Blog

Once upon a time there was on old king who had two sons. The king was so old and sick he could not leave the castle. One day, from a window, the old King spied a magical bird atop a steeple which then flew off into the forest. Filled with longing, he asked his youngest son to go and fetch it. The Prince happily set off and spent the day searching the forest.

When darkness falls the Prince built a fire. As he sat warming himself a Fox approached the camp. The Prince sets his dog on the Fox but before any harm could come to him the Fox turns the Prince and his dog to stone.

When the younger Prince fails to reappear the older Prince is then sent to find out what has happened to him. He too finds himself in the forest and lights a fire. Again the Fox appears but this Prince greets him kindly and offers him something to eat.

Jung identifies two distinct ways in which people habitually relate to the Unconscious. One way is to identify with it utterly and to become inflated as we saw in the last blog, ‘The Pig Bride’; an old king loses everything by simply subsuming himself to the desires of the Pig, by abdicating his personal responsibilities and inhumanly sacrificing his daughter.

The second way in which we habitually deal with the Unconscious is quite the opposite, to pretend it doesn’t exist. This denial of the Unconscious and the scrambling to re-establish the Persona which follows is symbolized in our current fairy tale by the younger Prince who chooses to kill the Fox rather than negotiate anything with him or suffer his intrusion. Aliveness is thus petrified. The fructifying potential in the Unconscious is cut off and so the Prince becomes benumbed and transfixed.

This Prince is identified with his Persona. He can be told nothing new. He knows everything there is to know. His is a world of ‘first and only’. Everything outside the purview of his personal bubble is irrelevant, so he lacks curiosity…

and caution.

Such a man tends to sneer at the world because anything which doesn’t immediately concern the Persona is deemed irrelevant, mock worthy. In fact the maintenance of his Persona may require him to degrade and vilify others, which means he is unprepared for the possibility that the Fox might be more than his match.

Jung notes that Goethe’s Faust exemplifies this denial of the Unconscious…

‘Towards the Beyond the view has been cut off; Fool—who directs that way his dazzled eye. To roam into eternity is vain! Thus let him walk along his earth long day; Though phantoms haunt him, let him go his way, CW7 p472

The foolish Prince is oblivious to anything in the Psyche which is non-ego and so he has nothing to look out for until it turns him to stone. Indeed he lived ‘happily and without a care in the world’ until he gets zapped. His refusal to look beyond his own hide bound concerns is his fatal undoing…

Keep to the narrow round, confine your mind, And live on fodder of the simplest kind, Mephistopheles in Goethe CW7p475

Its interesting to note that the operation of evil in Goethe’s epic, Mephistopheles, is intent not upon leading Faust astray, but upon keeping him fixed to what he knows, to his Persona. His efforts are aimed at keeping Faust’s nose to the grindstone such that a soulful life may never develop in the first place, let alone that it might be lost. In the process the problem of good and evil fade away. They say that the Devil’s greatest trick is to pretend he does not exist.

The mischief, then, lies neither with the collective psyche nor with the individual psyche, but in allowing the one to exclude the other. Jung CW7 p481

The older brother in our story is not so hampered by the blinkered narcissism of his sibling. In his own travels he seems to have learned that life is complicated and so when the Fox appears he can think beyond his own assumptions sufficiently to be circumspect. He takes the Fox’s power seriously and so engages its co-operation. As soon as he is offered warmth and food the Fox turns into a young man who promises to help the Prince find the mysterious bird which, he says, resides seven lands away in the gardens of the Red King.

Eventually they arrive at the palace of the Red King. In the center of gardens they find a Pear tree and in that tree nests the magical bird. The Fox warns the brother not to bite any of the fruits in the tree for that will alert the guards but of course he does and is dragged before the Red King who offers him an alternative to summary execution. He is to find and abduct a Princess in a castle at the edge of the sea and bring her to the Red King. The older brother accepts the challenge and the Fox pledges his support…

‘Again you took the difficult task. I won’t let you do it alone. You were good to me, unlike your brother.’

Prince and Fox journey together. The Fox has solutions for every hazard they encounter. Eventually they find the Princess, who is not too keen on the idea of marrying the Red King. So the Fox transforms himself into a stunning bride for the occasion, escaping during the festivities to rejoin the Prince and Princess who are slowly making their way back home. On the way the Fox transforms the younger brother back from stone. When they all return the older brother gives the magical bird to his dying father who is then youthfully restored.

Jung identifies several ways in which the Persona may be freed from it’s stony encapsulation. These methods are personified by the actions of the more mature Prince. Firstly, he refrains from setting his dog on the Fox. In other words he avoids the mistake of having only a single knee-jerk point of view and accepts the non-rational to his fire side.

‘The human psyche is both individual and collective. Its well-being depends on the natural co-operation of these two apparently contradictory sides.’ Jung CW7 p486

When the Fox tells the Prince that the magical bird he’s looking for lies seven lands away and suggests they go in search of it, he’s inviting him to pursue a set of allegorical symbols, in other words, a fantasy whose contents are beyond the horizon. The Prince has to go off piste on the understanding that the symbol..

‘acts as a signpost, providing the clues we need in order to carry on our lives in harmony with ourselves. The meaning [of the symbol] resides in the fact that it is an attempt to elucidate something that is still entirely unknown or still in the process of formation.‘ pp492

Thirdly, the older brother has developed a sense of relatedness. Whilst he values the Fox and is prepared to go along with him on the symbolic quest to find the Red King and subsequently the Princess, he does not abdicate his own moral ground in the process. When he finds out that the Princess is unwilling, he does not force her despite the fact that this may well incur the wrath of the Red King and stymie his efforts to return to his own lands with the magical bird.

‘He who does not possess this moral function, this loyalty, will never get rid of his neurosis. But he who has this capacity will certainly find the way to cure himself.’ pp499

When the Prince finally returns to his own lands with the magical bird, the treasure hard to attain, it rejuvenates the old King. The magical bird is a symbol of the transcendent function, the synthesis of consciousness and the unconscious, which, like the Grail, has the power to reanimate and bring fresh meaning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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