Frances Wickes – Andy White Blog

What is Luck?

Hans had completed seven long years of work for his Master who rewarded him with a great lump of gold. The gold was very heavy and Hans was soon utterly worn out from carrying it. A kindly man passing on his horse asked what the trouble was, offering to swop his horse for the gold so Hans could ride along. Hans was extremely pleased at this sudden good fortune though when he mounted, the horse bolted and threw him down. A lady with a cow passed and helped him up, generously relieving Hans of the troublesome horse for the amazing cow which would supply him with milk and cheese for all eternity, though when he tried to milk her she kicked him in the head.

A compassionate swineherd gave up his pig for the horrible cow and now he had more bacon than he could imagine, though more fear too since it seemed that the pig was stolen and so he quietly swopped it with a very helpful man for his plump goose. Having said that, all these fortunate events gave him no coin in his pocket and so he swopped the goose for a grinding stone that was only a little damaged. It would be a great living but it was also pretty cumbersome and so when it accidentally fell in the well when he went there to drink it seemed he was now entirely free of troubles and so he went happily on his way.

The story appears absurd on the surface. Hans repeatedly trades for things of objectively lesser value until he owns nothing at all. Instead of regretting his losses, he becomes happier with each exchange, finally overjoyed after accidentally losing the final treasure.

From a conventional perspective, Hans is a fool. From another point of view, he may represent someone moving away from identification with material value towards psychological freedom. It’s as if the fairy tale quietly asks: What if our valuation system itself is mistaken?

The tale dramatises a journey from being possessed by the object to freedom from it, from the oppression of collective values toward a lighter relation to life. The repeated losses strip away identities that seem necessary but also prove to be hardships.

It seems the purpose of the story, like the bit in Jack and the Beanstalk where Jack trades his cow for a handful of beans, is to challenge our assumptions about what it means to be lucky, to reflect on the prejudice we tend to share that luck and increase are synonymous. The story also invites us to reconsider the notion that luck is simply something which befalls us from out of the blue, merely a matter of external forces acting upon a passive subject without reference to the attitudes or dispositions of the person in question.

And yet, before we’ve even thought about it too much, we know that some people seem to be more lucky than others. There seems to be more to it than a mere roll of cosmic dice. Jung went so far as to say that ‘what happens to a man has something to do with him.’

What does this mean exactly?

From the standpoint of psychological meaning what ‘befalls’ us is not merely accidental. Our unconscious dispositions, conflicts, and patterns are intimately connected with the events we experience or the way we experience them. In his work, ‘The Interpreted World’, Ernesto Spinelli says, ‘The definition or meaning given to events has as much to do with you, and the meaning system that you employ, as it does with the thing itself.’

He then develops this argument, ‘This interpretational process must be acknowledged in our statements about reality… Reality, as far as each of us experiences it, is this process. In other words, interpretation is inseparable from experience itself.’ Refraining from a knee-jerk interpretation of what we imagine things have to mean requires the development of what Jung calls the symbolic attitude.

The Symbolic Attitude.

The symbolic attitude is a way of relating to experience which neither takes it literally nor explains it away. It is an attitude of openness to the possibility that an image, event, dream, emotion, or coincidence expresses a meaning that has not yet been fully grasped by consciousness.

If a symbol is the best possible expression for something as yet unknown then a symbolic attitude is one which holds open the possibility that the significance of events is not necessarily as obvious as they might seem.

A symbol points beyond itself. It is a living image that mediates between conscious understanding and unconscious reality. By the same token the symbolic attitude is the willingness to relate to events as living realities, rather than objective givens of which we are the passive recipients.

The symbolic attitude avoids two opposing errors. Literalism on the one hand and reductionism on the other. Literalism says a dream of drowning means I am literally going to drown. A black crow means death is coming. I lost my job because I am cursed. The wafer is the body of Christ. etc. Here the symbol is collapsed into an external fact.

Reductionism does the opposite. The dream is ‘only’ anxiety. The crow is ‘just’ coincidence. Religious images are ‘nothing but’ wish fulfilment. Here the symbol is explained away as being no more than something already understood. Both attitudes are psychologically limiting because they prevent the symbol from doing its transformative work.

The symbolic attitude in practice.

