Blog

The Jealous Type.

Jealousy is not about love.

‘The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.” CG Jung

it looks like its about lurve,

but it frikkin’ ain’t.

Love is about people. Jealousy is about me.

Dj’am sayin’?

Jealousy is about me not getting what i want when, when, when, that udder fukka, him getting aaaaaalla good stuff.

Bastard.

someone else is getting someone else….

Or, someone else is getting what I want, which is someone else, soon to be something else..

When you feel jealous its a sign your intended has already become ‘stock’, to be bought and sold..

like a bitch.

When you come across a situation marked by jealousy you will nearly always find that its just the latest in a great pattern of events, a mere bead on a long string of….

tales.

Jealousy is not just a feeling.

It’s an attitude to life….

Which is why you get ‘jealous types.’

Jealousy is their ‘modus vivendi’.

Start as you mean to continue…

They see the world in general and people in particular as extensions of themselves, there to serve/nurture/provide. Should the other, reduced now to a mere function, fail to comply…

‘Dere gonna be trouble….’

and wander off…. doing something unscripted..

like,

Talking to someone..

or strollin’ off to the otherside of the supermarket in search of oyster sauce…

or havin’ too much chat with the cashier…

Brian, 67, overweight and balding: a bloke, and a bit whiffy at that…

gonna be trouble, mon.

I have a friend who owns a shop. He works at his trade whilst simultaneously selling his wares and entertaining customers. He is always busy, busy, busy. When I go in we talk while he works….. and sells…. and entertains…

Within minutes his wife storms in hands on hips, quivering with fury… eventually you just have to leave…

It looks like an accusation of loafing, but the man is a font of productive labour… his hands don’t stop….

ever.

The problem is me…

And the fact he’s so delighted to see me.

Now it looks like jealousy..

but it ain’t that neeva.

my presence has caused him to behave as though he were no longer her prosthetic limb…

Ooops.

He’s… acting autonomously..

OMG!

like a leg that just suddenly decided to dance across the room by itself…..!

You are not being what you are supposed to be.

You have breached your existential remit.

To be what I need you to be..

And nothing more.

The narcissist and the jealous type are first cousins..

of the kissing variety.

and, maybe more…

There’s something inevitable about their tryst.

the reason is that the narcissist has identified with their own ideal and therefore has to split off their dark brother, the shadow, to achieve this end.

They reject and project…

the undiscovered self.

And so the other, in quite a real sense, truly is an extension of themselves…

to be fascinated with..

for as long as the projection holds…. the jealousy will remain.

When the other asserts beyond doubt their autonomy, or the projection is withdrawn, jealousy slides into sour grapes..

and everyone goes home.

never really fancied her…

The end of jealousy has to do with renouncing ownership.

of course the ‘jealous type’ would rarely admit that. Their’s is a noble sentiment..

You’ll never guess what she did next…

It’s about love! and feeling.. vulnerable…..

fearing betrayal…

you bastard.

which is why jealousy is so hard to address.

because there’s sooo much ‘poor me’…

whilst panelbeating the shit out of everyone in range with a 4 pound lump hammer.

So, the narcissist actively picks people like you and me, who are such hard work, because there’s endless opportunity to bewail the fact that we are off doing our own thing.

And so what’s so great about being regarded with eternal suspicion?

No, its a real question.

What is the deal with you hanging out with jealous types?

Oh., poor me, I didn’t sign up for this… I was only trying to help…

Bollocks.

Could it just possibly be that ramming someone’s insane, irrational, selfish shit back down their stupid throats is just toooo good an opportunity to pass up?

Ok, you’re the boss.

Enjoy.

 

Polymorphous Perversity

Yes, its a real thing.

‘The ability to find pleasure in any part of the body.’

clearly in need of chemical neutering….

According to Freud, a young child is, by nature, “polymorphously perverse” (Introductory Lecturs 15.209)….

which is to say…..

‘that, before education in the conventions of civilized society, a child will turn to various bodily parts for sexual gratification and will not obey the rules that adults determine……….’

So, a spontaneous and irrepressible delight in the world…..

no, don’t tell me..!.

can it be that bad…?

Some adults retain such polymorphous perversity, according to Freud.

thank fuck for that.

Only now, unfortunately, ensconsed formally into the annals of science and medicine, is the final betrayal of the child whose words, or cries, will now officially not be believed and moreover, whose claim of abuse will itself be considered a symptom of illness……

Because when Freud renounced his Trauma Theory, which said that kids are driven crazy by their parents….

parents didn’t like it.

And parents were society.

So he came to the opposite conclusion as quickly as was decent to do so, without an Edwardian eyebrow being lifted too high….

which they liked better.

namely, that children fuck themselves up.

oh yes, that’s what I meant…

I remember now…

And so for a hundred years or more there has been built into the law of the land, via expert witnesses in autopsy, medicine and psychology, who, true to their training, consider, as a default point of reference that a child making a complaint is both lying and disturbed.

Its not just that Freud regarded his patients in such a poor light…

He came just in time to mark the end of a long process of disenfranchisment of the child. The quality of relatedness that the divine feminine once brought to life is lost along with the Great Mother and increasingly the child is unheld and unsafe.

When my twelve and a half year old son was asked by a court official where he wanted to live and he said with his father, this was taken to mean the opposite of what was said because the child couldn’t possibly know his own mind….

and so he was taken away…

during which time he went from am A grade student to a failing student….

and had to harm himself to get the authorities to sit up and take notice.

