Why do people take refuge in the strong arm of those who beat them? So as not be at home when he comes calling. Your castle is burned to the ground but you get to hold the torch.
Alice Miller calls it ‘Identification with the Aggressor’, a process by which a child or subjugated person defends against the precarity of their situation by dissociating from it and forming a psychological alliance with the source of their suffering.
It was named ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ after bank raiders in Sweden took hostages that then became their fervent supporters, even writing to the Prime Minister asking to go with their captors. Hieress Patty Hearst became a gang member of the group that kidnapped her. Natascha Kampuch wept at the death of her jailer and rapist Wolfgang Priklopil, moved into his house and ran his car…
It’s an aspect of what Levy-Bruhl calls ‘participation-mystique’, a process of merging with another, initially observed..
‘in so-called primitive cultures where certain objects treated as holy artifacts were seen as filled with the spirit of their owners or worshipers.’ Gifford
Most people know the story of Bluebeard. He murdered his wives one after another and kept them in a secret locked room. He forbids his most recent bride from entering the room on pain of … well, a lot of pain, but she is unbearably curious and sneaks in while he is away…
just a peek…
Too late!
The room is a charnel house of former wives. She drops the key to the floor in horror where it becomes stained with blood that will not wash off no matter how she tries…
Bluebeard finds her out, and sets out to do just what he said he would do… though she is saved in the last moment by her brothers who show up in the nick of time…
an’ cut ‘Ol Bluey down…
The traditional meaning is that of a cautionary tale,
‘Oh curiosity thou mortal bane, spite of my charms thou causest oft pain and sore regret..’ Charles Perrault
followed swiftly by reassurances that men are not so bad..
‘This a story is of time long pass’d; No husbands now such panic terrors cast; Nor weakly, with a vain despotic hand, Imperious, what’s impossible, command:’ (ibid)
More recently its been given socio-political attention with Bluebeard in the role of Patriarch enforcing gender roles with violence, or more psychologically with Bluebeard in the role of pathological narcissist. Clarrisa Pinkola Estes calls him,
‘the predator of the Psyche, wanting to sever intuition, a malignant force at odds with the instincts of the natural self.”
Von Franz amplifies this theme, Bluebeard is the destructive, murderous animus which must be encountered in order to grow..
”If a woman hasn’t gone through the experience of being trapped by a demon animus she only has unconscious thoughts.”
All well and good, but there is a curious detail in the story that snags my attention.. Most of the interpretations are based on later versions of the tale in which the youngest of three sisters falls for his charms because she is naive, or she marries him against his will. But in the original, by Perrault, there’s neither foolishness nor abduction…
Bluebeard goes to one of his neighbours…
‘a lady of quality, whose two daughters were perfect beauties. He desired of her one of them in marriage, leaving to her the choice which of the two she would bestow upon him….
‘I want one of your children, it doesn’t matter which…’
None of this phases anyone. There is no outrage, no injunction to never darken her door again. Mother colludes and passes of her kid like a mail-order bride who gradually identifies with her rather than face how she has been betrayed.
‘There was nothing then to be seen but parties of pleasure, hunting, fishing, dancing, mirth and feasting. Every thing succeeded so well, that the youngest daughter began to think the master of the house not to have a beard so very blue, and that he was a mighty civil gentleman…
A six year old child, having been persuaded onto her parent’s lap rather than explore the nearby swings and play area, is trying to extricate herself in an ungainly way whilst mother chides her softly like Nursey from Blackadder..
”Oh you.. banana-brain…”
child’s inaudible muttering…
”What are you?… a banana-brain”.
more muttering..
”Banana-brain, that’s what you are.”
And you could say its just harmless fun and the mother is ‘joking’ in an extroverted and jovial way. ‘Its just people being what they are,’ you say, but actually its the worst kind of cruelty.. making a child feel stupid for wanting a go on the swings, feeling like a banana-brain in adult life for wanting to explore, embittered then and muttering in her old age for the life that’s been denied her.
Such throw away lines are how lives are poisoned. Often repeated they become the kernel around which identity is built because our survival compels us to adapt to expectation. So even when she’s free she stumbles, can’t get co-ordinated, making a hash of her liberty, just like… a banana-brain.
Her inner life is destroyed, not by showdowns, punishments or overt rejection but by one thing parodying another, by the wicked cleverness that can say you are stupid and I hate you with a smile. What’s the matter, can’t you take a joke?
Life is what you make it but more importantly its what you believe it to be. Life will faithfully offer us up our expectations of it, rising to manifest and mirror back to us all our prejudices, secret fears and covert assumptions.