If someone asserts, “I’m unlucky,” the literal attitude asks, ‘Is that objectively true? The reductive attitude asks, ‘Is this just cognitive bias? The symbolic attitude asks, ‘What psychic reality is being expressed through the experience of being unlucky?

This does not assume the person is objectively unlucky, nor does it dismiss their experience. Instead, it asks what the image of “unluckiness” might be saying about their relationship to fate, agency, suffering, hope, identity, or the unconscious. This is important because the symbolic attitude facilitates mediation between the ego and the unconscious, making psychological growth possible.

Without the symbolic attitude dreams become either meaningless or superstition, religious images become either dogma or delusion, myths become mere stories, suffering becomes either pointless or merely pathological. With the symbolic attitude each of these can become a source of psychological insight and development.

Gerhard Adler’s development

Adler extends Jung’s idea into clinical practice. For Adler, the analyst’s specific task is to protect the symbolic space. If the analyst interprets too quickly, the symbol dies because it has been reduced to a fixed meaning. If the analyst encourages literal belief, the patient becomes possessed by the image. Instead, analyst and patient stay with the image long enough for its meaning to unfold. Adler often describes this as allowing the symbol to remain “alive.”

The symbolic attitude is thus an epistemological stance, a way of knowing. It rests on the recognition that some aspects of experience are not yet fully intelligible and so we are ill advised to rush to any kind of definitive conclusion. Rather than forcing premature certainty, the symbolic attitude tolerates ambiguity while remaining engaged with the experience.

In this sense, the symbolic attitude is closely related to what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’, the ability to remain “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is the capacity to remain with the unknown rather than rushing to closure.

The essence of the symbolic attitude is thus the capacity to meet an experience by asking, “What is trying to become known through this?“ This shift, from explanation in terms of what-is-known to a dialogue with the yet-to-be-known, is what allows symbols and events to transform consciousness rather than merely decorate it, to participate in meaning rather than be bludgeoned by it.

Luck and archetypal identification.

Edward Edinger’s contribution to this thread is subtle but substantial. He doesn’t write specifically about luck, nor does he focus on the symbolic attitude in the way Adler does. Instead, he provides a compelling account of how the ego becomes identified with archetypal patterns, making certain self-descriptions feel unquestionably true.

In Ego and Archetype, Edinger argues that much of psychological suffering arises when the ego unconsciously identifies with an archetypal image. Rather than simply having experiences, the person becomes the rejected one, the victim, the chosen one, the failure, and so on.

Applied to luck, the question shifts from, ‘Am I un/lucky? to ‘have I become identified with an archetype whose story is one of perpetual misfortune?” In other words, “unlucky” may not be a neutral description of probabilities but part of an identity organised around an archetypal narrative.

The ego lives inside a myth.

One of Edinger’s recurring themes is that individuation involves discovering the myth one is unconsciously living. Someone who says, ‘Nothing ever works out for me,’ may be living the myth of Job (endurance amid suffering), the abandoned child, the scapegoat, the exile, or even the tragic hero. In Carl Orf’s ‘Carmina Burana’, the song ‘oh Fortuna’, expresses this sense of being identified with an archetypal reality which clearly has its own personality…,

‘Fate, monstrous and empty, you turning wheel, you are malevolent, your favour is idle and always fades, shadowed, veiled, you plague me too. I bare my back for the sport of your wickedness. In prosperity or in virtue fate is against me, Both in passion and in weakness fate always enslaves us. So at this hour pluck the vibrating strings; because fate brings down even the strong, everyone weep with me.

The song is full of the sense of being trapped in another’s narrative. Such identifications may not determine objective events, but they strongly influence the lens through which events are experienced, colouring and shaping which events are noticed, remembered, and imbued with certain meanings. Ego configurations dominated by archetypal patterns can produce a form of attachment to suffering which absolutely inhibits the possibility of experiencing oneself as lucky.

Edinger repeatedly emphasises developing what might be called a psychological objectivity, the capacity to observe one’s identifications rather than be wholly absorbed by them. This resonates strongly with Adler’s symbolic attitude. Instead of saying, ‘I am unlucky’, one might come to say, ‘Part of me experiences life through an image of being unlucky.’