Apparently, at this, our pinnacle of evolution, kids don’t know what they want, don’t speak the truth and haven’t got their own minds. They are considered to be so stupid that you can’t open a window in the classroom on a hot summer’s day, in case one of them absent mindedly falls out…

…or maybe a whole clutch of them would suddenly make a mad dash for the window, and launch themselves at it…

…spilling

and falling

like Lemmings onto the concrete playground below..

stupid children.

So stupid, bottle tops come with instructions, ‘Twist’! Salt comes with a serving suggestion, a packet of peanuts warns of the possibility that the packet may contain nuts and that Harry Potter broomstick in the toy shop bears the legend,..

..”does not actually fly”.

That’s not evolved. That’s a deeply regressed, collectively depressed state with all common sense and faith in the other wrung out of it.

And so Narcisissim and OCD are not just defences, but consequences…

because ‘polymorphous perversity,’ is actually required for artistic and creative expression. Its containing of the chaotic processes that creativity and artistic expression involve. If you can take equal pleasure in whatever the world/mother has to offer, then you mind it’s inclement weather a little less and can play with what’s at hand.

But if you don’t get comfy and taste everything, then that unlived life becomes cold and vengeful, like a spurned lover.

”Unlived life does not sit idly on the shelf, it will turn around and bite you.” M L von Franz.

And so if our kids aren’t given the basic credit of being able to top a strawberry without supervision then how are they to get comfy and experimental and curious about everything?

And if we then don’t live life out to the last drop, challenging all kinds of sacred cows in doing so en route, we actually invite not just boredom and apathy on ourselves but fully fledged neuroses.

Give me the polywossname any day.

 

 

Shame and the lost Goddess.

Guilt is for what you did.

Shame is for what you are, or what some discovery has ‘revealed’ you to be. Shame can seem ineradicable, like some base line of identity.

in yo’ bones.

Darlene Lancer bought out a new Utube video on shame and co-dependent relations.

http://www.whatiscodependency.com/

She draws our attention to what a wrecker shame is in relationships.

Shame is generally about failing, being-a-failure.

But life is full of failing.

Actually,

” If youre not failing you’re not trying.” Chris Bonnington.

The impulse to grow and change impels us into situations which are difficult by necessity. There has to be a chance of not making it for it to be worth striving for in the first place.

So, as well as being, ‘thrust into multiplicity,’ (Hillman) we can fold in the face of it and be thrown back.

And people’s lives in respect of their private endevours are full of failing..

-or ought to be –

let alone their lives together.

And if we can’t fail without excessive shaming of ourselves, or allowing ourselves to be shamed by others, then we are unlikely to try very hard in the first place.

Don’t try, can’t fail, no shaming.

Of course, there is also the teensy issue that the whole of Western Civilisation has as its cornerstone a story of shame and being cast out. Right from the start, ‘Thou Shalt not Fail’.

or be conscious..

Our dominant culture is rooted in shame. And so we can’t learn how to fail, or find the value of confusion, the magic of not-knowing, or of having to.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”. T.A. Edison

Many of our more philosophical enquires are likewise rooted in shame-avoidance and fear of failing. Even the question, ‘what is the meaning of life?’ is itself run through with the assumption that whatever it is, it is something I have to grasp or attain.

Something to be understood by the mind,

a quest which must fail…

With the erosion of the divine feminine from the collective imagination we must, perforce, sacrifice the Principle of Relatedness as part of the deal. This means that compassion for and accepting the inevitability of failure, something a mother might convey to her child with a simple look, becomes increasingly lost to us.

We have to know who we are, where we are going and have all kinds of definite  beliefs.

To demonstrate our maturity.

And no-where, in any of that, is their any reference to Mystery.

Unless its to surmount it…

No encounter with the Ground-of-Being.

And loss of the internal relatedness wherein I might get to coach me…..

……as me crashes and burns.

There’s a couple of square miles in the Chiltern hills I know so well that I can walk around them for hours at night without a light. Badgers don’t like torches.

Sometimes I do get lost. But I learned from my feet that the part of me which felt lost and didn’t like it, wasn’t as big as the part of me that was lost and didn’t mind, that was ok with pressing on regardless, perhaps in the faith that some landmark would eventually emerge from the dark.

Failing to know where I was from one moment to the next became less important than the encounter with forest.  And because I was ok with being lost I was never lost for long.

You might say that there has had to be this sacrifice of belonging, once intrinsic to our ancient polytheistic selves, in order for consciousness to evolve, but in fact what it seems to have given rise to is co-dependency rather than individuality. To individualism, a cult of persona, rather than actually standing apart from the crowd.

On your own two feet.

What divine kingship knows, whispered perhaps down the backstairs of Yahweh’s Chambers to those early kings; epoch spawning kings… Jacob, David and ‘ol Neb’…..

way back….

is that its greatest strength lay not in the fealty of the people but their being seductively offered the path of least resistance, having to acheive nothing  provided they are loyal….

ashamed of failing and therefore easily led…

If we can’t fail we can’t learn, and wind up with ‘a cult of ignorance.’ Isaac Asimov…

We lose the capacity to compromise and therefor must come adrift in our relationships.

If the psyche is self balancing then you wonder, what the deal could possibly be for the ordinary, cheering person, who will likely be shamefully squeezed in perpetuity by the very monarch he’s praising, or sent to die in wars that having nothing to do with the fighting men involved.

