Despite his striking image there are few stories about the Green Man. He tends to show up in disguise as Pan or Cerrunos, Bacchus or Radergast. One story, ’Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, casts him in the role of a self-regenerating warrior who rides into the castle keep of Camelot, bursting in on consciousness, challenging all present to fight him, one blow in return for another. Gawain accepts and beheads the knight thinking this might slow him down a bit, but the Green Knight just laughs. He picks up his head and rides off saying they will meet in a year and a day when the blow will be returned but not so readily endured.

Gawain undergoes a series of trials, secretly set by the Green Knight himself. He arrives finally at the appointed hour facing almost certain death. But Gawain is spared. The Green Knight, it now transpires, is acting on behalf of King Arthur and has been commissioned, along with Morgan le Fay, a powerful witch, to test the honour and bravery of Arthur’s knights. Here, the Green Knight seems to be a psychopomp of the individuation process. He not only tests but also helps and has compassion for his charges as he oversees their development.

I had always thought of the Green Man as quintessentially British, baked into the folklore but it turns out not to be so. The reason there are so few stories about the Green Man is perhaps because he is actually an immigrant to the British Isles. The Green Man migrated from India via Iran in the second century, Italy, France and `finally aboard the boats of Norman invaders who decorated churches all over Britain with his image.

The stage for the Green Man’s debut in Britain was set centuries before he arrived and thousands of miles away at the battle of Actium 31BCE. This was a battle fought between Marc Anthony and Cleopatra on the one side who supported the old Roman republic and Emperor Octavian who preferred a more direct approach to government and subsequently became the first Emperor of imperial Rome, the first God-Man. Octavian changed his name to Augustus, the Increaser, hinting at a divine or sacred authority. He proclaimed himself son of the Gods and replaced their images on Legionary standards with his own. He was not simply in charge.

It was with this newly minted imperial mind-set that his grand nephew Claudius then invaded Britain, an invasion which was now idealogical as well as territorial. There could be only one man-god. Claudius’ subsequent persecution of the religious orders of ancient Britain is legendary. He sent his general Suetonius to eradicate all native spiritual practice which he did most efficiently, destroying sacred sites and killing all members of the druidic order at that time.

A thousand years of Dark Ages passed, during which time the Green Man was making his way slowly across Asia Minor and Europe, drawn by this massive wound to the British psyche at the hands of imperial zeal whose rooting out and purging of the old gods had been both ruthless and systematic. Nature abhors a vacuum. By quirk of fate and 1066 the Roman church then brought to Britain gothic art and the compelling images of foliate heads on the doors and eves of its cathedrals.

For another thousand years the Green Man waited in the vaulted ceilings and stone masonry of the church, making it home. Then, on the brink of the Second World War and the orgy of destruction about to unfold from the industrial mechanisation of our world, Lady Raglan wrote an article first using the name, ‘the Green Man’ in the magazine ‘Folklore’. This so gripped public imagination that the Green Man was widely if retrospectively adopted as a national figure, albeit one of 20thC folklore, a symbol nevertheless around which some hope for regeneration and the rewilding of our collective imagination might gather. The Green Man’s response to imperial destruction is what you might expect given his reputation for regeneration. He came back.

The Green man is a trickster. Not only did he manage to smuggle himself into Britain but he gets himself quietly adopted by a culture which then agrees he was always there. Moreover, he will insist on sprouting, sometimes in the most unlikely places and in the most unlikely ways but always in response to a need, a feeling of loss or fear or barrenness.

I wonder if the predominance of the Green Man’s image over actual stories about him of any kind isn’t testimony to how old he is, like the ice giants of Norse mythology or the Titans of Greek mythology. We have few details as such but more a sense of their energy and presence. The Green Man is elemental, unknown, save the disposition to surprise and delight, to restore and regenerate.

Whilst the Green Man is traditionally associated with seasonal cycles he is particularly connected to Spring because of this emphasis on regeneration, clinically relevant because it is really rather different from the idea of transformation. The Green Man could be thought of as a chthonic form of Mogenson’s ‘Dove in the consulting room’, to remind us that growth happens by itself once optimum light, warmth and soil are provided.

These different models find common ground in Hildegaard of Bingen’s ‘Viriditas’, latin for ‘greeness’, a dynamic principle of regenerative greening, a metaphor of life returning to an inhospitable inner land via natural processes which revitalise and invigorate, a response to difficult material surfacing in consciousness. Dream images of greening often herald new growth and change, the return of life, warmth, abundance. Simply being out in Nature is profoundly restorative, helping us connect with ourselves and underscoring what’s important in life, simple things and precious others.