That small shift, from identity to observation, is psychologically significant. So if someone persistently thinks of themselves as “unlucky,” Edinger’s distinctive contribution is to suggest that the belief may be less about objective patterns of chance than about an archetypal self-image. The work is not to prove or disprove the claim statistically, but to understand what psychic story has become fused with the ego and whether that fusion can be disentangled.

Luck and the symbolic attitude.

For someone capable of a symbolic attitude luck ceases to be merely external chance without reducing it to magical causation. This suggests that the symbolic attitude is not simply an intellectual stance one chooses to adopt; it rests upon a developmental achievement in which emotional experience has been successfully transformed into symbolic form. Where symbol formation has been compromised, the analyst may need first to help establish the capacity to symbolise before the patient can genuinely engage in the symbolic attitude which Jung regarded as central to individuation.

In his book ‘The Luck factor’, (2003) experimental psychologist Richard Wiseman’s central conclusion is that “lucky” people differ less in what happens to them than in how they respond to events. The first of his four principles of luck, derived from interviews and experiments with hundreds of self-described lucky and unlucky people is that….

1. Lucky people create, notice, and act upon chance opportunities.

Wiseman discovered that lucky people tend to have broad social networks; talk to strangers and maintain casual acquaintances; remain open to new experiences and avoid becoming so focused on one goal that they miss unexpected opportunities.

In one experiment, Wiseman gave participants a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs. A large message halfway through the paper read, “Stop counting—there are 43 photographs.” Self-described lucky people noticed the message far more often than unlucky people because they were less narrowly focused.

2. Lucky people make fortunate decisions by listening to intuition

Wiseman found that lucky people often trust their intuitive judgments. They pay attention to “gut feelings”; give themselves time to reflect before making important decisions and avoid overanalysing every possibility. He also found that reducing stress improved intuitive decision-making. Anxiety tends to narrow attention and interfere with noticing subtle cues.

3. Lucky people’s expectations help create good fortune

Lucky people generally expect things to work out well. Because of these expectations they persevere after setbacks; approach new situations with confidence; are more approachable socially; take opportunities they might otherwise avoid. Wiseman suggests positive expectations influence behaviour in ways that increase the likelihood of favourable outcomes.

4. Lucky people transform bad luck into good.

When something goes wrong, lucky people habitually imagine how the situation could have been worse; search for possible benefits; treat setbacks as temporary; learn from adverse experiences. Rather than seeing misfortune as evidence that life is against them, they reinterpret it as information or opportunity.

The connection with Jung.

Although Wiseman himself does not frame his work in Jungian terms, there are some intriguing parallels with Jungian psychology,

Principle 1 resembles Jung’s idea of a symbolic attitude: openness to unexpected meanings and possibilities rather than rigid literalism.
Principle 2 echoes Jung’s respect for intuition as one of the four primary psychological functions, capable of perceiving possibilities not yet consciously evident.
Principle 3 aligns with Jung’s observation that our conscious attitude influences the kinds of experiences we are prepared to encounter and integrate.
Principle 4 is perhaps closest to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, in which conflict or suffering can be transformed into psychological development through a new symbolic perspective.

These principles resonate with our tale ‘Hans in Luck,. Hans repeatedly remains open to possibility and chance encounter; he pays attention to his intuition, expects things to work out and interprets apparent losses as gains. Wiseman would describe this as having a resilient cognitive style; Jung would likely observe that Hans embodies a symbolic attitude which transforms fortune and misfortune through his relationship to them rather than attributing the events themselves with intrinsic meaning.

I once overheard two men talking on the train. The first was telling the second that he had been in analysis. The second man was curious and asked him about it, whether it had helped and so forth, finally asking if he could specify what the difference was before and after the analysis. ‘Well,’ said the first man, ‘before the analysis life was just the same old boring daily grind.’ And afterwards?’ prompted the second man. ‘Well,’ said the first man perking up, ‘afterwards it was simply one thing after another.’

Synchronicity and the transcendent function.

So far we have been discussing how the interpretation of events governs the nature of the experience associated with them, the freedom of movement we have to experience causally connected phenomena which seem to have objective value but in fact do not. Then there is the question of how things might line up independently of our perception of them to produce experiences of being either lucky or unlucky.