Could it be that this era of divinely appointed monarchs, supposedly a necessary adjunct to the evolution of consciousness, is simply the collective implimentation of Yahweh’s original promise to us all of an easy life – by acting out the coniunctio, the sacred marriage, and doing it ‘on behalf of the people’… so that the people don’t have to do it for themselves. Which is why they cheer so loud…

an’ take so much shit.

The shame is worth not having to do anything about it.

The Tar Baby.

Brer Fox hated brer Rabbit.

Hated him real bad.

Hated him so much that aaaal he could think about was how to nail ‘ol brer Rabbit.

So he came up with a plan. He would build a baby made of tar, knowing that when brer Rabbit came along his curiosity would get the better of him and he’d stick himself fast.

‘An it would be all over for brer Rabbit.

So he built the baby of tar and turpentine and set him up beside the road waiting for brer Rabbit to come along.

By and by brer Rabbit strolls down the track.

”Morning”.

I said, ”Morning…”

”You deaf or jus’ rude?”

Brer Rabbit gets easily riled you see and within a moment he’s steaming at the silent tar baby.

Only a matter of time before he clouts the tar baby and gets his paw caught .

Then he hits him again and, you guessed it, soon he’s completly stuck fast.

Brer Fox rolls out of the bushes killing himself laughing.

”Got you this time brer Rabbit!”

But while he’s rolling about brer Rabbit is thinking fast…

”Oh please, brer Fox, do with me what you will but don’ throw me in the Briar patch!”

”I’m gonna cut you up and boil you for breakfast!”

”Oh, anything, so long as you don’ throw me in the Briar patch!”

”I’m gonna skin you and wear your pelt for a hat!”

”Mercy, just so long as you don’ throw me in the Briar patch.”

”Gonna make your bones into porridge!”

”Anything but the Briar patch!”

Then brer Fox hesitates and muses a bit..

”Tell you what,” he announces triumphantly, ”it’s the Briar patch for you!” an tosses brer Rabbit right in.

Brer Rabbit uses the briars to unstick himself and races off laughing loudly.

”I was born and bred in the Briar patch brer Fox! born and bred!”

Narcissistic Brer Fox also suffers from an obsessive compulsive disorder. His whole meaning-construct is about tormenting brer Rabbit into carrying his inferiority.

Not catching, outwitting and humiliating.

Outwitting brer Rabbit is all he thinks about. His den is a mess, he’s thin and mangy and there’s no sissy Fox on the horizon.

He lies awake at night fantasizing about how he, clever brer Fox, will one day be the talk of the woods. He’s what Nassim Nicholas Talebe would call ‘fragile’, he only has one string to his bow.

And therefore only one way of doing things.

And because he has idealised himself and is unconsciously identified with one aspect of life he is compelled to operate from a highly restricted perspective.

So he reacts rather than responds…

… according to the sole injunction, ‘do whatever hurts brer Rabbit most’, rather than, ‘do what suits me best.’

His compulsive need to enviously attack brer Rabbit robs him of his breakfast.

And because his one and only sacred task is to revenge himself on his dark brother he is unable to self-reflect. There is no inner dialogue whereby I might say to me,

‘hang on a minute, what’s going on here?’

‘Why is brer Rabbit so insistent?’

‘ What is the deal with Rabbits and Briar patches?’

And of course, he unconsciously knows what will happen but is compelled to let it happen because if he finally ate brer Rabbit who would there be to carry all his shit?

Brer Rabbit’s different, he is what Talebe calls ‘anti-fragile’. And that doesn’t just mean he’s tough. It means he has options and thrives on complexity. Brer Rabbit can talk to himself. He’s able to have an inner discussion about the pickle he’s in because he’s not overly identified with just one corner of the psyche.

And so he can play adversity to his advantage.

He’s gained his inner flexibility by having a confrontative encounter with his own shadow symbolised by the tar baby, the dark brother. Its deflating. He has been caught with his pants down after all. But the encounter enriches him by opening up internal channels of communication between I and me.

An’ so he can get outtada pickle.

Brer Fox has less inner dialogue. Being is lodged in this one thing in his life. He is bound to be resistant to change.  By and large, the goal of many helping professions, particularly at the behavioural end of the spectrum, is to ‘relieve’ him of his symptom.

But that’s all he has….

So he hangs on like grim death.

It would be much better, instead of trying to cut the only string he has to his bow, to help him realise that his obsession has to do with the poverty of his inner world. It is about not being fed in some way. He then might let himself be depressed about the limited options this eventuates and see his idealised self-construct as compensation for the restricted way in which he has thus far lived.

And of course if his culture had not been so foolish as to cut itself off from the nourishment of the divine feminine responsible for relatedness then one thin, gloriously idealised slice of life’s pie, will be all you’ll get….

excep’ you not him therapist.

He might then realise that his envy of brer Rabbit is justified. Brer Rabbit really does have greater internal flexibility than brer Fox and actually represents brer Fox’s own potential.

When envy can be named and allowed, it is free to grow into admiration for the other that can then be emulated and alchemicaly transformed into inner possibility.

Brer Fox’s negative transference on Brer rabbit might then be resolved.

‘An so him can find pleasure in tidying him den….spruce him fur…   an’ follow on de trail of sissy Fox.

Booyakasha!

Freud’s Ratman.