The story of Pinocchio, a wooden puppet who aspired to be a real boy, was originally intended as a cautionary tale by Italian author Carlo Collodi. Disney’s adaptation made him a lot more loveable but he still retained the narcissistic traits flagged up in the original version. Pinocchio refuses to adapt to the world much to the distress of his conscience, Jiminy Cricket, and in sharp contrast to his to his otherwise fervent desire to become real.

Pinnochio’s regressive tendencies are personified by Cat and Fox who encourage his truancy from school. They also encourage him to explore the dubious delights of ‘Pleasure Island’ with its promises of endless gratification. There he allies himself with Lampwick a devil may care persona figure bent on self indulgence…

“Right here, boys! Right here! Get your cake, pie, dill pickles, and ice cream! Eat all you can! Be a glutton! Stuff yourselves! It’s all free, boys! It’s all free! Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!”

Unfortunately it all goes rather badly for them and Pinocchio only narrowly escapes being turned into a donkey by leaping blindly into the sea where he is swallowed by Monstro the whale, a Noah-like descent into the unconscious.

The story has strong moral overtones but more importantly it seems to represent something more than the fate of naughty boys. It is rather a developmental stage through which we must all pass with connotations more persuasive than the injunction to be good and with implications of profound import for our current political climate.

The utter shambles unfolding in America, the sexual sleaze of Epstein’s Pleasure Island, the cover ups and distractions, all have a way of evoking moral outrage from the rest of the world which, unfortunately, render us hamstrung in any attempt to explain the meaning of such corruption. Indignation, righteous as it might be, has a way of arresting enquiry into how the Trump phenomenon managed to unfold in the first place or what it might be which motivates either his inner circle or his MAGA base. The descent into autocracy cannot be explained from the moral high ground and we are left with reasons which seem insufficient, such as the desire for personal enrichment or the entrenchment of jobs and position. Their fawning puppetry demands deeper analysis.

During Trump’s canvassing for his first term he held a town hall in Iowa which he began with the question, ‘how stupid are the people of Iowa?’ This insult to the audience of proud Iowans was received with thunderous applause. Narcissistic co-dependence is typified by this kind of enabling. One of the most insidious reasons for this is the fervent conviction held by the abused that appeasement is the precursor to redemption. If only I try harder, wait long enough, humour sufficiently, demonstrate endless patience, the other will change and grow. Such beliefs are no less pathological than the abusive behaviour of the narcissist themselves. Both are deeply rooted in magical thinking.

When Pinnochio lies his nose grows. He’s genuinely surprised about this because he is not yet a real boy who can tell fact from fiction. He is still at a developmental stage which cannot distinguish fantasy from reality or recognise the sovereign status of others. This is no mere lack of empathy but determined resistance to the kind of conscience which, unfortunately, attends the very maturity and becoming-real he otherwise desires. Jiminy Cricket spends most of the story getting battered and bruised.

When Trump is trolled as Diaper Donny, the implications of such mockery have yet to be elucidated. If he were to be given a polygraph test during one of his forays from the truth he would pass with flying colours. He doesn’t lie, he just can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. He’s still at the developmental stage where if he says it then it’s so, which is the original meaning of ‘abracadabra’, from the Aramaic, ‘I create as I speak.’ The threshold of wishing-not-making-it-so has yet to be crossed. He’s not immoral but pre-moral. The lies are not ‘post truth’. They are pre-truth.

The problem with becoming a real boy is that it’s attended by both conscience and consequence, by the deflating limitation of the rule of law, by grief laden loss of entitlement and specialness. He and his sycophants fight as hard as they do because a great deal more than position and power are at stake. They might also lose preferred identity. The choice is not a happy one, the belly of the whale or the prospect of being turned into a donkey.

Pinocchio’s redemption is to be able to connect to someone/something greater than his isolated and encapsulated self. In the belly of the whale he discovers Geppetto, his creator, whom he saves and in the process ‘dies’ to his old self by being brave and unselfish. The transformation of narcissism tends to be this dramatic, involving a death and rebirth motif presided over by some kind of spiritual insight/illumination.

