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.

Here are two stories which exemplify narcissistic and borderline personality structures respectively, looking at their similarities and differences. We’ll begin with the stories themselves, then at a suggested common origin and finally how their divergence from one another shows up at the developmental threshold of symbol formation.

The Two Old Friends.

There were once two old friends who lived on different sides of the mountain. One of the old friends decided to go out into the forest to see if he could find some nuts but all he found were oak apples. He thought he’d go down into the village and try to sell them anyway. Perhaps some idiot would buy them.

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

Half way there the two old friends bumped into each other. It seemed best to be pleased at the meeting so they clapped one another on the back and boasted a bit about how wonderful life was on their respective sides of the mountain. Finally they came up with the brilliant idea that they would swop sacks and save themselves a journey down into the village which, in any case, surely did not merit being graced by their presence. So each returned home chuckling about how they had outsmarted the other.

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

”I never could cheat you brother!’

‘No, and I never could cheat you….’

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

One old friend lowered the other old friend down into the well where he filled up his sack with gold but not to the brim. He knew full well he would be left behind if he sent the gold up first so he left room for himself and climbed in after. Sure enough, once the gold was hoisted up, the old friend set off at speed, unburdened by conscience and with no more thought for the other old friend until the latter popped his head out of the sack, thanking him for the ride. The old friend was so exhausted from all this effort of carrying both gold and man he set down to rest and soon fell asleep whereupon the other old friend shouldered the gold and slipped away.

When the old friend woke and found the gold missing he connived a cunning plan. He tied a thread to a stick and cracked it like a whip as though leading an ox and cart. He knew the other old friend was lazy and would wait for the prospect of a free ride. Sure enough, around the bend of the lane sat the other old friend with his thumb out. He was so tired from his exertions that he had fallen asleep with all the waiting. So the old friend now took back the gold and ran all the way home, telling his wife to hide the gold in her wooden chest and bury him in a shallow grave so that the other old friend would think him dead. 

When the old friend arrived he was shocked to find the weeping wife, then suspicious, but also moved by the woman’s tears. Perhaps he was a bit upset himself now and so they wept together long and hard for the demise of the old friend. Then the old friend asked to see the other old friend’s grave to pay his respects. The clearly hasty arrangement of things aroused his suspicions once more and so he began to make sounds like an angry bull about the mound of earth until the other old friend cried out in fright and leapt up from his pit.

Don’t tread on me, my old friend will find me.!

I found you already old friend..

”I never could cheat you old friend!’

‘No, and I never could cheat you….’

The old friend shook the earth from his clothes and the other old friend dusted him down while his wife dragged out the gold and divided it evenly between them all.

……………………………………………………

Snow White.

Our second story, Snow White, has a different kind of splitness and fragmentation.

A Queen sits sewing on a winter’s day in her ebony framed window. She pricks herself on the finger and three drops of blood spill onto the snow, ‘oh if only I had a child as white as snow as red as blood as black as ebony wood.’ she sighed. Within a year it was so and a princess was born as white as snow as red as blood and as black as ebony wood. Sadly the queen died. The King married again, a proud and vain woman who soon hated Snow White and wanted her dead. The Queen had a magic mirror which she would ask, ‘Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of us all?’ And each time the mirror would reply. ‘Thou, oh Queen, are fairest of all.’ One day she asked it and it spoke differently..

”The queen was fairest yesterday,
But Snow-White is fairest now.”

She ordered a huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and kill her, bringing back her heart as a token. But the huntsman let her go out of pity. He returned with a boar’s heart instead which the Queen promptly had Cook prepare with parsley and a light balsamic glaze. Once she had cleansed her pallet she again went to the magic mirror and was astounded to hear it tell her..

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

The Queen disguised herself as an old peddler-woman and went to the dwarves cottage, crying: “Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap.” Snow-White called out: “Good-day, my good woman, what have you to sell?” “Good things, pretty things,” she answered; “stay-laces of all colours,” and she pulled out one which was woven of bright-colored silk. “I may let the worthy old woman in,” thought Snow-White, and she unbolted the door and bought the pretty laces. “Child,” said the old woman, “what a fright you look; come, I will lace you properly for once.” But the old woman laced her so quickly and so tightly that Snow-White lost her breath and fell down as if dead. “Now I am the most beautiful,” said the Queen to herself, and ran away.