Freud’s thought can be divided into two utterly distinct phases and the transition from the one to the other has had an impact on our culture which has been profoundly underestimated. Up until 1896 Freud believed that psychological disturbance was created by childhood abuse and the repression of the associated memories. His views were rejected.  He  renounced his insight and said instead (in his Drive Conflict Theory) that children became disturbed because of their own inability to handle real life.

One of the most famous of Freud’s cases was called the ‘Ratman’, commonly studied in many psychotherapy trainings. It’s a psychoanalytical room 101. The appeal is Freud’s enthusiasm for this patient, who exemplified his substitute ‘Drive Conflict’ theory. The bizarre nature of the case is bound to titillate the voyeur in us all.
In brief, the poor Ratman was terrified of rats. His particular fear was of rats being strapped to his behind in a cage and left to gnaw their way out through his anus. His fear stemmed from childhood after a nanny had encouraged him to view her genitals.

Freud’s view was that the Ratman’s ‘eroticized’ phobia was a symbolic expression of castration anxiety should his father find out ‘what he had done’ and what Freud felt he wished to do again, a desire which resulted in him suffering from ‘the vicissitudes of sexual curiosity’ (Freud 1991). Students invariably swallow whole the cleverness of modern psychology’s father/king without blurting out the obvious; the Ratboy had been sexually abused.

Imagine the public outrage if someone stood up in a modern court claiming they had ‘allowed’ a prepubescent child to view their genitals? Imagine it then being given as expert opinion that if the child had a bad reaction to this exposure it was simply because the complicit child was afraid of being caught and punished. The court would erupt. Yet this is what Freud suggested. How is this possible? This poor child was betrayed by a carer in ‘loco parentis’. How had the reality of his abuse been denied?

Sexual abuse of children is deeply psychologically damaging. It can destroy the quality of a person’s life. It has a catastrophic impact on a child’s self-esteem, ability to relate and express feelings. It also profoundly affects the capacity to make emotional commitments in later life.

Rewind.

On the 21st April 1896 a young Sigmund Freud stood up before the collective might of the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna and read his paper, ’The Aetiology of Hysteria’, a clear formulation of the part parental abuse plays in the disturbance of childhood.. It was met with total silence. In the days that followed Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Flies, ‘the word has been given out to abandon me and a void is forming around me.’(Masson1992). What had happened? Why had his paper met with such hostility?

What Freud had so bravely done was to confront polite society with its own shadow. He argued that childhood abuse was at the root of later neuroses. The Society were appalled. Madness was caused by parents. By them.

It did not take long for Freud to realize what he had provoked. ‘I am as isolated as you could wish me to be,’ (ibid) he complained to Flies. In private and among his remaining colleagues he began to recant. By 1905 he made a public retraction. This, despite an intervening period as an intern at the Paris morgue where he saw evidence at first hand of the brutal rape and murder of children, ‘of which’, he says in private letters, ‘science prefers to take no notice.’ Soon, Freud himself was turning a blind eye until by 1925 he was able to say, ‘I was at last obliged to recognize these scenes of seduction had never taken place. They were only fantasies..’(ibid)

Neuroses were now due to an individual’s inability to resolve inner conflicts. Freud capitalized on children’s tendency to blame themselves for the ills that befall them.

Freud turned his theory around entirely. Any charges of abuse now reflected the child’s failure and were themselves construed as neurotic symptoms. The symbol and pedigree of this utterly revised theory of neurosis was the ‘Oedipal Complex’. The story is twisted to imply Oedipus wanting to sexually possess his mother, the Ratman to sexually possess his childminder and the battered corpses in the Paris morgue to possess their murderers.

Freud stumbled on the threshold of midlife, failing to stand by his convictions and endure the censure of his peers. He succumbed to the self-preservation that would ensure his social standing, his professional career and his income but sacrificed his earlier theoretical framework which supported the reality of child sexual abuse.

Fast forward.

I think what happened was that the Ratman had no-one to mirror back to him the truth of the abuse he had suffered. ‘And so’, to paraphrase Alice Miller (ibid), ‘he lost sight of it himself’. His experiences of intrusion were repressed. They became symbolized in the dramatic set of images characterizing his case. They were split off and relegated to a future possibility, preferable to his past reality but still gnawing at him from behind.

We are used to dreams containing symbols representing and poetically expressing the issues with which we struggle. Sometimes these spill over into frightening fantasies, waking dreams which give us clues about the origins of suffering. But why sexually violent rats? Why not locusts or fire ants? There are all kinds of tortures the Ratboy could have fixed upon. Freud doesn’t explore the meaning of the symbol.

The trick with symbols is not to be too clever or to assume, with Freud, that they are intent on concealment. Symbols are a language with a purpose like any other, to communicate as clearly as possible. They are problematic because they occur when consciousness is turning a deaf ear. Both the Ratman and Freud shared the same problem. Neither of them could face how the patient had been sexually molested, aggressively intruded upon by a plump, furry thing that awed and frightened him.

When Freud renounced the theory which had made him so unpopular with the Viennese and substituted one they liked a lot better, he effectively excluded adult influence from the causes of psychological disturbance. The roots of madness were then intra-psychic rather than inter-personal. Issues of madness and sanity were no longer about Relatedness. Parental impact on childhood was reduced to the workings of the ‘super-ego’, which, throughout his writing, always seem beyond reproach. It is ‘’ what is highest in the human mind’’ (Freud 2001). He uses the term interchangeably with ‘ego ideal’. If there is a problem regarding ego formation this is put down to the unruly child.

