Tag: Freud

The Goose Girl.

There was once a Princess who became betrothed to a King who lived far away. Her mother, the Queen, packed up her dowry of silver and gold for the journey. Then she took out a small knife and cut one of her fingers, letting three drops of blood fall onto her handkerchief. This she gave to her daughter personally saying, ‘dear child, look after this carefully. It will be of great service to you along the way.’

The royal procession set off on its way, the Princess astride her talking horse, Falada. After some time the Princess became thirsty and asked her lady-in-waiting, who had a mean look to her, to fetch her some water. ‘Get it yourself’, came the retort; so the Princess got down from Falada and bent down low over a stream to drink. In that moment her mother’s handkerchief fell from her tunic and was carried away on the swiftly flowing waters. The lady-in-waiting noticed this and silently rejoiced because she knew that with this loss she now had power over the young bride. When the Princess returned to the bridal party she found the lady in waiting astride Falada. ‘My nag will do for you.’

At every step of the journey the Princess had to make one concession after another, loosing first her royal clothes, then her jewels and finally her crown to the wicked maid who, as they arrived at the bridegroom’s castle, made her her swear a blood oath never to tell anyone what had happened.

The young King welcomed the wicked maid as his bride. His father, the old King, noticed the Princess standing forlorn in the courtyard and later asked the false bride about her. ‘ Oh, she is just someone I picked up along the way, give her some work to do.’ So the old King gave her to the goose herd, Conrad, and bad her tend the flock out in the meadow all day long. Meantime the false bride had become anxious that Falada might tell the story of what happened to someone so she begged her new husband to sell the horse to the knacker and have him kill the animal for meat and hide. The Princess came to hear of what was to pass and paid the knacker to hang up Falada’s head in an archway on her route to the meadow so she could exchange a few loving words with him.

‘Alas Falada, hanging there!’ she grieved.

‘Alas, young Queen, how ill you fare. If this your Mother knew, her heart would break in two.’

Once out in the pasture Conrad tried to take advantage of the Princess. He notices her unbraiding her plaits and is spellbound by the golden locks, wanting some of her hair for himself. She summoned the wind to blow off his hat such that he had to chase it about here and there, leaving her in peace to comb and braid her hair once more.

“Blow, blow, thou gentle wind, I say,
Blow Conrad’s little hat away,
And make him chase it here and there,
Until I have braided all my hair
And bound it up again.”

Conrad later complained to the old King that the Princess were some kind of witch who spoke to dead horses and summoned the wind. The old King hid himself next morning and watched her as she exchanged loving words with Faluda’s head and distracted Conrad with the wind once out in the meadow so that he would leave her alone.

That evening the old King took her aside and asked why she did these things but the Princess was mindful of her blood oath and said nothing. The old King, being wise, said, ‘well if you will not tell me perhaps you can tell it to the hearth,’ and he went away. The girl crept towards the hearth and cried pitifully, emptying her heart into the darkness. Meantime the old King had been standing close by and heard everything. He went to his son and told him he had been duped by the wicked maid and that the goose girl was in fact his true bride. A feast was laid on and when the false bride arrived the old King asked her a riddle, ‘what punishment should be served on an usurper who betrays her mistress?’ The maid replied she should be put naked into a barrel spiked with nails and dragged about the streets… and so it came to pass. The maid dies a hideous death and the Princess is reinstated to her former station. She marries the young King and they live happily ever after.

We are used to the idea that fairy tales are symbolic. But what do we mean by that exactly? Moreover, how are we to understand a symbolic story which has, as its central theme, the consequences which unfold as a result of the loss of the symbol, the handkerchief with its three spots of blood? Let’s begin by seeing if we can arrive at a definition of what is meant by ‘symbol’ and then see what we can understand from the story about what happens when the symbol is lost.

For Freud symbols are effectively allegories, X means Y. The camouflage of cultural prudery simply has to be stripped away to reveal what the symbol ‘really’ means. His approach is reductive and runs the risk of the symbol being diminished to ‘nothing but’ repressed sexuality, a death wish, or something equally distasteful to Victorian sensibilities, a stand-in for a repressed idea, wish, or traumatic memory. Thus the blood spotted handkerchief would likely be treated in a way which limited its significance to a transitional or, in fact, displaced maternal object.

From a Freudian perspective the loss would therefore represent the painful separation from the mother and the consequent instability of the daughter’s identity. At the same time, because blood is associated with menstruation, virginity and sexual maturation, the talisman and its loss would seem to condense meaning into the daughter’s ambivalence to impending adult sexuality.

Bettleheim, following in Freud’s footsteps, treates the story in his ,’Uses of Enchantment’ as a cautionary Oedipal tale warning children to give up the idea of usurping the same sex parent, ‘because of the terrible retribution which is meted out to [those who seek] to replace the rightful marital partner.’

Whilst such a rendering of the symbol is interesting it doesn’t seem to do the fullest scope of meaning justice, not to mention the sense that the symbol and therefore the whole story is given no more significance than that of an educational artefact interpreted along the lines of paradigm a priori accepted as gospel. You cannot help but feel that classical psychoanalysis approaches such gems rubbing its hands together with a preordained sense of, ‘well, we already know what this means.’

Jung’s approach is really quite different, a symbol for him is ‘the best possible expression for something unknown.’ He goes further, anything can be considered symbolic, ‘if we assume that it states or signifies something more and other than itself which eludes our present knowledge, [but] is nonetheless known to exist.’CW 6 §814 And then a step further; ‘The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning.’ (§816)

In other words, whilst we understandably want to know what the symbol means we mustn’t jump to conclusions. The symbol is not only essentially unknowable but derives its very significance by refusing to be an object of knowledge. As soon as we say, ‘it means X’, it becomes a lifeless remnant and loses its transformative potential. Hence Jung’s insistence on developing the ‘symbolic attitude’, which is essentially one of epistemological humility in which we have to admit we are eternally out of our depth. Having said that we may still make some valuable observations/approximations provided we refrain from trying to draw any definite set of conclusions.

It could be said that Jung does not, in fact, go far enough in his collected works. In his rebuttal of Freud he seems to be somewhat on the back foot and leaves others to develop the idea that the symbol is not only unknowable but alive. His insistence that we consider our attitude towards the symbol is not quite the nuanced approach of Gerhard Adler’s conviction that the symbol is alive. Adler takes this to its logical conclusion and insists on ‘relationship with’ as well as ‘attitude towards’.