In the evening, the seven dwarfs came home and saw Snow-White lying upon the ground. They cut the lace, and she began to breathe a little, and by and by came to life again. When the dwarfs heard what had happened, they said: “The old peddler-woman was no one else than the wicked Queen; take care and let no one come in when we are not with you.”

But when the wicked witch went back to the mirror it answered as before…

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

So then she made a poisonous comb and took the shape of another old woman. She went over to the seven dwarfs cottage, knocked at the door, and cried: “Good things to sell, cheap, cheap!” Snow-White looked out and said: “Go away; I cannot let anyone come in.” “I suppose you can look,” said the old woman, and pulled the poisonous comb out and held it up. It pleased the girl so well that she let herself be beguiled and opened the door. When they had made a bargain, the old woman said: “Now I will comb you properly for once.” Poor little Snow-White had no suspicion, and let the old woman do as she pleased, but hardly had she put the comb in her hair than the poison in it took effect, and the girl fell down senseless. “You paragon of beauty,” said the wicked woman, “you are done for now,” and she went away.

When the seven dwarfs came home they found Snow-White lying as if dead upon the ground and at once suspected the stepmother. They looked and found the poisonous comb. Scarcely had they taken it out when Snow-White came to herself, and told them what had happened. Then they warned her once more to be upon her guard, and to open the door to no one.

The Queen, at home, went before the glass and said—

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who in this land is the fairest of all?”

then it answered as before—

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

When she heard the glass speak thus she trembled and quivered with rage. “Snow-White shall die,” she cried, “even if it costs me my life!” Thereupon she went into a quite secret, lonely room and there she made a very poisonous apple. When it was ready she dressed herself like a peasant woman, and so she went over the hills to the seven dwarfs. Snow-White longed for the fine apple, but hardly had she a bit of it in her mouth than she fell down dead. Then the Queen gave her a dreadful look and said: “White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony-wood! this time the dwarfs cannot awaken you again.”

And when she asked of the looking-glass at home—

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who in this land is the fairest of all?”

it answered at last—

“Thou, O Queen, art the fairest of all.”

Then her envious heart had rest, so far as an envious heart can have rest.

The dwarfs made her a transparent coffin of glass, so that she could be seen from all sides, and they laid her in it. They wrote her name upon it in golden letters and took turns to watch over her.

One day, a king’s son came into the forest and was amazed to discover the glass coffin with the beautiful Snow-White inside. He begged the dwarves to let him have her, so struck was he by her beauty and had it carried away by his servants on their shoulders. It just so happened one of them stumbled over the root of a tree and jolted the coffin. The shock dislodged the poisonous piece of apple caught in Snow White’s throat and before long she opened her eyes and was once more alive.

“Oh, heavens! where am I?” cried she. The King’s son, full of joy, said: “You are with me.” And soon they came to be married with great show and splendour.

The Old Queen was invited to the wedding and when she arrived they were waiting for her. Iron slippers had already been put upon a roaring fire. The red hot shoes were brought over with tongs, and set before her. Then she was made to put them on and dance until she dropped down dead.

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Fairytales as diagnostic paradigms.

I bought these two stories as playful ways of thinking about Narcissistic and Borderline adaptations, both in how they function and with some clues as to what might be needed. In the story of the Old Friends we have all the rivalry, deception, manipulation and seduction of narcissism. In the story of Snow White we have the denial, splitting, persecutory envy and projection associated with a borderline structure.

We will take up these differences further when we look at how they both respond to the developmental hurdle of symbol formation in a short while. What I would like to do initially is to suggest their common origin in Esther Bick’s concept of adhesive anxiety.

Adhesive Anxiety.

You may be familiar with Bowlby’s attachment styles, though this may well hamper any efforts to think about which particular attachment styles might give rise to either narcissistic or borderline phenomena. We are happily saved from this dilemma by the work of Klienian analyst Esther Bick who introduced the concept of adhesive attachment in the 1960s as part of her work on early infant development, particularly in her paper “The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations” (1968). She used the term adhesive identification or adhesive attachment to describe an early primitive mode of relating in which the infant experiences a kind of “sticking” to mother, relying on physical contact prior to any differentiation between self and other.’ Bick’s adhesive attachment doesn’t map very well over Bowlby’s four, until you stop trying to mush the concepts together and think of adhesive attachment as their progenitor.