This is made difficult for us all if those in our orbit have a vested interest in promoting the grandiosity of narcissism’s false self. From this point of view the problem is not the narcissist themselves but their enablers. And why, you might ask, does anyone support the strutting of the wooden despot? Because it relieves everyone else of the burden for their own growth. The narcissist is both the saviour and the problem child all rolled into one, someone upon whom both our potential and the shadow can be projected which means we need not take responsibility for either.

The easy life, the American Dream, entails having someone at the helm who is a mix of god and devil. When the world dances in the streets at Trump’s passing, which is not too far away, they will already have forgotten how much he has been necessary to our collective equanimity. The same senate who murdered Julius Caesar for wanting to be an Emperor happily ratified Octavian to that same position only a few years later.

A long, long time ago, way before you were born, way before machines, tarmac or income tax, there was a fisherman who used to paddle his wickerwork coracle out onto the lake where he lived at every full moon. On this particular night the moon was low and heavy, there was not a breath of wind and the coracle floated without effort into the night. After a while he set his line and waited, knees drawn up under his chin, wolfskin pulled down over his shoulders to ward off the cold. He waited and waited and waited. The coracle bobbed ever so gently on the still surface. His mind wandered…

All of a sudden the line snapped taught and the coracle tipped forward into the dark water. The fisherman quickly looped the line around one hand and braced his feet against the wicker as the small craft was pulled about. He tried to balance himself, leaning back so as not to have the coracle be swamped by surging motion, his heart now racing to the struggles of his hidden prey.

Just as it seemed the boat would be pulled under, a mighty Salmon burst out of the water towards him, arcing through the dark sky, moonlight glittering across its thousand silver scales as it slammed into his body. He tried to get a hold of it. Just for a moment he managed to grab it by the gills and the tail, just long enough to look into its yellow eye, just long enough to see its yawning mouth, just long enough to hear it whisper sweetly, ‘hello darling man, would you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman dropped the salmon back into the water as though it had bitten him. It slipped away and disappeared in an instant. He shook himself and yelled at the rippling wake by way of trying to assert he was somehow still in charge of events, ‘Are you mad? You are a fish! I am a man! Come back here …!’ But the salmon was gone.

The fisherman did the best he could to gather his wits. He told himself he must have imagined it all, or been bewitched perhaps. He set his line again by way of trying to organise his thoughts and soon recomposed himself. But not for long. Once more, just as the waters’ surface had regained their calm, the huge fish burst skywards, knocking the poor man clean off his feet and into the lake.

Though winded and suddenly freezing in the cold waters, he tried to grab at the fish, getting all tangled up together in the line which now seemed more like endless tresses of silver hair. With one hand he tried to hold her whilst clawing for the edge of the coracle with the other. The salmon wriggled against him, almost teasing him, her mouth gaping close to his ear, ‘hello darling man, would you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman spluttered and choked, struggling for coherence, ‘I, you.. what? No!’ And so the fish took him down, line, rod, and man, down down into the inky waters, until his lungs felt as if they would explode… ‘and what about now my darling? Would you be my sweetheart now?’

He tried to fight her. He tried to swim for the surface. He tried to speak, life bubbling out through his beard and up through the swirling mass of hair and flailing limbs. As consciousness dimmed he felt vaguely aware that she had wrapped arms around him, drawing him down and down, ever deeper into the cool dark depths of the lake.

The moon gradually disappeared from view as they sank, though it was not entirely black as you might imagine. Eventually they reached the silty bottom, landing softly and with exquisite comfort in the soft ancient mud. Being dead didn’t seem so bad after all. She held him gently, caressing his face and nuzzling his neck. He put his hands on her waist and then around her, holding her to him. ‘ And now, darling man? Will you be my sweetheart now?’

He thought about it for a bit. Being dead seemed to make quite a difference to how he felt about everything. It seemed not such a bad idea after all. ‘Okay, I will,’ and with that she gathered him up and swam strongly along the bottom, gradually rising up and up until they reached the surface and the edge of the lake where they found themselves in a sandy sheltered cove. There they rested and made gentle love together till morning.

When the fisherman woke he found she had been busy and built them both a rather lovely cottage with a garden and out buildings. A table had been set in the garden with breakfast things and coffee brewed on a fire. Their first child cooed and burbled in his cot. As the fisherman ate the child grew and then there seemed to be another and then another. For an age they dedicated themselves to the lives of the children. Eventually seven sons all shot up like weeds, grew beards and left home one by one, leaving the old couple with hoar frost heads, bodies bent, and just as they came to their last…. there was a mighty jerk on the line and the fisherman woke with a start, the coracle rocking wildly in the water.