Synchronicity could be described as the expressive emergence of the transcendent function. The transcendent function is an intra-psychic process which creates a new symbolic standpoint; synchronicity is an expression of that same process manifesting as a meaningful correspondence between psyche and the external world. In other words, they are distinct concepts, but they arise from the same underlying dynamics of individuation. The transcendent function is crucial to the manifestation of synchronicity. Without a symbolic attitude, synchronicities remain mere coincidences.

The transcendent function integrates opposites within the psyche, synchronicity reveals that psyche and matter themselves participate in a deeper unity. The transcendent function prepares consciousness for an experience of the unus mundus, while synchronicity offers occasional empirical glimpses of that underlying unity.

In her book, ‘The Inner World of Choice’, Frances Wickes gives an illustrative example of her patient, a mother who was struggling to let her grown up son live his own life. This mother was very controlling but in considerable denial of the fact. The son had fled her ‘care’ and gone to live several time zones away. Wickes steadfastly attempted to draw her patient’s attention to the fact that the young man’s departure was a response to her overbearing manner and that she had effectively been suffocating him, all of which jarred terribly with her own remonstrations as to his ingratitude. Finally the patient managed to hold the tension between the conscious realisation of her maternal task to let him go and the unconscious wish to hang on to him eternally.

‘It was her last hour of analysis before fall. As the hour drew toward a close, there came to her, like the breaking of a new dawn, a consciousness of her own separate life, a gift originally given, an individual potential which was hers to live, whatever might happen in the life of another. She said, ‘I am going to take up my own life and learn to live it even if I never see him again. My sorrow will go with me always but it will be my own life that I shall live.’

It was the end of the hour. The clock struck twelve.

Three days later she received a letter. Its date was the day of her decision. It read, ‘Dear Mother, I am sitting on a hillside three thousand miles away. Just now I heard the clock strike nine and suddenly I felt that a fear that had been with me always was gone. I know now that I can come home because you no longer need me.’

The mother recognises her possessiveness and her unconscious need to keep her son psychologically dependent. Then rather than trying to regain him, she bears the grief of letting him go. Subsequently a genuinely new attitude emerges, she discovers her own separate life and relinquishes identification with the maternal role. Finally, at the very moment of this inner transformation (marked by the striking of the clock), the son experiences an equally decisive inner shift thousands of miles away.

This is one of the clearest clinical examples suggesting that a transformation produced by the transcendent function is accompanied by a synchronistic event. It therefore provides a compelling bridge between Jung’s essay on the transcendent function and his later essay on synchronicity.

This lived sense of ‘Fortune favouring the brave’ is expressed in a remark by one of Goethe’s couplets, ‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!”

This is not about exercising the freedom to interpret events but is rather about generating the improbable occurrence of the event itself..’something that surpasses our powers of comprehension, and can only be conceived as possible by virtue of the most wonderful pre-established harmony’. Schopenhauer.

‘Synchronistic events rest on the simultaneous occurrence of two different psychic states. One of them is the normal, probable state (i.e., the one that is causally explicable), and the other, the critical experience, is the one that cannot be derived causally from the first.’ (Jung CW8 para 855) Circumstances are not simply open to interpretation such that a variety of meanings could be derived from them; rather, meaning presents itself despite one’s best efforts to look the other way.

Some years ago I lost my home and my artists studio which were being sold by the landlord. I found a new place to live but it didn’t have a studio. Despite the beautiful location I felt frustrated at this disruption to my artistic calling. I put an A5 ‘wanted’ advert into the village PO window with an image of my work and waited. Months past. I waited and waited, refusing to settle or accept my new situation. One day, I was looking out of an upstairs window onto a blustery day. In the far distance, way up in the sky, I saw what seemed to be a fluttering bird. The wind blew it closer and I realised it was not a bird but a piece of paper, hundreds of metres in the air. Closer still and I saw a familiar flash of colour. Could it be? No way and I pushed the thought from my mind. Minutes later, I opened the back door to find my advert squarely planted on the welcome mat. The message was undeniable. I had to accept where I was and be grateful for what I had.