Bick proposes that the skin is the infant’s earliest symbol and experience of containment. It is not only a biological boundary but a sensory modality of cohesion, safety, and “being held together.” When this holding is adequate, the infant internalizes it, a “skin function” develops forming a psychic envelope which keeps the infant’s experience organized.

If the time and quality of being in arms dips below a certain threshold, the infant’s parts are left feeling as though they have no binding force amongst themselves. The baby must then develop a compensatory ‘second skin’, a defensive structure which forms when the infant experiences:

• unreliable holding
• emotional unavailability alternating with
• overstimulation
• inadequate or ‘over’ containment of distress.

The second skin is a substitute for the missing containing function, a rigid, compensatory sense of adhesion based on:

• muscular tension
• hyperactivity or motor control
• cleverness, pseudo-independence, precocious competency
• omnipotent self-reliance rather than relational dependence

Classic signs:

• “toughness” as personality armor
• chronic over-control
• manic energy used to avoid collapse
• fear of passivity or dependence
• reliance on intellect or performance to maintain identity.

Adhesive Anxiety as it pertains to the story of the Old Friends.

The mountain between the old friends suggests separation, but they remain psychically glued, locked in endless rivalry, trying to outwit one another in place of I and Thou, compulsively repeating the same pattern of betrayal, anger, and appeasement. The fused, symbiotic relation means the old friends cannot genuinely relate to one another. The two old friends are less two people than two halves of one psyche which cannot establish a stable boundary between self and other. Relations are structured to maintain the self’s omnipotent position rather than to promote mutuality. Their interaction is not genuine or reciprocal. It is “fraudulent” in the sense of being staged to maintain a self-construct rather than to connect with the other.

Jung saw narcissism as an inflated, defensive ego that resists deeper self-awareness, hindering true psychological growth and individuation. The theft of the rich man’s gold captures this sense of arrogating the numinosity of the Self to partial ego states. Analyst Otto Kernberg emphasises the ‘use of others as instruments….. as tools for the maintenance of self‐esteem or the grandiose self, rather than as partners in a genuine relationship of mutuality.” (p. 123) Ledermann advances Kernberg’s thinking, lack of love for oneself and concomitant feelings of aloofness arise as an early defence against the terror of not being able to be related to and of non-existing’.

“I am afraid they might someday find out that there’s nothing inside me, that I am only the skin of someone, and that inside — under my arm, perhaps — there’s nothing but emptiness.”Rilke

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The adhesion of violence.

The old friends’ beatings and quarrels do not break their bond, they reinforce it.
In adhesive relations, hatred can be as binding as love. Their fights create excitement, texture, and proof of existence so they endlessly recycle the same trickery.

That which cannot come in through the door must come in by the window. In the absence of a physically nurturing connection any other will do. The need to ‘be physical’, to have contact via violence is the body’s version of the feeling that I’d rather be told off than ignored. Violence, then, can act like the “positive reinforcing function of negative attention” (Gallimore, Tharp & Kemp. 1969) When skin to skin needs are unmet by nurture they must be set in place by other means. Aldous Huxley makes the brilliant observation in ‘Chrome Orange’ that the Central American Republics went to war with one another after gaining independence from Spain in order to know themselves as nations. They were unmothered babes in arms. Indigenous beliefs had been eroded by masters who now too were no longer. This crisis of cultural identity and the need for internal cohesion was resolved by going to war with one another, each waving their flag, freshly filled with the glue of patriotic fervour and sticking together.

Margaret Mead makes a clear connection between infant rearing practices and levels of collective aggression. She compares two field trips to very different tribes in New Guinea, the Mundugumor and the Arapesh. The Mountain Arapesh are peaceable planters who, ‘substitute responsiveness to the concerns of others for aggressiveness, initiative, or any of the familiar motivations upon which our culture depends.’ (p15 Sex and temperament) Correspondingly, the tribe is child centric with infants spending considerable time in arms. The Mundugumor social organisation, by contrast, ‘is based on a theory of natural hostility between all members of the same sex.’ Describing Mundugumor suckling practices Mead explains, ”there’s none of the mother’s dallying, sensuous pleasure in feeding her child. As soon as he stops suckling he is returned to his basket.’ (p195)

The cohering conflict of the two old friends is only bought to a close when the feminine principle takes charge of the gold, plants her husband in his earth womb, and has her strangely ambiguous grief with the old friend. She feigns her feelings whilst imagining the grief of the other to be real in such a way as to still be sharing an experience despite the deception. Gestalt teacher George Brown once said, ‘the first time you call yourself a therapist you will be a liar, the second time you will be a fraud, the third time there may be some truth in it.’ All of which means asking fresh questions about what we mean by false selves. Jung and Winnicott seem to use the terms rather differently. For Jung it seems to be more about the persona whereas for Winnicott its much more explicitly about adapting to parental expectations.