The fisherman cursed himself out loud for falling asleep, trying to cast the seemingly stupid dream from his mind as he struggled to regain control of the line. The coracle dipped dangerously in the water and he had to lean back all he could to prevent the craft from being swamped.

As he held on, bracing himself in the wickerwork, the images of his sleep swirled about inside him, insisting themselves, scoring into his memory and imagination. He struggled against them as though against some hated enemy, desperately trying to reassert himself. He needed to keep his small boat afloat, to land his catch and have something to show for his efforts by morning. Mouths depended upon him after all. There would be hunger and recriminations should he fail. So he held on with all his might when suddenly a great fish erupted from the dark waters and careened, flapping wildly, straight into his body. They both fell to the bottom of the boat where he struggled to hold onto his prey which now fixed him with it’s yellow eye as he held her close and whispered, ‘hello darling man, will you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman is seeking something. He’s not sure what. Something to feed himself, something to keep body and soul together. The concept of seeking is central to many spiritual traditions, though what it actually means is not so obvious. Is it simply a matter of casting out your line and hoping for the best? The contemporary Christian tradition of ‘seek and ye shall find,’ cast in your line and something will surely bite, is rather different from the original version. This was found in the Gnostic book of Thomas, recently discovered at Nag Hammadi, unadulterated by two thousand years of kings and pontiffs with axes to grind and populations to keep in line. In Thomas this line reads, ‘He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All.. (para2)

Why will we be troubled and amazed? Perhaps the answer to this is best expressed by Rumi in the Sufi tradition, ‘ What you seek is seeking you.’ The divine is not just sitting there waiting to be discovered. It is actively engaged with us, trying to draw our attention to a greater reality than that bound by ego consciousness. Sometimes this is by visiting upon us the most difficult and painful situations in order to bring about the new perspective.

On the entrance lintel to the Oracle at Delphi are carved the words, ‘Know thyself’. This had a rather different meaning to the ancients than it does for us in modern times. We tend to think of self knowledge as shadow integration, having a good grasp of the darker corners of the personality. Back in the day ‘mind’ or ‘self’ was equivalent with the entirety of the Psyche and so knowing oneself really implied having a relationship with the inner ‘Other’ which transcends ego awareness. ‘The Spirit of the Depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being.’ (Jung p232 Red Book)

This understanding helps us to grasp the symbolic meaning of what is often referred to in the literature as ‘ego death’. The western tendency to think concretely has stopped more than a few in their quest for spiritual progress because they imagine their egos have to be eradicated in the process. Nothing could be further from the truth. We need healthy egos to withstand the impact of self-realisation since the experience of the self ‘is always a defeat for the ego’ (Jung Mysterium para 778)

When we become aware of the ‘Spirit of the Depths’ it challenges and reconfigures the constructed identity we spend so much time trying to maintain and stabilise. This leads to the humbling and even painful realisation of how superficial and one dimensional life has been thus far. A sacrifice of ego-as-centre-of-the-psyche has to be made. The death is not that of the ego per se but of its primacy in the psyche. The ego is no longer that around which everything revolves but is itself a satellite of something more fundamental. ‘The Spirit of the Depths said: “No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction; sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come.(Jung p230 the Red Book)

The ego is then compelled to realise it is not master of its own house, but a servant to a greater power. The ‘death’ is that of the illusion that the psyche is what I know of it. The birth is that of realising that we don’t know the half of it, in the face of which mystery we can only stand in awe and wonder.

‘The Spirit of the Depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child: This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.’ (ibid p234)

Once the fisherman can renounce wanting the Salmon on his own terms he is introduced to an experience of life’s purpose he could not previously imagine. His life becomes simple and dedicated to the child(ren). Of course, once in a while, he lapses back into what Kierkegaard would call ,’the despair of wanting to be oneself’, the fantasy that he is isolated and separate. Perhaps there is purpose in such despair, to be reminded once more that, ‘even the enlightened person remains what s/he is and is never more than their own limited ego before the One who dwells within, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses on all sides, fathomless as the abyss and vast as the sky.’ (Jung, Answer to Job.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the role of symbiotic omnipotence in the narcissistic character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It was a Lion,’ replied the Mule.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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