Such events cannot help but have us wonder if the gods are not involved because they seem to border on the miraculous. ‘For want of a demonstrable cause, we are all too likely to fall into the temptation of positing a transcendental one.’ Jung’s objection to this is that,’ ‘a “transcendental cause” is a contradiction in terms, because anything transcendental cannot by definition be demonstrated.’ And yet it can be inferred. I wonder if Jung is anxious to steer away from speaking about divine intervention and that it is precisely this which he alludes to when referring to his reticence in broaching the subject of synchronicity in his essay’s opening remarks. (vol 8) Elsewhere he repeatedly emphasises and even underlines the intentionality of unconscious contents, poetically expressed by Kierkegaard’s own observation, ‘there’s what I want to think about and there is what wants to be thought.’

Jung’s explanation of synchronicity is two fold, ‘Synchronicity therefore consists of two factors: a) An unconscious image comes into consciousness either directly (i.e., literally) or indirectly (symbolised or suggested) in the form of a dream, idea, or premonition, b) An objective situation coincides with this content. ‘[859] He assiduously avoids Goethe’s reference to the intentions of Providence, though he inadvertently includes this factor, albeit from the writings of Albertus Magnus quoted lower down the page,

‘Whoever would learn the secret of [synchronicity] must [first] fall into a great excess … and he must do it at that hour when the excess befalls him, and operate with the things which the soul prescribes. For the soul is then so desirous of the matter she would accomplish that of her own accord. Everything she does with that aim in view possesses motive power and efficacy.’

This then seems to suggest a fourth factor, the emotional state of the ego personality. Seizing the day requires intense emotional involvement. Alchemical treatises often emphasise the need for patience, love, living with uncertainty, longing and humility. Yet there are also far more challenging feelings which must be endured and willingly entered into, the conscious suffering of bearing the opposites, the despair, confusion and grief of the Nigredo. In Shakespeare’s ‘the Tempest’ this is represented by the storm itself, the chaotic and mortifying collapse of Prospero’s status, certainty and identity; his renunciation of power and vengeance. In Dante’s Inferno there is the emotionally impactful suffering of a descent into hell which prefigures Purgatory and Heaven. In Faust, Goethe makes explicit the feeling tone of what it means to seize the day, ‘“Thus let it be! Henceforth I’ll fling me into the roaring tide of time, into the surge of circumstance, And then may pleasure and distress, Success and failure, interchange as they can; For man grows active only through unrest.”

The literal translation of this last line is,’ “Man errs as long as he strives,’ which accentuates the necessity of error, suffering, and misjudgment in the pursuit of wholeness. Faust’s renunciation of bookish scholarship, his willingness to engage with Mephistopheles brings about the death of an old way of being, a state described in alchemical literature as ‘the torments’, a process equivalent to psychic dismemberment.

The Unus Mundus.

The capacity to bear the tension between opposites eventually gives rise to new life, Heaven’s birth, the ‘filius philosphorum’. Jung writes that the union of opposites culminates in the appearance of a new personality, not a compromise but a third thing produced from the tension itself.

Alfred Ribi argues that this ‘unus mundus‘ (one world) represents a further stage in the evolution of consciousness, one that moves beyond the modern split between mind and matter. In ordinary consciousness, we experience psyche and the physical world as fundamentally separate. At the level of the unus mundus, however, this division is understood to be secondary to the idea that psyche and matter emerge from a deeper, psychoid reality in which they are originally united. Synchronistic events provide glimpses of this underlying unity because they reveal meaningful correspondences between ‘inner’ psychological states and ‘outer’ events without requiring a causal explanation. Rather than reducing the psyche to subjective fantasy, this perspective restores it as an objective aspect of reality, equal in ontological status to the physical world. The individual thus comes to experience consciousness as participating in a larger, cosmic order rather than existing as an isolated ego.

One of Ribi’s original contributions is to place this idea within a developmental model of consciousness. He proposes that humanity has progressively moved, from an archaic, undifferentiated participation in the world, through the modern scientific separation of subject and object, toward a stage where differentiation is preserved but reunited within the unus mundus. This is not a regression to primitive consciousness but an integration which recognises the psyche’s objective reality while retaining reflective awareness.