Adhesive Attachment in Snow White.

The Queen does not relate to Snow White as an autonomous other but as a thing to which she is psychically glued. In adhesive attachment, difference is intolerable because it undermines the sense of enmeshment which maintains cohesion.

• Snow White’s ‘fairness’ doesn’t just offend the Queen, it unravels her very identity, collapsing the structure which gives the Queen meaning. She has no alternative source of worth—no inner virtue, no relational bonds, no purpose beyond dominance.
• Historically, fair didn’t just mean attractive. Alchemically, her red, white and black nature point to Snow White as a symbol of psychic wholeness (nigredo, albedo, rubedo) embodying the opus alchymicum, which the Queen can neither attain nor tolerate.
• The Queen’s wish to erase Snow White is a desperate effort to destroy anything which might upset the symbiosis upon which her identity has come to depend.
• Erasing the other’s experience is how the wicked witch protects herself. I came across an example in the street the other day. A mother is striding along at great speed. Her three year old boy is running to keep up. She asks angrily, ‘Why are you running?’ He replies, ‘because I am not .’ To remain congruent with mother’s denial of reality, that he’s having to run to keep up with her, he has to deny it himself, even if it negates his embodied experience.

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Core Features of the adhesive mother/infant relationship

• In one of her infant observations Esther Bick writes, ‘As the mother’s tolerance to closeness to the baby increased, so did her need to excite the baby to manifestations of vitality lessen’ Bick Ie increased bodily contact between mother and infant interrupted episodic cycles of under and overstimulation.
  • The caregiver fosters continued fusion with the child’s emerging ego, rather than allowing it to form independent identity. This fusion is rather well represented by the Wicked witch’s eating of the Boar’s heart. Her wish for pre-eminence devours the child’s capacity for courageous autonomy and having feeling for others.

Analyst Masud Kahn makes the additional remark that the enmeshed mother/infant ‘bond’ is characterised by symbiotic omnipotence which engenders precocious mental development and involves a certain sensitivity or hyperawareness to mother’s mood, endorsed by mothers’ ‘over-cathexis of the child’, with a corresponding ‘failure to integrate aggression. This has a specifically deleterious effect on the synthesising functions of the emergent ego.’ 

In the Netflix series, ‘The Last Kingdom’, Prince Aaethelwold, the rightful king of Wessex, is asked if he means harm to his usurper uncle King Alfred, ‘Oh, no ‘ says he, ‘I wish him dead but I would not harm him.’

Alongside the problem of unintegrated aggression, Kahn further notes that mother’s intense and exclusive relationship with the child has the effect of devaluing and even actively discouraging ‘cathexis of other objects and their perception as valuable or nourishing..’

Dorothy Bloch goes further and reminds us that the monsters who hide in the cupboard or under the bed and make an ordeal of separation are representations of unintegrated parental aggression, which the child inuits or unconsciously registers and experiences as it’s own split off fears.

Alice Miller expresses it well, “You can drive the devil out of your garden but you will find him again in the garden of your son. [Nor does this] Narcissistic ca-thexis of her child by the mother exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child, as her self-object, excessively.”

When Jung says that the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents, he was, I think, speaking about much more than unrealised hopes and dreams, though those are problematic enough. I think he was also referring to the vulnerability of the child, by virtue of its receptive plasticity, to material in the parent which never sees the light of day.

“The child is so closely bound up with the psychic attitude of the parents it is not surprising that most of the nervous disturbances of childhood can be traced to something disturbed in the psychic atmosphere of the parents.” Frances Wickes

The content of such parental projections is bound to determine which defences the child then employs to deal with its situation. Parental projections which are idealising, symbiotic and depersonalised, require defences quite different to one in which the child is saddled with projections which are aggressive and vengeful.

In short..