The difference between Jung and Adler’s formulation of what constitutes a symbol is considerable. By way of example, I recall being invited to lunch by a girlfriend’s mother for the first time. Her ‘attitude towards’ me was polite enough, though her failure to ‘relate with’ was made embarrassingly evident when she leaned past me to address her daughter at the end of the meal, asking in a hoarse whisper, ‘does he want any more?’ For god’s sake, I was sat right there. The guest, the symbol, deserves to be addressed directly.

Having said that, Jung’s approach to the symbol in the Red Book is very different from his formulations in the shop front of the collected works. There he affords the symbol with a visceral autonomy and intimacy of feeling absent in the academic exposition of his more scholarly publications. Jung writes, ‘I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my Soul.’ His insistence that the Red Book only be published 50 years after his death is testimony to the taboo we have against treating the emanations of the unconscious as having their own life. The handkerchief has indeed been lost.

Where Jung and Adler agree is that the loss of the handkerchief, the symbol which connects to one’s origins, is responsible for the collective neurosis of our time. Whilst the handkerchief could well represent a loss of personal connection, fairytales are collective motifs and have a phylogenic significance as well as an ontological one. From a cultural point of view the story describes the hidden cost of the Age of Enlightenment with its emergence of independent ego consciousness. The Princess as spirit-of-the-times loses her bond to the (ma)trix of her belonging, her rootedness in the psyche, the spirit-of-the-depths, and becomes so alienated from herself in the process that the collective shadow/false self comes into ascendency resulting in baleful regression and self estrangement.

In our story this decline is represented by the usurpation of the false bride, and the degradation of the Princess’ status which follows. ‘The unexpected result of this development is that an uglier face is put upon the world.’ (CW10 para 181) The monotheism of consciousness loses its connection to the unconscious such that its later ‘discovery’ by Freud characterises it as no more than the ego’s repository.

Adler explicitly defines neurosis as a loss of the symbolic attitude. Jung describes our collective neurosis as one of excessive civilisation, which amounts to the same thing. Jung’s argument is not that civilisation is bad. It is that civilisation has produced an extreme one-sidedness of consciousness which has become so highly differentiated and rational it has cost us a dissociation from the archaic layers of the psyche and left us marooned in a pre-symbolic concretised world devoid of meaning. Moreover, the ‘chymical wedding’, the internal synthesis of opposites, the fruition of human consciousness, cannot occur. The Princess loses all her power to the false bride, is struck dumb and sent out to mind the geese.

Fortunately there are forces at play other than those of chaos and ill will. The presence in the story of Falada, the speaking horse, suggests the agency of centres of consciousness other than that of the ego, which, try as one might, cannot be silenced or killed off. Falada’s continued support of the Princess, even after death, suggests a locus of unconditional influence in the psyche immune to circumstantial events. It also suggests that meaning is intrinsic to being and not something merely ascribed by consciousness. This is rather different from the ordinary idea that consciousness simply projects meaning onto an inert object and underscores both the agency and the autonomy of the symbol. Analyst Barbra Hannah describes Falada’s head as the autonomous inner intelligence that punctures self-deception.

Falada repeatedly refers to our Princess as ‘young Queen’, reminding her of who the really is and that her current station as goose girl is neither real nor acceptable. He also repeatedly references her mother’s grief which maintains the connection to the archaic psyche despite the loss of the handkerchief.

‘Alas, young Queen, how ill you fare. If this your Mother knew, her heart would break in two.’

For as long as the false bride sits on the throne, the Princess is plagued by the immature iteration of her animus. Conrad is juvenile, harassing, intrusive, demeaning and wants a piece of her. She can only keep him bay by invoking the intervention of the wind to keep him busy. The un-braiding and re-braiding of her hair seems to represent the ‘de-integration’ and ‘re-integration’ of the developing psyche described by analyst Michael Fordham, those natural operations required for individuation to take place whereby the psyche alternatively loosens and then reconfigures itself in the process of establishing increasingly mature and differentiated ego states. In order to do this the Princess needs to get Conrad off her back and summons the wind to do the job. The Princess is having to reach beyond herself, past the instinctive knowing of Falada to something truly elemental. She does not command the wind, she invokes it, speaking to it as a living being.

‘Blow, blow thou gentle wind..’

In myth and legend the wind is often associated with a benevolent and protective natural power which comes to the aid of human distress. In the Odyssey, Athena implores Zeus to send favourable winds to aid Odysseus. In the story of Zephyrus and Psyche, from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Zephyrus, the west wind, acts as a helper. Cupid’s servants place Psyche in a beautiful meadow, and Zephyrus carries the vulnerable woman into a protected psychic space.

The Princess’ prayerful invocation not only mobilises the wind, it acts as a reconnection to the living protective symbol originally contained in the handkerchief. By calling on the wind the Princess is remembering her lost connection to the archaic layers of the psyche which then has the magical effect of bringing about transformation. Her reliance on the wind, the embodiment of ego’s dependence on factors other than its own mastery and control, bring about a succession of events, Conrad’s complaint to the old King, which then gets this more mature animus figure involved. His trick with the hearth reconnects the Princess with the divine feminine, since the hearth is the realm of Hestia, sister to Hera, the mother of the Gods. The natural order of things being restored, Nature takes its course and the Princess is returned to her rightful station.

Our story describes the process by which the loss of the symbol, the handkerchief, which connects ego consciousness to the archaic realm of the psychic matrix, plunges the bereft Princess into neurotic disorder. It then shows how the autonomous operation of instinctive forces represented by Falada, maintains her spirits while the even more elemental psychoid forces of the wind protect her during the psychological work of braiding and unbraiding necessary to catch the old King’s attention. The story shows how the ego is not the agent of transformation in the psyche, but that by patiently attending to what’s needed circumstances are influenced such that help might be forthcoming. The reestablishment of the symbolic attitude demonstrated by the value afforded to Falada’s head and the invocation of aid from the wind, set in motion the restitutive events which resolve the neurosis and lead full circle to the recovery of wholeness.

AJA talk. The Two Old Friends and Snow White.