‘We do not see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” Torah
That which we cannot face on the inside comes at us from without. Having had her inner life attacked by her social-climbing mother, our heroine learns to attack herself, killing off her spontaneity, deadening her sexuality, stringing up her feelings and hobbling the discriminating function that feelings are there to serve.
When she intrudes upon Bluebeard’s inner chamber she is bound to find there some expression of this violation. She is going to find her worst nightmares in the little room because she has been entered into this arrangement in terrible bad faith, having had her integrity sold out and the possibility of true love traded for the appearance of an easy life.
Bluebeard is certainly a villain, but never pretending to be more or less than he is. There is no deception. ‘I want one of your daughters, I don’t care which.” When mother colludes the poor bride masks over the awful injury this constitutes by following suit, by pretending that people and privacy don’t matter, but has to kill off her aliveness and subjugate herself to the tyranny of life’s baubles which will extract their pound of flesh from her one way or another. Her inner world will be attacked on a regular basis.
Life presents us with the face we show it and mirrors back to us inner states normally occluded from view.
I once comforted a woman whose husband had just had a heart attack and was at death’s door in hospital… but I withdrew my hand from her shoulder as if bitten by a snake when she wailed, ‘who will help me now?” Her thoughts were not of him, nor her tears about him, but about the burden of her middle-class chores.
Through her tears she then told me a dream that wild dogs had gotten into her lovely white Mercedes convertible and torn all the upholstery to pieces. Her inner life had been ripped out by her paltry material concerns and the utter failure to transcend her own petty troubles.
”We thought it was the outer event that had happened to us, but now see that it is we who have happened to ourselves.’ F. Wickes.
And so there is no transformation. The dead wives are as much a part of her world as Bluebeard himself. Killing him off still leaves her with the problem of life denied and the damage done to her personal destiny by the spell which compels her to identify with toxic values rather than her own gut feeling which knows people are more important than any amount of power you may have over them.
A mother is walking down the street with her child. She’s in high gear and the child of three-ish is having to run to keep up. She looks at him with annoyance and says, ‘why are you running?”
The boy, out of breath, replies, ”because I’m not.”
The poor lad cannot face the denial of his reality in her question, the dismissal of his inner world to which the only honest answer is a forbidden truth-telling version of, ‘because you’re in a big bad mood and stomping off…
without looking to see if I’m left behind….
And so the only thing he can do is to deny his own reality. At least there will be common ground if only on the basis of shared contempt for the child’s point of view. This will cost the child his footing. On the pavement and in life.
This boy is not, ‘failing to internalize values’ (Kernberg)
He’s internalizing them only too well.
I … am not quite real, but I can run and walk at the same time. Look out everyone it’s the fantastic running/walking boy!
Where adequate treatment fails, double think and grandiose Self structures ensue. We can’t be whole for as long as we identify with an expectation to run and walk at the same time.
Otto Kernberg coined the phrase, ‘Grandiose Self Structure’, to describe Narcissism. But his insistence on it having a ‘pathological formation’, tends to strip it of meaning before we’ve even had a look around.
The problem with calling anything abnormal is that we tend to lose respect for it and forget to ask helpful questions.
and so he has to account for sadism by saying that,
”the infliction of suffering is the child’s attempt to defend against his own helplessness, through the exercise of omnipotent control over another.” O. Kernberg
No, that’s what kings do.
Not children. Y’all confuse’.
Important names for things can get in the way of experiencing them. Its like mastering the Kama Sutra without ever looking your partner in the eye,
The thing about early deprivation is that it urgently needs to split off and project desperation. The child concludes that it is un-held because it is lacking or deficient. Moreover, the baseline of how people treat each other, reality itself, is violated. The intrusive dark splinter of not quite being real has to be visited on another.
and even more pointily when collectively encoded in religious lore…
DO AS I SAY ON PAIN OF DEATH..
in one moment and…
DO AS YOU PLEASE SO LONG AS YOU PRAISE ME.
on the other.
His poor flock are suddenly awash in persecutory anxiety and paranoia. Their double/bind is unbearable and can only regain their composure by joining Yahweh in his unreality …
”I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” St Paul.
and so it begins.
Kohut is unequivocal, Narcissism,
”results from massive shortcomings in mothering.” Kohut.
and even Kernberg will give a bit and refers to incipient..
”intolerable reality in the interpersonal realm.” Kernberg
which I suppose is a sanitized way of talking about the unbearable misery of being a child who is related to in an ideal way or not at all, which is what you get when Mother has had her spiritual essence sucked out of her by animus-ity which refuses to sacralize her mothering .