The Ratboy was doubly betrayed, first by his nanny and then by his analyst who, because he had renounced his Trauma theory, couldn’t validate the reality of the boy’s subjective experience or help him through it. His new and much more popular theory suggested if children haven’t wholly imagined the abuse then they must have at least been a party to it. This meant that the adult in the equation could be vindicated whilst the wicked child was left in unacknowledged anguish not unlike poor Oedipus whose father had tortured and abandoned him.

Victorian values.

The Victorian age could be characterized by the denial of sexuality. It was an era when ladies fainted at the sight of a chair leg. This denial was at the level of ordinary, healthy, ‘’normal’’ sexuality. What then of sexuality which strayed from this norm? Male homosexuality was a criminal offense at the time. Female homosexuality in England was not criminalized but only because Queen Victoria refused to believe that there was any such thing as a lesbian. If homosexuality ‘dared not speak its name’, or simply didn’t exist, what of sexuality which was clearly deviant?

Husbands were allowed to rape their wives as their ‘conjugal right’ and could beat them too without fear of prosecution or conscience. Child rape was rarely if ever prosecuted successfully. In Austria at the time it was punishable by one to three months imprisonment. What were the chances of speaking openly and candidly about the abuse of children? Society simply refused to do so, denial reflected in the fact that the age of consent was as low as twelve for many years.

Freud’s wildly successful contribution to science was paradoxical. His ideas were so challenging and revolutionary in daring to talk about sex at all, yet permitted society to continue denying their worst secrets. He made it acceptable for society to talk openly about sex, which must have been a relief; yet denied truths a grateful public could not face, which must also have been a relief.

Freud’s theory is the West’s neurotic solution to its own alienation from the body, its erosion of the Continuum. It opened up sexuality for discussion but only by sexualizing children. He managed to dovetail his theories with the otherwise insurmountable contradictions of an age determined to adopt both an attitude of unquestionable moral superiority and a set of thoroughly dehumanizing attitudes to children.
As soon as he ‘discovered’ infantile sexuality Freud was immediately and heartily endorsed by fellow physicians. They too were clever enough to see the Emperor’s new clothes. Believing in things because we want to, rather than because they are there, is something rather common. We do this out of the fear of chaos inherent in any change, especially wholesale paradigm shifts and so we resist change accordingly.

People believed the earth was flat for a long time after it was circumnavigated. The belief that the sun revolved around the earth persisted for generations after Galileo proved otherwise and the need to believe in witches lasted for centuries backed up by all kinds of incontrovertible ‘evidence’.

We have all experienced presenting someone with undeniable evidence of something which is rejected when it is at odds with a treasured belief. A Jehovah’s Witness once tried to convert me with promises of an assured place among the 144,000 chosen in Heaven. I pointed out there were more than that number of Witnesses already and therefore my conversion was no guarantee of a reserved place. He simply wouldn’t accept the logic. He accepted the facts but refused to put them together.
What Freud offered us, persuasive enough to have lasted for over a century, is the opportunity to maintain the belief in our own psychological sophistication whilst being relieved of the burden-some facts of childhood vulnerability. We lapped up his paradigm as eagerly as our ancestors believed in dragons and ice giants. To let his theory go means to raise once more the specter of child abuse.

Ironically, Freud himself shed light on this negation of childhood suffering in a paper that he wrote 30 years after his ‘discovery’ of infantile sexuality. Occasionally the reality of the inner world bursts through the mask of the false self in the most unlikely and unusual ways.  And so we find Freud himself produced a succinct little four page article entitled ‘Negation’ (1925), in which he states,
“In our interpretation, we take the liberty of disregarding the negation ….. To negate something in a judgement is at bottom to say ‘this is something which I should prefer to repress’. A negative judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression, its ‘no’ is the hallmark of repression ….. Thus, originally, the mere existence of a presentation was a guarantee of the reality of what was represented.”

Freud could have applied these thoughts directly to his own negation of the reality of childhood suffering and its consequences for adult life. This seems not to have crossed his mind. Perhaps this paper of his was as close as he could get to admitting what he had done. Perhaps the fact that it has taken so long to come to light is as close as we can get to acknowledging our complicity.

The One Ring.

The genius of Tolkein was not simply that he told a ripping story but that he managed to tap into a rich vein of collective meaning for our time.

A divided, dangerous world in which Power has momentarily eclipsed Love….

Even our spiritual journey can wind up being about ‘gaining’, possessing, wanting the knowledge, rather than the humble journey to return that which is not ours to wield and to make our peace with mystery.

The inheritance of Western Civilisation is an anthology of inflation. We are collectively narcissistic. We crave power and wealth. More than that our society identifies with its God to such an extent that we can impose our freedom on others at the point of a gun without contradiction and subjugate them for their own good.

Doin’ them a favour, innit?

Well, they carn’t govern their frikkin selves, hey?

Moreover we oppress the inner voice of soul because it will not come to heel and refuses to be relegated to the status of an artifact.

And so our aloneness is complete.

The other is ‘nothing but’…

“All modern people feel alone in the world of the psyche because they assume that there is nothing there that they have not made up. This is the very best demonstration of our God-almighty-ness, which simply comes from the fact that we think we have invented everything – that nothing would be done if we did not do it; for that is our basic idea and it is an extraordinary assumption.” CG Jung.