Adhesive attachment is a response to a certain kind of profound anxiety expressed differently depending on personality structure — grandiose and self-focused in narcissism, fragile and enmeshed in borderline pathology. It constitutes a degree of severing from what Jean Liedloff would call the ‘continuum concept’, the skin to psychic skin connection which ensures confidence and going on being. Having grown up in Africa I cannot help but reflect how rarely I ever came across an anxious tribal person. I recall once asking a man at a bus stop when his bus came and he replied cheerfully, ‘today’. The Ndebele people I was raised with always held hands in the street and mothers always carried their babies on their backs.

The !Kung San (Kalahari) hold or carry their infants about 80-90% of the time during the first few months of life. ResearchGate

In contrast, the same source indicates that in a Western (Euro-American) sample, infant holding/carried time was much lower — e.g., about 18% in one cited comparison. Lancaster EPrints

Fordham’s “symbol formation.”

So far we have looked at the early shared similarities between these two personalities. Now we will begin to think about how the differences between them emerge by comparing how they approach the threshold of symbol formation. Let’s briefly recap before returning to our two stories.

Michael Fordham, building on Jung, saw symbol formation both as a threshold of development and as a process of transformation which mediates between conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche. For Fordham the Self is a primary, innate totality which de-integrates and re-integrates through-out development. Symbol formation is the psychic activity by which these de-integrations and re-integrations are managed, linking the inner and outer worlds.

‘My interior gives birth to the children of chaos of the primordial mother,’ says Jung in the Red Book, ‘He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, he melts. The formed in him dissolves and binds itself anew with the children of chaos, the powers of darkness, the ruling and the seducing, the compelling and the alluring, the divine and the devilish.’ (p179)

Fordham’s ideas about de-integration and re-integration illustrate the psyche’s innate capacity for self-healing by describing a dynamic process through which the self continually disassembles and reorganises its structures in response to inner and outer experiences. In de-integration, aspects of the self temporarily ‘renounce cohesion’ to allow for new situations or stimuli to be assimilated along with previously unconscious material. Re-integration of more differentiated elements are then made one’s own in a more developed, cohesive form. This cyclical process shows that psychological disturbance or fragmentation is not merely pathological but can serve as a natural mechanism for renewal and transformation, enabling the psyche to restore balance and move toward greater wholeness.

Thus, symbol formation exercises the self’s developmental potential — its ability to transform raw experience into meaning and is predicated, to paraphrase Serafidou, on loss; a recognition that giving credence to the sovereignty of others is the price we pay for exercising our own.

Symbol Formation and the Two Old Friends.

The old friends operate almost entirely on the level of concrete, pre-symbolic logic. The exchange of sacks — oak apples for ashes, is fraudulent, a distortion of symbolic exchange. That which purports to be nourishing is not. They cannot imagine meaning beyond the object itself. So they enact barter and trickery and theft in place of imaginative transformation. When my brother was about seven or eight he took a ten pound note from my mother’s purse and encouraged his friend next door to do the same. They then swopped the notes so it wasn’t stealing any more. They were so sure in their efforts that they proudly broadcast what they had done and were most upset no one else thought them so clever.

Failure to Internalise the Other.

Symbol formation requires internalizing the loved object but the old friends can only exist through physical confrontation or fraudulent transaction.. Their encounter has the effect of confirming isolation rather than alleviating it because every exchange is an exercise in deceit. They “know” themselves through either rivalry or identifying with one another. Every affect (envy, anger, guilt) must be acted out in physical form: hitting, swapping, stealing, burying.

Symbol formation requires a capacity for inner space — the ability to tolerate separation between ego and Self, subject and object. Narcissistic structures tend to collapse that space. Lack of empathy is more deeply rooted in a failure to experience the other as sufficiently their own person to have feelings about them in the first place.

• Likewise the inner world is not experienced as populated by autonomous psychic figures/complexes, but rather as reflections of the self-image, with a corresponding, ‘the psyche is what I know of it.’
• So symbols tend to serve the ego’s cohesion rather than mediating ego–Self or subject–object relationships.
• The imagery tends to be self-referential or ornamental.
• The symbol does not transform the personality; it decorates it.

Death and rebirth.