Here are two stories which illustrate narcissistic and borderline personality structures respectively. We’ll begin with the stories themselves, and how their similarity suggests a common developmental origin in childhood. Then we’ll look at how their divergence from one another shows up at the developmental threshold of symbol formation and finally how they differ with reference to feelings of guilt and shame.

The Two Old Friends.

There were once two old friends who lived on different sides of the mountain. One of the old friends was so hungry he 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 was so hungry he had gone out in search of poppy seeds. He came home empty handed but filled up his sack with ashes, thinking to go and dupe some poor fool in the village below. 

Half way there the two old friends bumped into each other. 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 the sacks and save themselves a journey down into the village which, in any case, surely didn’t 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 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 in the middle they beat one another black and blue before dissolving into 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 snuck into his garden to liberate 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, with no more thought for the other old friend until he 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 it 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..’

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

……………………………………………………

Snow White.

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

A Queen dies giving birth to a princess, as white as snow, as red as blood and as black as ebony wood. The King soon married again, a proud and vain woman who hated Snow White and wanted her dead. The Queen had a magic mirror which she would consult, asking, ‘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 and it spoke differently..

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

The furious Queen ordered a huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and kill her, bringing back her lungs and liver as a token. But the huntsman let her go out of pity. He returned with the lungs and liver of a boar he’d killed 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 and went to the dwarves cottage, crying: “Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap.” Snow-White unbolted the door and let her in. “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,” cackled the Queen to herself, and ran away.

The seven dwarfs came home just in time to resuscitate her.

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 went knocking once more. When Snow White let her in, she said: “Now I will comb you properly for once.” Hardly had she put the comb in her hair than the poison in it took effect, and the girl fell down senseless. The dwarfs again returned just in time to remove the comb and save her.

When the Queen got home she again consulted the mirror which 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 this the wicked queen quivered with rage. “Snow-White shall die,” she cried, “even if it costs me my life!” Whereupon she went into a secret, lonely room and there she made a very poisonous apple. When it was ready she dressed herself like a peasant and called upon Snow White once more who hardly had more than a bite of it than she fell down dead. And when the Queen again asked of the looking-glass….

“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, in so far as an envious heart can have rest.

The grief stricken dwarfs made Snow White a transparent coffin of glass and they laid her in it. They wrote her name upon it in golden letters and took it in turns to watch over her. One day, a king’s son came into the forest and was amazed at 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 then just so happened that 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, replied, “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.

Fairytales as psychological paradigms.

I bought these two stories as playful ways of thinking about Narcissistic and Borderline structures. In the story of the Old Friends we have all the rivalry, deception, manipulation and seduction of narcissism. In Snow White we have the denial, splitting and envious spoiling associated with a borderline adaptation.

Adhesive Anxiety.

You will 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 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 earlier primitive mode of relating in which the infant relies on physical contact prior to any differentiation between self and other.’

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.” which keeps the infant’s experience organised.

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 infant must then develop a compensatory ‘second skin’, a defensive structure which forms when it experiences:

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

Adhesive attachment is thus a response to a certain kind of maternal holding, grandiose and encapsulated in the face of intrusive absence, fragile and enmeshed in the face of envious spoiling. It is a response to the severing of what Jean Liedloff would call the ‘continuum concept’, the essential containment of skin to skin contact which ensures confidence, coherence and going on being.

These two different ways in which the continuum is interrupted evoke distinct compensatory patterns of idealisation which shape future development. The ‘too loose hold mother’ idealises the child to bridge the gap, but, as Schwarz-Salant reminds us, it comes in the form of, ‘you’re wonderful but I hate you for it,’ giving rise to later splits in the nascent ego. The ‘too tight hold mother’, idealises herself with ‘though you’re an encumbrance I can heroically bear with it,’ giving later rise to a dread of autonomy and the terror of envious attack.

How does this pertain to the story of the Two Old Friends?

The two old friends are poor. They have nothing but the clothes on their backs and no food to eat. Their compulsive cheating is born of deprivation. The backdrop of this story is one of maternal neglect and subsequent impoverishment of inner resources. The internalised mother as nourishing object is nowhere to be seen. Developmentally, she is insubstantial and cannot provide sufficient cohesion for the infant’s interior world, giving rise to an experience of self which Bruno Bettelheim describes as ‘the empty fortress’, characterised by self-aggrandisement and defensive fortifications.

The mountain between the old friends suggests separation, but they remain psychically glued in endless rivalry, in place of I and Thou, compulsively repeating the same patterns of betrayal, anger, and identification. Their fused, symbiotic arrangement means the old friends cannot genuinely relate to one another. They cannot establish a stable boundary between self and other. Fraudulent interactions are structured to serve and maintain the self’s omnipotent position rather than to promote mutuality.

Jung saw narcissism as an inflated, defensive ego which 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. 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’, says Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘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.”

The old friends’ beatings and quarrels do not break their bond, they reinforce it,
acting 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 nascent Central American Republics went to war with one another after gaining independence from Spain (15th Sept 1821), in order to know themselves as nations. Indigenous culture had been eroded by colonisers 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.

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 glued in psychic obligation and by whom her ontological status has been relegated. Snow White’s autonomy is intolerable because it undermines the sense of enmeshment which maintains cohesion. Snow White’s ‘fairness’ doesn’t just offend the Queen, it collapses the pre-eminent self-structure which gives the Queen meaning. She has no alternative source of worth beyond the impulse to eclipse, no purpose beyond domination.

Alchemically, Snow White’s red, white and black nature point to her psychic wholeness which the Queen can neither attain nor tolerate. The Queen’s wish to eclipse and erase Snow White is a desperate effort to destroy anything which might upset the hegemony upon which her identity has come to depend.

The Queen’s adhesive wish to devour Snow White’s lungs and liver seem especially significant. In antiquity the liver was the seat of feeling, hence Prometheus’ poetic punishment of having his liver repeatedly eaten for daring to have compassion for humanity expressed by his theft of fire. The lungs serve pneuma, the spirit, and so the Queen’s destructive incorporation constitutes an attack on the emotional and spiritual vitality of the child, an enactment of her desire to internalise qualities lacking in herself.

Erasing and incorporating is how the wicked witch preserves her sense of self. I came across an example in the street the other day. A mother is striding along at great speed. Her three year old 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 this gobbles up his embodied experience.