For Ribi, the resolution of opposites is not simply an intra-psychic compromise but the realisation that both psychic and material realities participate in the same underlying ground. Individuation therefore culminates not merely in personal wholeness but in an experiential awareness of the unus mundus, where apparent dualities, subject and object, inner and outer, psyche and matter, are understood as differentiated expressions of a single, psychoid reality.

This interpretation aligns closely with Jung’s late writings in Mysterium Coniunctionis, where the unus mundus is presented as the hidden, unitary background from which both psyche and matter arise, and where the coniunctio symbolises a restoration of this primordial unity rather than merely a reconciliation of psychological conflict. Thus increases in “good fortune” are to be understood as a by-product of living in greater accord with that unity, not as its purpose.

Bluebeard, the Secret Hell.

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

Without such meaningful totemic relationships which allow a person to be in the presence of their own mystery without being contaminated by it, we in the West do the same with pop stars and celebrity, reality TV and the cult of personality, which despite the high of being one with your hero..

‘can influence a person or group of persons into acting against their own best interest’. (ibid)

Identification with the Great Leader makes all kinds of heroic feats possible though you may not survive them. It wipes out all your troubles back home and replaces them with a fizzing righteousness so potent it can transcend the fear of death and calmly walk wave upon wave of unfaltering youth to the grave.

Sometimes the battlefield’s turf is the quietly carpeted drawing rooms

of gentility rather than the crack and thump of conquest at any price, but still….

‘a person caught up in this spell would rather die or injure him or herself than consider new information that might upend their thinking.’ ibid

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 .

The Tyranny of Lawn.

How people have their gardens is interesting. What they do with them, even if it is nothing, says much about a person because it embodies something of their relationship with Nature and their own Deep Selves.

Maybe you don’t have a garden and long for one but that too is a relationship, missing space to potter and grow stuff. Or, you only have a potted Yucca to call your own but that can be enough if you love it.

Some feel gardening is just housework out of doors. If you scratch a little you’ll find that Life itself is a drudge, the day a series of tedious boxes to tick all linked together with Obligation’s resentment.

Others ‘maintain’, their patch. Its a notch up from housework-out-of-doors because there’s a little pride in it though it’s limited to space to-be-kept-the-same, the chaos of creative potential held firmly in check.

More are making their mark or making an effort, or having something to do because there is nothing to do..

On the far-side there are the parking lots, Nature supplanted by Tarmac, forecourts for the glittering prize.

More wierd than the Parking-Lotters are the Lawn Brigade, acolytes of a tradition strangely rooted in tyranny and death.

Back in the day, only the rich could afford to hire the many hands needed to scythe and weed the grass, so a lawn was a mark of wealth and status. The earliest lawns, however, had a very specific purpose. They were the closely trimmed verge around medieval castles in France and Britain, kept clear of trees so guards had an unobstructed view of any dodgy blokes in armour that might hove into veiw.

Part of the problem with building big fat castles and hiding your loot in them is that everyone for miles around knows it’s there. The word ‘lawn’ comes from the Celtic ‘laun’ meaning safe enclosure, which sounds very sweet and mystical except that it was invariably a clearing on the other side of which are bearded hordes with a malevolent twinkle in their eye..

and pointy sticks..

The first lawns were battle grounds. Nice to promenade about on with your mates and stretch limbs weary from the Watch, but their real purpose was to deprive everything within bowshot of cover to hide in.

The bigger your castle, the more anxious the need for protection, the bigger your lawn needs to be, a kind of insurance policy reasoned on the likely assumption that the more loot you have the more attention you are likely to receive from unsavoury parties.

The problem with making a bet that something bad is going to happen to you is that it catches the attention of the Fates as well as that of your less than salubrious neighbours who are bound to then usher all kinds of ill to your door…

mostly in the form of armies.

So the status symbol of the pristine lawn originates in fear and conflict precipitated by folk having more than they need. The lawn, gentle epitome of Pimms, Tennis, and that Lounger-in-the-Sun, is actually the yawning gap across which Us is divided from Them.