The motif of shallow burial as a metaphor for the crossing of thresholds is to be found in many indigenous cultures. Several Aboriginal Australian groups incorporate symbolic burial or earth-covering in male initiation ceremonies. These rites sometimes involved covering the initiate with earth or placing them in a shallow pit for a limited time. These acts connect the initiate with ancestral beings and the land.

Some North American plains traditions include earth confinement symbolism. These vision quest related rites sometimes involve earthen lodges or pits representing the womb of the Earth. Symbolic burial imagery also appears in some African initiation systems. In Bantu-speaking groups initiation involves temporary earth covering or secluded enclosures symbolizing the end of childhood.

Burial / earth-enclosure symbolism also appears in female initiation and life-cycle rites in many cultures, usually connected to menarche, fertility, renewal, and rebirth. In Australian Aboriginal cultures and in sub-Saharan Africa girls undergoing puberty rites may be covered with clay or ash and made to sit or lie in shallow earth hollows, symbolising grounding, enclosure, and ritual containment. These motifs in which the earth functions symbolically as womb and ancestor may be found across the Americas, also in Andean and Melanesian societies.

In modern parlance we talk about narcissistic mortification, a term first coined by Kohut (The Analysis of the Self (1971) to describe the exposure or collapse of the grandiose self , which can look very much like indigenous ritual experience, containing similar themes of loss of identity, death which prefigures new possibilities. Kohut distinguishes mortification from mere shame or embarrassment since mortification fundamentally changes the self structure as does ritual. Mortification is not shame’s “I failed,” but rather “I have been unmasked.” Painful, but a necessary precursor to a more compendious identity. ‘Nature will be mortified and must suffer, even unto death; for the merely natural man must die in part during his own lifetime’. (Psych of TF p100)

Making Meaning.

Symbol formation allows us to make meaning from repetition — to create narrative, learning, or moral insight. This happens when the cycle of thieving is broken by one old friend handing over the gold to his wife. This is a crucial moment in the story because it’s an act of trust and introduces the possibility of a mediating third who both takes the gold in and gives it back in a differentiated (shareable) form.

This detail suggests Winnicott’s concept of “maternal reverie”, the process by which a mother takes in the infant’s raw emotional experience, processes it internally, and returns it in a more manageable form. Her wooden chest is the ”holding environment,” a psychological space in which the infant’s unintegrated, (stolen) overwhelming sensations and anxieties can be contained and transformed through her empathic responsiveness.

Winnicott (1960) writes, “The mother’s adaptation to the needs of her infant, when good enough, gives the infant the illusion that there is an external reality which corresponds to his own capacity to create.” This reverie-like function, in infancy and in analysis makes use of the mother/analyst to act as an intermediary of experience so the infant/patient’s chaotic inner states are met, contained, and given back as meaningful or at least manageable experience—forming the basis for emotional development and the capacity to think. The old friends are mostly stuck in their repetition compulsion until a containing third gets involved and their closed circuit can become transformed into a developmental arc.

We could think of the Old Friends as conflicting persona and shadow, or true and false self but I think it works better to think of them as the precocious and the delayed selves, a part which had to grow up to quickly and one that got left behind, each hampered for want of one another.

Snow White and symbol formation.

Denial, Splitting and Projection.

Unable to symbolize ambivalence (love and hate toward the same object), the Queen must split herself and others into ideal and persecutory parts. This split replaces internal conflict with external war upon which her cohesion thereafter depends. Her psychic pain and envy cannot be represented internally, so they must be denied and acted out instead by destroying the external figure who carries what she cannot symbolize within herself.

Denial is something I still find myself thinking about as though it were merely intra-psychic, as though it were isolated to the idiosyncrasies of the person concerned, forgetting the impact/contagion it has upon the other who must then either get in line or be constituted threat. The flat-earther wants your exasperation. Archetypally, the impact of denial upon the other is exemplified by Peter’s betrayal of Christ where humanity and relatedness are erased as well as truth. The effect of denial for the other is that it produces epistemic anxiety, a loss of shared ground which then undermines faith in the validity of subjective experience.

Denial both negates content and depersonalises being in the same breath. It is helped to do so by what Meltzer and Segal called concrete equation thinking — the confusion of symbol and thing, or of being and behaviour.

• The Queen doesn’t just envy Snow White’s beauty; she equates it with life itself.
• To destroy Snow White is to do more than rid her of a rival, it is to assure going on being, her ontological security.