Fordham’s “symbol formation.”

Now let’s think about the emerging differences between the stories as they approach the threshold of symbol formation. 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 inner and outer worlds.

‘My interior,’ says Jung in the Red Book, ‘gives birth to the children of chaos of the primordial mother. 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.’ (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. Thus, symbol formation exercises the self’s developmental potential, its ability to transform raw experience into meaning and is predicated, to paraphrase Katerina 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 two old friends operate almost entirely on the level of the concrete and pre-symbolic. The exchange of sacks, nuts for oak apples, poppy seeds 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 transactional trickery and theft in place of imaginative transformation. When my younger brother was about six or seven 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 of themselves that they proudly announced what they had done and were most upset when no one else thought them quite so clever.

Failure to Internalise the Other.

Symbol formation requires internalising a loving object but the two old friends have none and so can only exist through physical confrontation or fraudulent exchange. Their encounter has the effect of confirming isolation rather than alleviating it because every transaction is an exercise in deceit. They “know” themselves through either competitive rivalry or identifying with one another rather than via intersubjective recognition. Every affect (shame, anger, greed) must be acted out as hitting, swapping, or stealing.

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 this space. Symptomatic 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.

Death and rebirth.

Symbol formation finally occurs with the dusting down of the old friend following his interment, a gesture which acknowledges and validates the subjective needs of the other. This can occur once the cycle of trickery is broken by the old friend handing over the gold to his wife for safe keeping. It’s a crucial moment in the story because it introduces the possibility of a mediating third who both takes the gold in and gives it back in a differentiated (shareable) form. This can happen once the old friend has experienced the de-integration and re-integration of death and rebirth sufficiently to enable sharing.

The motif of burial as a metaphor for the crossing of developmental thresholds is to be found in the initiation rituals of many indigenous cultures. Symbolic burial represents a creative regression into the womb of the Earth. In ‘Symbols of Transformation’ Jung repeatedly develops the idea that regression is not merely pathological but a necessary precondition for further psychological development. Throughout the “Hymn of Creation” and “Sacrifice” chapters Jung argues that regression toward the mother-symbol is teleological, not merely infantile. In his essay, ‘On Psychic Energy’, in vol 8 he says, “From [this] standpoint the libido regresses to the imago of the mother in order to find there the memory associations by means of which further development can take place…” Jung is wanting to contrast regression which becomes transformative because it can be symbolised and regression which remains trapped in repetitive enactment because it is not.

Developmentally, both the wooden chest and the earthen grave suggest 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 and the earthen grave are ”holding environments,” psychological spaces within which the infant’s unintegrated anxieties can be contained and transformed through her empathic responsiveness. 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.

The final division of the gold is thus not merely a moral ending. It is the symbolic fruit of a regression that has finally become developmental rather than merely repetitive. The circular economy of narcissistic trickery gives way to a new psychic organisation centred on participation rather than possession.

Snow White and symbol formation.

It seems the brothers Grimm were struggling with their own capacity for symbol formation in the early editions of their work. In the first 1812 edition the wicked witch is Snow White’s own biological mother. By 1819, in the second edition, the birth mother dies and a step mother is given the status of wicked witch. This alteration seems to reflect society’s increasing tendency to idealise motherhood by displacing destructive maternal impulses onto third parties. The 1812 text is arguably the more psychologically striking version, because the “Terrible Mother” and the “Good Mother” are united in a single figure rather than being split between mother and stepmother. In the second edition the murderous maternal impulses are denied, split off and projected.

The Queen, as destructive maternal introject, harries the child’s emerging autonomy, enviously attacking her in order to split off psychic pain which cannot be consciously represented or symbolised. Such denial both negates and depersonalises in the same breath. It is helped to do so by what Meltzer and Segal call 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 herself of a rival, it is to ensure ontological security rooted in the wish to dominate and control.

The Queen 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 and that suffuses their interaction, ‘what a fright you look, I will lace 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.

Shame and Guilt.

We could say that the two old friends lack empathy but I wonder if this misses the mark somewhat. The failure of empathy feels symptomatic of something more fundamental; the realm of I and thou has yet to be inhabited. It’s not that cheating feels either wrong or justified, it’s simply that cheating failed to work. The two old friends are pre-moral rather than amoral. The concept of being-with is reduced to, ‘you’re with me or against me’. The choice is between identification or enmity. This is manifest initially as the shared projection of inferiority onto the villagers they separately hope to fool, then, upon one another and finally upon the rich man whom they seem to feel deserves being robbed.

There is no guilt about any of this. In every instance guilt is warded off and converted into the active shaming of third parties. There is as yet not enough differentiation out of what Masud Khan would call ‘symbiotic omnipotence’ to exercise the distinction between subject and object upon which basis self reflection and moral consideration might be possible. Being and behaviour are still fused. This makes a mine field of personal accountability. Any criticism levelled at behaviour feels like a shaming attack levelled at the core of being. Persona, confused with the Self, cannot distinguish guilt from shame and so it has to be projected.

In Snow White, guilt and shame are treated very differently. Our heroine seems to have little capacity to defend herself from the envious shaming of the wicked queen. She even seems to invite attack, allowing her into the temenos of the dwarves cottage despite being expressly warned not to. She buys into the shaming condemnation of the wicked witch in line with Ferenczi’s ‘identification with the aggressor’. Ferenczi describes the child as becoming almost automatically attuned to what the aggressor wants, attempting to anticipate and gratify those wishes, effectively abandoning her own subjectivity in order to survive the relationship.

The borderline structure will thus assume guilt and blame, as a form of appeasing judgmental or destructive objects and warding off catastrophic expectations. The emotional dysregulation involved often has much to do with overwhelming feelings of responsibility, a form of plea bargaining to prevent abandonment. When Snow White is about to be killed by the huntsman there is no sense of her protest only of an appeal for mercy. When the WW comes calling at the cottage she feels she has to let her in despite her own experience which the Queen’s shaming of her further undermines.

Both Snow White and the two old friends demonstrate a curious ambiguity to the prospect of shame. Both parties are mobilised against it whilst subtly colluding with it. Whilst shame infuriates the two old friends they would rather be shamed than held accountable. Whilst shame tends to collapse Snow White she would rather be shamed than be abandoned.