So the next time you’re out trying to relax on the lawn but finding it difficult to do it justice, it might be down to your endocrine system anticipating the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune..

and the cannon balls of very bad luck…

but mostly what makes it so difficult for us to relax that we need multi-billion dollar service industries working around the clock to make any kind of dent in it, is good old fashioned Conscience…

.. way deeper than any internalised moral code which knows that both the castle and its sumptuous lawns are bread from the mouths of starving babes and who’s purpose it is to rectify the balance any way it can, including the judicious use of colourful neurotic afflictions and physical symptoms.

Conscience is its own thing, beyond any great influence of the ego. It grows horns and a tail like anything else we try to suppress, becoming a kind of Fury that brings it’s own form of Justice to the table when normal constraints have failed.

It is She who compells any person who has more than they need to..

”unconsciously seek retributive punishment in order to atone and so remove the sense of guilt at having avoided the problem of love.” Frances Wickes.

Curiously, the Palace of Versailles has just obtained a dreamlike piece of ‘lawn art’, pictured above. It is a life size statue of Sarah Kerrigan in her role as ‘Queen of Blades’, an assassin hero from the Starcraft Universe. She is an avenging harpie..

‘Hell hath no fury like a woman swarmed..’ Queen of Blades.

These blades are not for cutting the grass. They are for exacting poetic retribution. When the Principle of Relatedness is cut off for the sake of having power over others She haunts the lawn, working tirelessly behind the scenes to reach those parts that official channels cannot, making us live in the ivory tower the lawn serves…

cut off from self and others.

Sweet Porridge.

Once upon a time there was a very poor mother and daughter. They were so poor that the only had the clothes on their backs and a tiny, ramshackle cottage with a leaky roof.

They were hungry aaal the time.

”Baby bawled for mama -skull savaged it,

Death-hunger anger, the kissless trap-clamp.” Ted Hughes.

One day all the mother could give the girl was a single dry biscuit.

”Make it last”, she said.

The girl went out into the forest to see what she could find. There she met a very old lady with a knapsack who knew of her plight.

”I haven’t eaten for three days,” sighed the old lady. ”Do you have anything to eat?”

And so the girl gave her that one biscuit she had.

”Baby bawled for mama -skeleton skelped it,

Clash of crockery knuckles, the shatter bottle bones.” ibid

”That was very kind”, said the old lady, ”and now I’m going to give you something.” And out of her knapsack she pulled out a small iron pot.

”This is a magical pot. It won’t work for me but it will work for you,” she explained. ”When you want to eat, say…

”Little pot, cook!

”And when you’ve had enough, say…’

”Little pot, enough!”

So the girl rushes in with the pot to show her mother. She sets it on the kitchen table and says…

”Little pot, cook!”

And before you know it the pot has filled up with porridge.

”Baby bawled for Mama, grave grinned, gripped it,

windowgap teeth and a flagfloor tongue…” ibid

They had three bowls each.

‘Little pot, enough!”

And they were never hungry again.

Then one day, mother got a bit peckish while the girl was out at play and thought she’d have a bowl or two of porridge seeing as there was such an endless supply an’ all……

….though it took her a couple of goes to remember exactly what to say to the pot…

”Cook, little pot…”

”Porridge, pot…”

”Little pot, cook…”

And when she got it right the little pot duly obliged till she’d had her fill.

‘Stop, little pot…’

”Little pot, stop…’

”Cease and desist, oh pot…”

But the magic words weren’t right and the pot kept making porridge till it started to pour off the table and onto the floor..

”Stop it, pot…”

”Frickin hey, pot..”

”Mama came, with her bull nostrils

Mama came in the skin of a weasel..” ibid

But the pot kept making porridge. It filled the kitchen till the door squeezed off it’s hinges. It squidged the roof off. It poured out into the street and down the hill. It porridged everything.

The girl was coming up the hill and saw the terrible oaty flood, guessing immediatley what had happened..

”Little pot, enough!”

And so the little pot stopped making its porridge…

but not without considerable damage to..

everything.

In a culture where the divine feminine is repressed, relatedness in general and mothering in particular are going to become impoverished. Having had her own sacred bedrock eroded and devalued, mother has less to pass on to her daughter than she might…

precious little to nourish her spiritual life.

A single dry biscuit.

It’s not her fault.

The systematic, unrelenting depracation of the sacred feminine through untold generations takes its toll in every generation, compounded with time, lived out as an unnameable loss, a vague unease, a sense of not belonging, lack of worth and emotional deprivation.