She cannot distinguish being admired from being alive; or being eclipsed from being annihilated. Hence her terrifying conviction: If Snow White lives, I die. She must succeed in her quest to kill Snow White, ‘even if it cost me my life’ because there is no symbolic space to separate self from other. This is managed instead by the systemic shaming that splitting entails.

The wicked witch’s shaming of Snow White dominates their interaction, ‘what a fright you look, I will lace you properly for once.’Now I will comb you properly for once.’ Her need to diminish and extinguish seem to be fundamental to her own inner peace. She achieves this by getting the child to believe that she is doing her a favour. ‘Being helped’ and feeling guilty begin to blend in deadly poison to eros and autonomy. The problem is not too much defensive closure as with the two Old Friends, but too much psychic permeability and fragmentation.

The agent of change.

In the Disney version of Snow White she is awakened by the Prince’s kiss. In the original, Snow White is carried from the forest in her coffin by a retinue of the Prince’s servants. On the way one of them stumbles over a tree root and momentarily drops his corner of the coffin. This jolt dislodges the piece of poisoned apple from her throat and rather suggests, as with any Felix culpa, some measure of divine intervention.

There are a number of fairy tales where the redeeming or saving moment happens accidentally, not because the character deliberately sets out to be good or heroic. In ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ the queen is saved because a messenger accidentally overhears him singing his name in the forest. In Sleeping Beauty the Prince doesn’t arrive because of destiny or effort—he simply stumbles upon the castle while wandering. In the ‘Frog Prince’, the spell is broken when the Princess angrily throws the frog against the wall, not through kindness or intention. In ‘The Goose Girl’, the truth is revealed because the King overhears the goose girl talking to the wind—completely by accident.

These stories suggest that growth doesn’t always come from deliberate virtue, deservingness or ‘working on yourself’. Chance and fate play a role, meaning redemption can also arise from mistakes, anger, or luck.

In Snow White the arrival of the Prince and the stumble over the tree root are seemingly chance events which do not follow the preceding narrative in any noticeable way. So too is it often with the journey of the borderline personality which can seem encapsulated for the longest time. One day, all of a sudden, something is different and you can’t really tell why. Except perhaps that the realm of the imaginal is being taken seriously, having been wanted and valued, given gold lettering and dwarven vigil, even though you were dead.

Such seemingly chance events are rather different from the story of the two old friends. Their work seems much more to be about being able to find some kind of holding wooden chest to adequately contain the gold. Von Franz says in ‘Individuation and fairy Tales’, that the success of an analysis depends entirely upon the analyst. It was perhaps particularly to the kind of containment exemplified by the wife’s wooden chest in the story of the Old Friends she was referring, the capacity to hold the treasure and keep it safe until it can be shared.

The Witch’s Fate.

At the end of Snow White, the Queen is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies. This corresponds closely to the motif of alchemical ‘calcination’ which burns away impurity, falseness, and excess, reinforcing the idea that the Queen is not to be ‘integrated’ in the way the Old Friends are integrated to one another via wifely sharing. She’s something to purge. She requires regurgitation rather than digestion, differentiation from enmeshment rather than the integration of guilty gold.

To put the wicked witch into iron shoes is to bind her within the very material symbol of her own hardness, vanity, and aggression. Her terrible dance is a public or visible collapse of identification with the negative maternal introject/ Death mother. Her burning becomes a ritual act of both purification and vengeance. The Old Queen must be burned away, not merely defeated, so Snow White can enter a new stage of life (marriage, maturity, generativity). Thus the “devouring mother” cannot simply be pushed aside. In our story she is both confronted and destroyed.

Symbolically, it’s the painful burning away of what is false or rigid so something more fundamental can emerge from the ashes. In common idiom we talk about holding someone’s feet to the fire as an expression of demanding accountability. In terms of human experience, it’s inner confrontation. Calcination, and healing, begins when pride, illusions, or false identities collapse, when a person realises “I’m not who I thought I was”.

Conclusion.

From common origins adhesive anxiety expresses itself sometimes as an inflated and split ego, sometimes as invasion of the maternal introject by which the ego is subsumed, then either unconsciously identified with or projected. The goals, of symbol formation and relatedness are, like their origins, shared. The one, so the entanglement of inner conflict can become a reflective dialogue; the other, so enmeshment with mother can be ended and one’s own conversation with the world begun.

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…