The tendency of these two adaptations to share internal organisation around shame and the prospect of abandonment or humiliation respectively makes their interaction with one another somewhat complicated. Though both fall into denial they tend to do so in somewhat opposing ways. These differing defensive structures can then fit together in a mutually reinforcing dynamic. The borderline tends to carry guilt and shame internally, disowning aggression, competence and self sufficiency with which the narcissistic structure happily identifies to shore up fragile esteem whilst projecting shame, vulnerability, and dependency which the borderline individual, whose identity is already organised around expectations of defectiveness and abandonment, is especially susceptible. Such mutual projection, could be called a complementary system of projective identification, each person’s defensive organisation temporarily stabilises the other’s in a psychological version of the nursery rhyme about Jack Spratt and his wife;

‘Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean, and so between the two of them, they licked the platter clean.’

Conclusion.

As useful as these stories are they do both seem incomplete. Even though the two old friends have learned to share there is still the sense that their theft of the gold remains unaddressed and that there is yet some reparation to be made with the rich man. The story seems to achieve further resolution in a later Grimm’s fairytale ‘The Stolen Farthings’, where a young ghost can only find peace and cease its haunting once the guilt of theft can be bought to light and deflating reparations made.

Similarly, whilst Snow White is liberated from the tyranny of the wicked queen her glass entombment has a different quality than the earthen grave of the old friend, suggesting preservation rather than transformation. Her situation is still unresolved insofar as she remains ideal which is perhaps why the further story of Snow White and Rose Red becomes necessary. In that story clearly differentiated sisters co-operate to deal with an ungrateful dwarf who seems to represent the unintegrated envious aspects of the wicked queen left hanging over from the previous fairytale. The sisters befriend a bear with whom they are able to play aggressively without destroying the relationship. It is the bear who ultimately deals with the dwarf though the girls create the relational conditions within which the dwarf’s power can be overcome. The feminine is no longer represented by a single idealised protagonist. It has become two legitimate forms of femininity. The dwarf, unlike the Queen, leaves behind a treasure, so some value is derived from the difficult encounter above and beyond the relief of a happy ending.

The Unconscious, a Horse Egg?

based on an Hungarian folktale.

Two villagers were crossing a field when they came across… a strange ‘something’. Neither knew was it was. They had never seen such a thing. One prodded it with a toe. The other turned it over with a stick. Between them they gathered the courage to see if it could be lifted and decided to take it back to the village council. Let them decide.

The Council were mightily perplexed. Despite their great experience and vast knowledge, none of them had ever seen such a thing. They went and asked the Mayor, known for his great wisdom. At great length he announced that the thing must be.. an egg. The others were amazed, of course, how wise, it must be an egg.

But what kind of egg? A dragon? Or maybe a griffin? Someone cleverly remembered that here had been a horse in the field, so… it must be a horse egg! Of course! But what to do with the horse egg and how to hatch it? The local horses all seemed too stupid to know what to do. So they elected to take turns to sit on the egg and hatch it themselves.

Eventually news spread and people from the neighbouring village came to have a look. One small boy observed that the egg had a bad smell and poked fun at them all saying that their egg had gone off. The villagers were peeved at being so humiliated and decided to take revenge. They took the egg to the top of a hill, wanting to roll it down on top of their rude neighbours. But the egg went off course, breaking up in a gorse bush half way down. This frightened a rabbit who had been sleeping there. It took off at great speed. ‘Look!’ they cried, ‘there goes the baby horse.’

When we speak about the Unconscious there is a tendency to assume we all mean the same thing. Jung’s break with Freud was, at least in part, because he discovered they had very different ideas about it. Likewise, though we analysts and lay persons alike all use the term ‘the unconscious’, it seems incumbent upon us to wonder about what we actually mean. Jung’s core definition is, “The unconscious is the totality of all psychic phenomena that lack the quality of consciousness.” CW 6 (Psychological Types), ¶837

Does this make us any the wiser? Is it enough to say that night is everything that is not day, or to refine further by saying that sometimes you can see your hand in front of your face but sometimes not? Moreover, considerable disagreement exists between different Jungian groups which makes a cohesive definition all the more difficult. The more archetypally oriented have a mytho-poetic slant which feels qualitatively different from the more developmentally inclined.

Anthony Stevens says, “The unconscious is the repository of the inherited potentialities of the human psyche.” ((1994), p. 54) This feels very different from von Franz’ definition, “The unconscious is not just a repository of forgotten material but a living, autonomous reality which compensates and corrects the one-sidedness of consciousness.” ((1988), p. 9) Edinger’s definition, “The unconscious is the objective psyche, a reality independent of the personal ego.” (1972), p. 5 which seems qualitatively distinct from Neumann, ‘The unconscious is not only the source of consciousness but also its matrix and its partner.” ((1954), p. xv)

Hillman’s take, “The unconscious is not a place or a container but a perspective, a way of seeing through the imagination.” (1975), p. 23. He emphasises that it is not a hidden layer beneath consciousness but is identical with the imaginal field itself. This feels very different from the developmental perspective of it being a structured psychic system.

To add a further, more philosophically nuanced layer to an already complex conversation, there is the question of whether the term ‘unconscious’ is perhaps a mere literary device. Jung says in the Red Book, ‘the unbounded makes you anxious. Consequently you seek limits and restraints so that you do not lose yourself. You cry out for the word which has one meaning and no other so that you escape boundless ambiguity. The word becomes your God since it protects you from the countless possibilities of interpretation. The word is protective magic..'(p250)

What if we were to refrain from thinking of the unconscious as a noun. Could we dispense with the term altogether? If it is not a natural object does it even exist in any meaningfully describable way? Though this rather feels like rolling the horse egg peevishly down the hill. Are we to disenfranchise the Unconscious simply because it is not ‘a thing’, especially since it is the abundant author of things; dreams, moods, inspiration, memories.

Lao tzu begins the Tao to Ching by saying

‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth;
the named is the mother of the ten thousand things.’

Analysts want to be taken seriously, feeling obliged by the gravity of our vocation to be rigorous and accountable. And yet it’s difficult not to find ourselves stammering at the edges of the known. In the ‘Birth of Tragedy’, Nietzsche says, “Language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of things.” We are inevitably like the blind Mullahs from Persian lore trying to describe an elephant from the limited perspective of feeling either the tail or the ear, the trunk or the foot. Concepts must falter when faced with that which transcends them. We are left rather wanting a propitious awe prepared to trade knowing for wonder. The epistemological humility of being able to embrace not knowing is, paradoxically, the precondition for the alchemical opus. Not-knowing is neither passivity nor ignorance, but rather the active psychological stance which allows transformation to occur.