I knew someone who had a terrible rash on her chest and neck that looked like a great burn mark. She scratched at the torment of it endlessly. By and by she spoke of a dragon she dreamt of over and again, some ‘part of her’ she had to ’embrace’. My comment was that trying to integrate a dragon that actually had its own life in the depth of her Psyche would likely result in all kinds of rashes and burns.

Her task was not to ‘integrate’ but to say hello from a safe distance.

The rash improved and she got more humble.

an’ had an inna other….

When a person imagines that the psyche is whatever they know of it and that the Unconscious is ‘nothing but’, then narcissistic strutting and all kinds of symptoms are not far away.

And for as long as the Ring is fought over, for as long as the Unconscious is something we just want to own like jewelery, then love and relatedness suffer. The artery through which love flows will be constricted and the streams of Psyche’s internal dialogue will become clogged.

Despite such cholesterol of the soul we think of ourselves as evolved….

….on the basis that evolution is somehow linear. And so..

we must be the finest and best.

job done.

Darwin and Freud had this in common, they both told Victorian society exactly what it wanted to hear. Not only are people not responsible for messing up their kids, our very existence/survival is proof positive of the right to dominate and exploit.

The price we pay for this delusion is a narrowing of our capacity for relatedness. Either I wear the ring and am narcissistically identified with ‘the power’ and thus pre-occupied and unavailable, or you wear the ring and I become your thrall, romantically enslaved to the other.

This bastardisation of the Principle of Relatedness is very different from the subtle nuances of human affection known, for example, to the ancient Greeks who differentiated almost as many different types of love as the Eskimos have words for snow. Ludus, philia, agape, eros, pragma, philautia…

In our time the predominant models of romantic love and narcissistic love seem to culminate in the culture of ‘Bling’, where persons are both idealised as demi gods and then worshipped from afar. They, ‘have it all’, whilst our preoccupation with what is essentially a projection leaves us depleted and feeling worthless by comparison.

Imagine the folk of ancient times trying to grasp our fascination with bards and mummers!

The Ring and its relationship with Mt Doom is a mystery. Returning it as bearer rather than as owner is a real piece of psychological maturity.  Mainly, Western Civilisation has been about the revelation of mystery, uncovering it for all to see. The last book of the Bible even goes by that name as if to give additional emphasis to its contents. Its not enough to serve a higher principle. Above all we want to know and be shown.

We cannot know.

”Unpalatable as it may be… the idea of mystery forces itself on the mind of the enquirer, not as a cloak for ignorance, but as an admission of.. the inability to translate what s/he knows into the speech of the intellect” CG Jung.

But, we may press on to where Nature refuses to be surmounted by our own efforts.

 

 

Innana and Ereshkigal

Innana’s encounter with Ereshkigal is an encounter with numen, with divine presence. In the West there is the idea that transpersonal experience is just a kind of sentimental oneness where everything is just harmonious and wonderful.

with lambs..

ok

and bunnies

and enough facebook feed to keep you from pondering all the wisdoms on facebook.

but its not like that, mostly… and so

despite the fact that people want to grow they are also heavily invested in maintaining the status quo precisely because transformation has the kind of de-integrating, disorienting effect you might expect from bumping into a bear.

M.L. von Franz describes her response to the first dream she had that introduced her to the a priori nature of the Deep Unconscious, to Ereshkigal’s lair.

”I pulled my knees up under my chin and stayed in bed all day”

Mostly we think of the unconscious as derivative.

Stuff I’ve pushed down.

the rubbish tip of the psyche

But, actually Erishkigal was there before you…..

and when we refer to Archetypes its often as if they were no more than templates or tendencies. But they

are actually autonomous complexes.

They have their own life.

And they can scare the living crap out of you.

I had a client who repeatedly dreamt of a terrifying figure that chased her. After a while it seemed that, greater than her fear,  was the peevish sense that this character would not come to heel..

‘After all, he’s just a part of me…’

which is precisely the attitude he was trying to scare her out of……

….to wrestle away this grandiose fantasy that we can contain or ‘integrate’ such things. No, relations are simply improved…..

on the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic. ~Hazel Henderson.

The narcissistic streak in us says, ‘the psyche is what I know of it’, and places itself at the centre of the map. Its a belief that is just going to run aground at some point, whether its by the gnawing incomprehensibility of death or by way of a sudden careless glimpse through the  bars of ego’s playpen.

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.” Joseph Campbell.

An apocryphal story is told about Jung to whom a man had come in crisis.

”I’ve lost my wife and my job in the same week”, he wailed.

”Just wait here a minute,” said Jung and went off, to return with a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

‘What are you doing?” asked the poor man.

‘Celebrating this opportunity for you to reinvent yourself,” said Jung and poured them both a glass.

It’s precisely when we are pinned to the wall and all our normal strategies fail or are frustrated that the deep authentic response of the Self comes through and invariably by way of pain and not knowing.

After all, Jung would be the first to acknowledge, with the clink of lead crystal, that, ‘the experience of the self is always a blow to the ego’.

What does that mean?

It means that out limited personalities cannot contain the boundless life and must be repeatedly cracked open if we are to blossom.

And so a visit to Ereshkigal is Innana’s acceptance of her seasons, a living with anxiety, and participating in that which transcends them.

 

 

 

 

Forest Epiphany

Ereshkigal is a dark goddess from Sumerian myth, an archetype of initiation into greater consciousness to whom her sister Innana goes for renewal.

I had my first encounter with Ereshkigal when I was a young soldier in the Rhodesian bush war. We had been dropped behind enemy lines for a surprise attack on a ‘terrorist’ base camp which, with surprise on our side, we had won after a short but intense fire fight.