Life unravels where it cannot unfurl.

We pride ourselves on how evolved we are, so much so that its almost counter-intuitive to suggest that ours is a culture wrung through with emotional deprivation. After all, we have everything. And yet one wonders whether this fixation on having to have everything is not part of the problem, our way of trying to deal with it.

Consumer society takes in more than it actually needs in response to a deep undercurrent in the psyche that remains unfed despite the gorging. Likewise, the compulsion to provide the next generation with over and above what they need is a poverty based gesture that attempts to compensate the loss of relatedness endemic in Single System systems…

We will go to extraordinary lengths to deny this..

”People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. …” CG Jung.

We also do this collectively. We do it with aggressive, vehement determination. Our collective inner poverty and emptiness are projected onto nations and peoples in much the same way as the individual narcissist will use those about him to emotionally feed from and into whom he will deposit his waste.

The deprived child needs others, not for companionship (for that ship has already sailed) but as carriers of unbearable anguish. He is pragmatic in his priorities. A culture imbued with the gnawing hunger of this inner poverty will resort to similar strategies. A container must be found and preferably held behind razor wire.

or a nice 6m stone wall….

Having to give up your biscuit is too much cognitive dissonance for the dominant myth of what a pinnacle we are. We split ourselves to deal with it…

schooled in double-think…

and so we’re perfectly happy with the paradox of invading people for their own good and actually need the contradictions of food mountains alongside starving millions in order to be reassured that the madness is really only happening to some one else…

in far far away land.

We bring nations to their knees, militarily and materially, for reasons far greater than stealing their grain store. Or doing the right thing. We create economic systems of recurring famine so that we can have entire peoples to shoulder the projection of our unacknowledged collective hungering.

It’s certainly true that..

”every gun that is made is theft from those that hunger…” D Eisenhower.

but the full irony is that we then point those guns precisely at the Hungry in order to compell them to continue shouldering the starving shadow of the West.

while we help them….

develop

with contracts to fund the infrastructure needed to maintain the poverty we are ostensibly alleviating…

but cannot for that would be to face it in ourselves. The heroine of our story faces the reality of her situation. Her single biscuit cannot be denied.

So the girl has to go into the forest to find something that will feed her.

”If we don’t have what we need from our parents it may be necessary to go to the Great Mother and the Great Father.” Sylvia Brinton Perera.

The daughter gets what she needs from her ancient heritage. It is often the case that deprivation and loss are initiators in life, dark pits that press the youth to brave the wild forest and discover the true extent of her own inner depths.

She meets the Great Mother who tests her to see if her heart is still in the right place despite all her trials and suffering, to make sure that she has not become overly bitter, grasping or turned to self-pity.

The gift of the biscuit is a form of self-sacrifice, a gesture that acknowledges there is more to life than the satisfaction of need . She gives herself in service to a higher principle. Not to mention a brush with death, that great quickener of consciousness….

Its a kindness that cannot go unrewarded. Honouring the deep psyche has a way of making it’s treasures available to us. When you stop trying to bend Life into some prescribed shape before agreeing to live it to the full….

Life loves you back.

The magic pot is a vessel of transformation. Raw and indigestible experience is cooked until it becomes edible and nourishing.

But its important to remember whose pot it is.

Like many a mother whose potential has been hobbled, whose opportunities have been curtailed, the mother in our story unwittingly lives out her forgotten hopes for redemption, her own wholeness, through her child.

Its understandable.

The child,

“will arouse certain longings in the adult … longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out..” CG Jung

The problem is greater than deprivation. Nature abhors a vacuum and tends to fill it with porridge.

Other people’s porridge.

With bull nostril and weasel skin.

”the disturbing forces that lie below the level of conscious adult life are intuited by the unconscious of the child and give rise to vague fears, apprrehensive fantasies and disturbing dreams.” F. Wickes

and its left to the child concerned to put an end to it….

”an irrevocable loss for no new and finer comradeship takes place of the outgrown one….” ibid

all of which means, perhaps, that the greatest thing we can do for our kids is to find our own porridge pot, to have gone looking in the woods ourselves and discovered meaning in life when they are not around.