The Narcissism of Small Differences.

There was once a Toad who lived near a pond with a Frog. Every evening Frog would sit on a stone and sing. His voice carried across the water—clear and strong—and all the animals would stop to listen.

Toad heard the singing and thought, I wish I could sing like Frog.

So one night Toad climbed onto a rock and tried. He puffed up his throat and pushed out a sound. But it came out rough and croaky. The crickets stopped chirping. The birds tilted their heads. Toad felt embarrassed.

He practiced again the next night, and the next, trying to copy Frog exactly—how he breathed, how he held his throat, how he shaped the sound. But the more he tried to imitate Frog, the worse he felt. Finally Frog came and sat beside him.

“Why are you trying to sing like me?” Frog asked.

“To be like you,” said Toad.

Frog listened to Toad croak again.

“That is not my song,” Frog said gently. “But it might be yours.”

Given Trump’s campaign promise not to involve America in foreign wars and the often stated conviction that his political rivals would bomb Iran as a means to deflect attention from domestic crises, it does seem a bit strange for us to be witnessing this billion dollar a day conflict unfold, the wish to distract our gaze from the Epstein files not withstanding.

Seen through a psychoanalytic lens it makes more sense. This brief essay will draw upon Freud’s idea of ‘the narcissism of small differences’, in order to explain it. I will draw additionally on Klein, Lacan and Jung.

Conflict, both interpersonal and international, is often accounted for by referring to the concept of projection. This is the attribution to the other of one’s own shadow material with which a person or nation then goes to war, rather than containing the tension of opposites in an interior way. So, for instance, a person might attribute to another their own bitchyness and then attack them for it, rather than hold the uncomfortable tension between the ego ideal of being ever so virtuous, on the one hand, whilst also being perfectly capable of back biting on the other.

But something else is going on here. Whilst there is undoubtedly a shadow component to Hegseth’s invokkkation of extremist Christian rhetoric, so too is there a sense that these two regimes are so much alike that dynamics other than projection seem to be at work. These less obvious realities risk perpetuating the war way beyond the need to export domestic devils.

Freud, who knew only too well from personal experience what it was like to be enviously attacked by his peers, coined the phrase, ‘the narcissism of small differences’, in a 1917 essay “Constructions in Analysis”. This concept will help us understand why Trump felt so compelled to commit to a conflict which will almost certainly be instrumental in his own downfall.

The narcissism of small differences refers to the psychological phenomenon where groups or individuals who are very similar to each other exaggerate minor distinctions and then use them as sources of hostility or conflict. In other words, the closer two groups are the more likely they are to fight over tiny differences. Freud observed this in ethnic, cultural, or social contexts, but it also applies to personal relationships. By emphasising tiny differences, people can defend their self-esteem and sense of uniqueness. The phenomenon is paradoxical; the more alike the groups are, the stronger the hostility over small distinctions.

Anthropological accounts of ethnic tribal conflicts abound in such examples but modern ‘civilised’ societies are no less prone to this curious phenomenon. During the renaissance, Italian city-states like Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca, who were all culturally very similar, were often at war with each other over hilariously minor disputes, like who had the right to display a certain heraldic colour on flags, which family had precedence in a local festival procession and which city could collect tolls from a specific bridge or river crossing. Florence and Siena, nearly identical culturally, fought a decades-long war over a disputed valley because both wanted symbolic control of a small hill. Entire armies could be mobilised over turf that was agriculturally insignificant, but prestige, honour, and identity made it a “life-or-death” matter.

In 16th–17th century Europe, during the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, Communities of Lutherans, Calvinists, or Catholics in the same towns sometimes persecuted each other without mercy, even though they shared most cultural and social practices. A tiny doctrinal difference, say, whether communion bread should be leavened or unleavened, could trigger riots, exiles, or massacres.

Perhaps the most Pythonesque example is ‘The War of the Oaken Bucket’, fought In 1325, between two nearby Italian city‑states, Bologna and Modena. They were both culturally similar and part of the same regional milieu. They fought a war that famously became associated with a wooden bucket captured from a well. The conflict was rooted in ongoing rivalries between the Guelphs (papal supporters) and Ghibellines (imperial supporters), but the immediate pretext that sparked the battle was the seizure (or alleged theft) of a bucket from Bologna by Modenese forces. The two cities met in battle at Zappolino, resulting in significant casualties, and the bucket ended up as a trophy in Modena where it is still historically displayed.

Mao’s China suffered a similarly absurd epidemic of purges for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ within the communist party. Minor differences led to massive internal conflict. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were purged for “capitalist road” tendencies despite being lifelong communists.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), party members, students, and workers were encouraged to denounce each other for “ideological errors.” The absurdity of this was that people were accusing long-time comrades and friends of being traitors for things like using the “wrong tone” when quoting Mao, not wearing Mao badges at exactly the right angle, or speaking too politely to someone labeled a “class enemy”.

Students in the Red Guards, who were all ideologically devoted to Mao, formed rival groups. Both groups wore the same Mao badges, read the same books, and repeated the same slogans. Yet they fought violently because of minor stylistic or tactical differences. One group marched clockwise around a city square, the other counter-clockwise. One read Mao aloud slightly faster than the other. The fights sometimes escalated resulting in injury and death.

The narcissism of small differences is ‘the means by which cohesion among the members of the community is made easier.’ (Freud) and describes a psychological tendency which helps strengthen internal group identity threatened by excessive sameness with other groups or individuals. Those differences become a basis for rivalry, hostility, or prejudice.

This form of Narcissism is closely related to envy because both arise most strongly between people or groups that are very similar or close to each other. In psychoanalytic thinking, envy intensifies when the other person is almost like oneself but possesses something slightly ‘other’, with the sneaking suspicion that it might be ‘better’.

Freud’s idea is that when two individuals or groups are very similar, tiny distinctions become psychologically important because they protect the ego from feeling inferior. If someone similar to me has something I lack envy arises which threatens my self-image. So I exaggerate small differences, devalue the other person or group and turn unbearable envy into riteous hostility.

