried away,’ and ‘I don’t know what got into me’. Worse still you find yourself saying things you don’t mean. I once gave up an argument with an ex for lost when she suddenly blurted, ‘you are always out with your friends!’ The irony was that I was a stranger in a foreign city where I knew nobody and had no social life whatsoever at the time.

”Complexes delight in playing impish tricks. They slip just the wrong word into one’s mouth, they make one forget the name of the person one is about to introduce, they cause a tickle in the throat just when the softest passage is being played on the piano at a concert. They bid us congratulate the mourners at a burial instead of condoling with them. They are the instigators of all those maddening things which are attributed to the “mischievousness of the object.” CG Jung

Invariably, the autonomous complex has an attitude contrary to consciousness, compelling it to behave all kinds of ways anathema to the ego’s intentions. You know you shouldn’t have another chocolate eclair but find yourself eating it anyway. You know smoking will kill you but have to light up nevertheless, pulling on the fag without pleasure and putting it out with disgust, wondering why you bothered with it in the first place. Collectively we elect leaders that crush us and give away our wealth to corporate billionaires who have no real use for it. We poison the air we breathe and destroy the environment we rely upon to sustain us.

‘Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes’. What is not so well known, is that complexes can have us. The existence of complexes throws serious doubt on the naïve assumption of the unity of consciousness and on the supremacy of the will. C. G. Jung

In our story, the hero is compelled to serve his Devils for seven years. He is in the grip of his complex and lost to the world of adapted reality. At the end of this time he is given seven rooms and is made to serve himself in their maintenance. In other words he manages to find some space to reflect on his situation and perhaps to wonder about how he got himself into such a mess. His attitude changes. He is no longer a victim. The magic lock he finds in the seventh room is something to be parried with and puzzled over rather than an inhibiting, proscribed fate which lies in the hands of others. The twelve Devils it contains are entities to relate to rather than forces to vainly suppress. Our hero renounces his narcissistic assumptions about the primacy and omnipotence of consciousness and gives the Devils their due. He acknowledges their power and thus frees himself from their malign influence. He transitions from the naive assumption that the unconscious is what he know of it, to the more mature realisation that he is not the master of his own house.

At this point in our story the Devils become helpful. A complex is not simply negative or destructive. It is only made so by the adversarial attitude of a dismissive ego. Having set his relationship with the Devils in better order our hero is now in a position to propose to the Princess which suggests a very different dynamic between the ego and the Unconscious. The King, as the dominant structure in the psyche is none too keen on this because it means the end of an old order, transformation which will cost him his crown, though having witnessed our hero being helped by the Devils to clear the forest, plant the corn and forge the diamond road, he gives way and helps the hero to find his way to the ancient crone who has stolen the magic lock.

The journey taken by the Prince, with his cat, dog and mouse helpers is synonymous with the individuation process. Our Prince, having addressed the contents of the personal unconscious, must now journey into the archetypal territory of the Great Mother, pursuing the magic lock as a talisman of the Self.

‘The via regia to the unconscious … is not the dream, as Freud thought, but the complex, which is the architect of dreams and of symptoms. Nor is this via so very “royal,” either, since the way pointed out by the complex is more like a rough and uncommonly devious footpath.’C G Jung

Fortunately for our Prince, he now has helpers which help him secure the lock, symbolising the reality of the fact that ego is unable to do this for itself, having to rely on redeemed aspects of the psyche to perform the final ‘theft’. Complexes wrought into a more conscious relationship become the equivalent of helpful spirits. From the life denying, imprisoning agents of Thanatos, they become the new life promoting servants of Eros.

We find this idea more explicitly stated in Grimm’s ‘Spirit in the Bottle’, much commented upon by Jung in his ‘Alchemical Studies’, where the spirit firstly wants to eat up the hero but then gives him a magical cloth which both heals wounds and transforms base metal into silver once the protagonist enters into a dialogue with it. This theme of the devouring complex become helper is also present in the story of Aladdin’s lamp. The ‘genie of the ring’ aids the recovery of the lamp which has been inadvertently swopped for a new one by the sultan’s daughter and spirited away, necessitating a transformational journey of forty days and nights into the wilderness which the hero could not possibly manage on his own.

These metaphors are important because they point symbolically to the means by which our afflictions may be redeemed, not by any amount of trying to be ‘positive’ which is simply more of the ego asserting itself, but by entering into a dialogue with the Unknown.