We then swept the terrain for weapons, documents, bodies..

I came across the man in a forest clearing. At first I thought he was dead.  Lots of blood. Then he opened his eyes and looked across at me. He was badly wounded but made no sound.

You just stood there staring back at him, silent, stuck between paradigms.

Forever.

He was silent.

Intensely, raging, terrified silence.

My training had been at the extreme end of the scale. I was guarding my dorm mates at boarding school with a lee Enfield 303 by the time I was sixteen. We took it in turns to watch over one another throughout the night in case we were attacked.

Terrorists.

We had night drills at school, crawling along darkened corridors, cursing.

Terrorists.

And armed convoys for a trip to town with mounted machine guns front and rear..

Terrorists.

And grenade screens on the windows and RPG proof blast walls so that rollcall could be safely held..

Alexander,Ball, Barber, Becker, Blick, Bradley, Brightenstein, Butterworth…

At night you could sometimes hear gunfire and the railway line was blown up.

Conn, Crow, Devilliers, Ellman-Brown, Fouche, Garvin, Graziola, Haynes…

I was drafted straight out of school, did special services training and was part of fireforce operations.

Henderson, Hill, Hjul, Horsley, Howden, Johnstone…

my job was to kill the enemy.

But try as I might the humanity and suffering of the wounded man lain there impressed itself on me despite lifelong indoctrination.

I didn’t know what to do. I had run out of rule book. I felt frozen to the spot. Unable to think or move.

After an age I jerked myself forward and had a look at his wounds. He was badly shot up. His eyes never left me as I examined him. It was as if they had teeth.

I called a medic over and began to patch him up. His eyes bored into me. I worked in silence. He had a ring on his finger. A green beryll stone set in silver. I took it roughly, then almost as quickly gave it back, embarrassed, confused, trapped.

The sargent came over to see what the hold up was and raised his rifle to kill my patient.

Stop him.

Call a chopper.

Patch up the injured man.

Finally I carried him over my shoulders to the DZ. When the chopper came I slid him in onto the cool metal floor. He looked me in the eye, took the ring from his finger and pressed it into my hand. ‘Datenda Nkosi.’ Thanks boss.

I never went back into battle again. One thing and another, including a long spell in Casualty, conspired to keep me from the field.

What had happened?

You met yo’ own dark brother, mon.

My analyst always did say I had a real gift for acting out. The main thing is not that I was brave and saved someone, I was brave and saved me.

But not without that brief eternity of suspension,

and being hung like a ham.

incoherant, body slaming, slow motion…

splintering….

shedding..

silence.

Enough to ask,

WTF?

When Innana descends through the seven gates to Ereshkigal’s lair she does so willingly but there is no doubt that the events happen to her in a visceral way. She’s going to feel victimised, humiliated and attacked.

Though she may be doing gladly what she must, it is also the experience of being destroyed.

There is ‘no-exit’ .

Death of the old which is still oneself.

A letting go and an act of will.

Violent silence.

The philosopher Karl Jaspers calls it ‘foundering’. When you have tried everything and failed,

when life brings you to your limits.

and the old way just won’t do anymore.

”Until the final question meets with the silence of fullfilment in which a person’s own essence can speak directly through the inmost self.”Koral Ward 2015

Its the moment when you face that a relationship must end, or that you must uproot yourself somehow without knowing where the wind will take you. Its going into the unknown with heavy heartedness or broken heartedness, sudden separation, the sense that you’re being reinvented without pre-approving the plan.

Czech analyst E. Dabrowski calls it ‘positive disintegration’, a breaking down of psychic structures that have effectively been outgrown, when values you’ve been living by crumble but you have no others with which to replace them.

….an’ it not jus’ some theoretical, beard stroking point for you to make mon, some arsy intellectual cocktail party piece.

I say…

Its switching off the automatic pilot and discovering you don’t know how to fly.

 

 

 

 

Descent to the Underworld

Inanna’s response to her dark sister is very different from the dark brother stories I have been telling, where the dark brother is betrayed or killed leaving the hero divided and incomplete.

Innana intuits that there is some need to visit Ereshkigal. Something in her doesn’t feel right. The adapted self may well have helped the personality through tough times…

but some way-of-being has become time worn or redundant.

Because its too narrow, constricting…

and yet its what she knows of herself,..

so the shedding of it can feel like death itself.

”The hallmark of the transpersonal is its capacity to act upon you” S.B. Pererra.

Innana’s tread into the Underworld is reluctant. Each garment relinquished at the successive gates are a wrench. Finally she is naked and her vulnerablity  is complete. But still she presses forward knowing instinctively that she has to face her sister.

”The truly responsible people of the world are those who accept the fact of their own nastiness, cruelty, things that co-exist with their capacity to love and construct.”D. Winnicott. 1958.

This is death to any conviction in one’s own riteousness. Unfortunately, the alternative is one form or another of narcissistic adaptation.

one that compensates for vulnerability rather than facing it..

It invites us to turn our backs on  ourselves in favour of ever decreasing circles of selfhood the maintainance of which soon chokes off aliveness.

”There is nothing more dangerous than a mild man.” C.G. Jung

And why? Not just because he is liable to project his shadow onto you, or some other neighbour…

but because he who is very determined to live out just a single corner of his psyche wants you to do the same. He’s not just shut down. He wants you to be shut down together. For your own good.