Thus the “narcissism of small differences” acts as a defence mechanism against feelings of inferiority. Instead of admitting envy, the mind says, “They are actually worse than us because of this difference.” This allows the person or group to restore narcissistic self-esteem.

Melanie Klein’s contribution is that envy is not just the impulse to want what the other has, but to spoil or attack it because the other possesses it. When someone similar to us seems to have a slightly better quality, success, or recognition, envy may lead us to denigrate, criticise, or symbolically damage that person.

Lacan connects envy to the dynamics of identification and rivalry which originate in what he called the Mirror Stage. When we identify with an image of ourselves (or someone similar to us), the other who resembles us becomes both a model and a rival. Envy arises because the other seems to embody a more complete or successful version of the self. Small differences then become charged with meaning, the rival’s slight advantage threatens one’s identity, so the hostile instinct of self preservation develops around those differences. Narcissistic identification easily flips into rivalry when the other mirrors us too closely. Hitler’s generals discovered this to their cost in the Night of the Long Knives.

Jung’s nuanced contribution takes Lacan a step further insofar as envy involves the projection of the Self, which is bound to add a dangerously numinous quality to events, wayyy more charged than the projection of inferiorities. The Self represents the totality and organising centre of the psyche. This wholeness is often projected onto religious figures, leaders, lovers, or spiritual symbols. In ‘Aion’ Jung explains that individuals may experience another person as uniquely meaningful, almost larger than life, because the psyche has unconsciously invested them with the symbolic significance of the Self.

This kind of projection helps explain powerful experiences such as idealisation, hero-worship, and intense romantic love. The person appears extraordinary because they are carrying an archetypal meaning which actually originates within the collective psyche, representing the image of inner wholeness which seems divine/perfect, the reflection of an inner potential for wholeness within oneself.

What made the Ayatollah different from the other ‘strong men’ Trump so otherwise admires is that he carried a projection of the Self in a way that Putin, Marcos or Xi Jinping do not. For all the laying on of hands and bibles, which can be yours for a mere $99.99, Trump has, for some strange reason, never been able to carry off the image of the spiritual leader. Despite the profound similarities in regime ideology the teensy detail of (not) being head of the church has always eluded Trump. He recently said himself that he is unlikely to even gain admission to the pearly gates. All of which is bound to fuel an envious billion-dollar-a-day habit… of Jihadi proportions.

thanks to Dr Dale Mathers for the inspiration….

The Prince who wanted to live Forever.

Once there was a Prince who had lost his mother. He seemed rather unaffected and even sang at her funeral, though, thereafter, he developed a terrible fear of death. He went to his father the King and said, ‘Father, I do not want to die, I’m going to take refuge with the Queen of Forever, where no time passes.’ After much travail he reaches the Queen’s castle and finds the way barred by three massive gates, each guarded by a fierce monster. A servant bakes magical loaves of bread which tempt the monsters to quit their posts and so the Prince passes through, finds the Queen and lives happily for thousands of years.

One Saturday afternoon, or maybe it was Tuesday morning, the Prince decides he might go back to Reality for a visit. The Queen gives him a pair of special shoes saying, ‘when you get there you will be attacked by a very bad man. Put on the shoes to get away from him’. The Prince returns and is immediately accosted by the spectre of Death. ‘I’ve been looking for you…’ The Prince hurriedly puts on the magical shoes which speed him back to Foreverland as promised. At the gates they meet the Queen who halts Death saying, ‘Let’s throw the Prince into the air, we’ll see which side of the gate he lands’. The Prince lands within the gates and so is saved, apparently.

Our Prince has received a great fright he cannot process, the loss of his Mother. He has no-one to whom he can take his grief. It’s enough to terrify him into avoidant re-action. He cannot proceed in a world where such terrible fears exist, without anyone to validate or mediate them. He cannot go back to Mother, nor forward to Father. His autonomic nervous system shuts down and he flees to a psychic realm akin to Jung’s ‘Spirit of the Depths’ instead. In order to do this he has to collapse the process of ego/self separation and skip past the three Guardians whose job it is to keep these worlds apart.

The Guardians are bought off with bread, synonymous with the body, so that normally unavailable thresholds can be crossed and the terrors of the world left behind. But at what price? In Chinese medicine ‘the three gates’ are described as ‘obstacles in the body which prevent the full circulation of Qi’. The emotional terrors have had to become physical problems.

In his writings on hysteria, Freud’s associate Sandor Ferenczi describes three gates through which psychological trauma can create psychosomatic symptoms. First is the child not being loved; second is that excitation persists at the bodily site of trauma (1932, pp. 80, 123-124) or is displaced onto other body parts (1932, pp. 23, 80); the third is that psychosomatic symptoms are a reenactment within the body of dissociated traumatic experiences.

The Prince’s foray back to Reality is immediately met by the figure of Death, the end of identification with Timelessness, the painfully surfacing memories of intrusion and loss, the felt experience of his inner conflicts. Both Spielrein and Jung refer to the anxiety of the unknown fear which haunts hysteria. The body, sacrificed as a repository for traumatic memory, then becomes a new source of fear in the form of either unwanted impulses or somatic symptoms. The enemy is now within, ‘before which you may vainly attempt to flee to an uncertain future’. (Spielrein 1955)

Analyst Sabina Spielrein talks about the need for the destruction of old forms, distorted self-concepts, so that the new can emerge. Though, what if the destruction feels unsupported, when separation and loss do not lead to new growth but prove too momentous to undertake? What happens when the loss of oneness does not lead to twoness, when the child’s autonomy gets in the way of prohibitive harmony, when participation mystique has to give way to body odour and hairy legs?

If part of a family dynamic is that a withdrawn mother is briefly bought back to life by the new life with which she can then identify and upon whom hopes of lasting happiness are pinned, then the child attaining any kind of autonomy is a threat to such expectations. The child protects itself from this hijack by identifying with mother’s views more strongly than her own, the true self now subjugated and forced into hiding by what has had to be swallowed down as ‘love’.