And so the politically correct solar hero becomes a narcissistic bully ramming his truth down people’s throats and sees no contradiction in promoting all kinds of fine ideals whilst preventing the deeper life inside himself and others from flowering.

I grew up in an extreme version of that world. The back end of Empire. Everyone was very polite and carried sub-machine guns. It was all exaggerated sunshine and bonhomie until you failed to respond correctly to a deprecatory joke or were somehow outed in your dissonance.

And suddenly the sunshine falters. You didn’t say the right thing, or use the magic words in the right order. And if you are not with us..

then you are against us..

And either way, growth grinds to a halt.

Thank goddess for Innana!

My sixteen year old son was mighty upset about some images depicting animal cruelty on his facebook feed. He went on and on about it, getting angrier and angrier. When he got to the point where he began making physical gestures demonstrating what he’d like to do to the people concerned I was able to point out that his solution was very similar to the problem.

Innana descends to Ereshkigal and has a mirror held up to her that kills the identification she has with her fine adapted ideals. Her sense of self is deepened. She’s initiated into her complexity and, to paraphrase Hillman, propelled forward into multiplicity.

Ereshkigal is also bought into increased consciousness by the encounter. The feelings she embodies are humanised and made more bearable. Suffering finds its context.

Paradoxically, Ereshkigal…

 gives special hope to those who come to her. She is able to encourage and sustain those who seek her certain solace precisely because of her darkness. Within the nature of her being, she holds the paradox: in and through darkness lies a fertile resurgence of life. ” -Cedrus Monte, The Dark Feminine

Innana and Ereshkigal need each other.

Sometimes things need to die. The trick is for it to be a symbolic death.

”If you are going to kill yourself, try not to harm your body.” J. Hillman

Something has to die and it feels like you but its what you thought you were….

And being hung on the meat hook of not knowing what happens next and not being able to do anything is precisely the ground that fresh consciousness needs to seed itself….

“We don’t cross into the ‘sphere of rebirth’ by power but by descent, by being swallowed.” Sue Monk Kidd

We are generally not very good with things that won’t be surmounted by our own efforts. Sometimes it seems as if our very integrity depends upon having the answers. But we are not healed by having answers. We are healed by providence  having asked the right kind of question.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”  C.G. Jung

The Dark Goddess.

It seems ironic, given how narcissistic our judeo-christian world has become, that most folk with an interest in Revelation think the last book of the Bible has just got to be all about them..

and their enemies…

over whom they will be victorious….!

Yay!

Whatever Revelation is about, it contains the casting out of Sophia/Wisdom, the ‘Whore of Babylon’ and the instating of the new bride, Israel.

Divorce court meets shotgun wedding….

with sundry colourful guests to both events.

Sophia was called the ‘Whore of Babylon’ because She and her supporters were sent in Exile to Babylon by uncle Neb’. So Babylon became her capital for a brief time while all the divorce papers were getting sorted..

Took about three millenia.

Sophia is cast in three pieces back into the sea. This is an archaic fragment of collective consciousness older than ‘In the beginning’,

before the fresh start..

Could these three ancient pieces of the goddess be the components of the Innana story? It would be poetic if it were true.

The classic response to trauma is to become split. This can typically manifest as an inner three way ‘mexican stand-off’, the traumatised self represented by Ereshkigal, the adapted self in need of self discovery and renewal represented by Innana, and the healthy self represented by Nishubar, Innana’s hand maiden who raises the alarm when her mistress fails to reappear.

Innana, the adapted self, is the part that’s developed strategies for life that might well work but may not be really ‘her’. These strategies are effective but not particularly authentic and so she has to re-aquaint herself with Ereshkigal who is a lot less PC but far more gutsy and real.

The problem is that Ereshkigal hates Innana, regards her as a lap-dog and a sell out, someone who is more interested in keeping the peace. To some extent her feelings are justified. Though she forgets what  Innana has endured in order to find a way of living above ground, in the real world, where Being seems like a constant process of costly negotiation.

Adapt or die.

an alla dat stuff, mon.

Ereshkigal might keep Innana captive forever if not for Ninshubar, the healthy self, who can pick up the phone, arrange childcare for the kids, leave messages and raise alarms. She has faith that Ereshkigal might still somehow be reached and Innana saved. She’s the one who intuits what to do and knows there’s help out there.

Enki’s little dirt helpers are the key, all those little acts of kindness and charity to our inner demons, or at least our unacknowledged less-than-perfect selves which can validate suffering such that meaning can be made of it.

“The original abandonment, the original abuse, the original horror has some reason and meaning in it. It is not senseless. It is not like being run down like a dog on the highway.” Clarrissa Pinkola Estes.

The encounter with Ereshkigal is uncomfortable, but she returns us to a more authentic way of being, one that is not so nice maybe, but one which feels like the real thing and is therefor worth its weight in gold.

Sometimes the only thing to do is to acknowledge our own limits and wait to see what happens.

One of the most memorable sessions I ever had with my analyst Chuck Shwartz was when I took him a whole bunch of archetypal dreams full of symbols and mythic encounters.

He listened to me reel it all off, nodded a bit, then said, ‘well, Andy, I haven’t the faintest what that is all about, but lets see what the literature says”, scooped a number of books off the shelf, pulled up his chair and we started leafing through them together.

What I remember is not this meaning or that, but one man’s simple willingness to acknowledge his limits so that I could, by extension, be okay with my own. It was a massive relief.