I wonder if the malignant ‘secondary personality’ typical of hysteria referenced by Spielrein isn’t internalised maternal hate at the child’s nascent ego, what Marion Woodman would call ‘the Death Mother’. The child internalises a hard unresponsive emotional core, ‘an unconscious identification with the dead mother,’ (A. Green 2021 p150) its own suffering stuck in the timeless symptom of some poor afflicted organ, whose sovereignty must be renounced at the castle gates of the Queen of Forever.

Woodman adds, ‘If we are not wanted and intuit that we are a threat to our parents, our cells will have been imprinted with the fear of abandonment, the terror of annihilation.’ (Woodman 1980) Such a scenario gives rise to what Woodman calls, ‘possum mentality’ playing dead to survive but with the danger that possum ‘becomes a feature of the body/psyche which ultimately may turn against itself.’. ibid

The image of the Prince being thrown up into the air like a rag-doll to see which side of the gate he lands is just this possum mentality.. Jung puts it like this, ‘Whoever relinquishes experiencing a risky undertaking must stifle an erotic wish, committing a form of self murder.’ (Jung in Spielrein 1955)

In our story the Guardians are bought off with magical loaves, sops to Cerberus. Bread has long been associated with the body which is then given over to the Guardians to gnaw on as they will. ‘An unconscious contract of sorts is signed in which it is agreed that sexuality and the body debase the purer aims in life. A sacrifice takes place, as the rejection of the body is one’s own bodily being..’ (Bollas 1999) This rejection of the body also finds expression in rejection of the other.. ”Auto-erotic means not conscious of the presence of other people. They see only themselves and that is why they have panics.’ Jung. My Mother and I. p189

If there is an embargo on engaging with the other, or where, ‘mother’s libido is demonstrated on rather than with the infant, (Bollas ibid) then the body is objectified and relatedness tabooed. Individuation of the child is secretly construed by mother as a form of betrayal. Such mothering often paints the world as too scary to live in whilst failing to protect the child from real dangers. It is then safer for the child to be depleted, to stay fused with what is life denying and relegate suffering from psyche to soma, from the feelings to the body.

Bollas says hysteria is a defence against intimacy, finding the erotic through the internal object. Fairbairn emphasises it is a compensation for an absence of closeness. The symbol of the Prince escaping Death with his hermetic shoes in order to get back to the Queen seems to include both these interpretations, since it contains the flight from the other/body and thus the refusal of life as well as giving himself some small measure of peace in the arms of the Queen of Forever. He chooses the mortification of the flesh over the unbearable mortification of not knowing where to go, what to do, or how to live.

The Queen seems to know about this dilemma and prepared the magical shoes ahead of time. They help the Prince evade a transformative encounter. The magical shoes are like Hermes’ winged sandals. Like Hermes the Prince is also moving between worlds, between an ideal alter-ego, Spielrein’s ‘hypertrophied self’, and the much more difficult and death dealing realm where symptoms once again become feelings.

Hermes is patron of thieves. Hysteria robs bodily aliveness; words get stolen, feelings get fleeced, memories are pocketed; organs stripped of proper function. Over solicitousness and eternal understanding of others is robbery of one’s own point of view. “Understanding is eo ipso identification” (Ferenczi 1932, p. 183). and so actually a part of the psychopathology rather than the empathy it’s dressed up to be.

In Freud’s ‘Studies in Hysteria’ (1895 p4) we find this opening remark, ‘In the determination of the pathology of hysteria the accidental factor evokes the syndrome.’ What this means is that hysteria is a response to something terrible, the accidental factor, happening to the child, experiences which cannot be integrated and wear away at the body/psyche of the child concerned. In his case history of Emmy von M, Freud is quite clear she has been overwhelmed by a number of fearful shocks, though he is careful not to suggest any of these might have been sexual even where the narrative might suggest it. Why does Emmy scream repeatedly, ‘don’t touch me?’

Further to these shocks or fears of violation, Ferenczi adds the introjection of guilt. The child makes itself a party to events by feeling responsible, an idea taken further by Fairbairn who frames the need to take in the perpetrator’s guilt as a form of counterintuitive protection from feelings of unbearable impotence in the face of overwhelming situations. If I am guilty I am at least in control. Bollas then reminds us of the power of the Mother to negate sexuality specifically and the body in general. For Bollas it is not so much the seduction of the Father which is problematic but Mother’s failure to do so, a failure rooted in distaste for the embodied Otherness of the child, all the more reason to make a sacrifice of the body to the Guardians seem like a good idea.

The Queen of Forever seems to be a kind of Anima Mundi figure, an archetype of Mercy at whose feet the Prince throws himself. But since the Prince has forcibly gained access to Her with his sacrifice to the Guardians, having Her ‘at-hand’ like this is an act of inflation and so she cannot serve in her usual life affirming capacity. His flight from reality results in a stasis of specialness, which has its own deadly effect on aliveness.

Spielrein describes Hysteria as a ‘hypertrophy of the ego,’ the overblown-ness of which reflects this inflation. The Prince’s identification with Transcendence at the expense of ego differentiation can often produce revulsion of the body, a pronounced tendency towards an identity with with ascetic practices, stringent regimes to take the place of embodied autonomy, now sacrificed to the Guardians. Bollas seems to feel that the entirety of organised religion is a collective form of hysteria rooted in hatred of the body. ”It was not only Jesus who left the earthly world to join his Holy family; he paved the road walked by all hysterics, who renounce (the bread of) carnal interests to testify to their nobler existence.” (Bollas 2000)

The end of our story is not a happy one. The Prince gets to stay with the Queen of Forever, forever. But…, by definition, nothing new ever happens there. So it feels safe but also dull and un-nourishing. I wonder if Freud’s own frustrated and somewhat varying perspectives on hysteria never quite gel because he could not find a way of describing this flight into transcendent reality. His lexicon had no entry for the Queen of Forever .

For Freud, in 1895, ‘symptoms disappear if memories of the causal process are awakened with its accompanying affect… and given expression.’ Jung concurs, ‘the blocking of affect is transmuted into physical symptoms.’ (CW4 206) Jung takes Freud’s ideas that hysteria could be thought of as a foreign body further by describing it like this,. ‘In hysteria the complex has become autonomous and leads to an active separate existence which progressively degrades and destroys the constellating power of the ego complex.” 1906.

You could think of this as a rogue super-ego, or as an internalised devouring mother, gobbling up the child, or as Thanima (P Goss), the death dealing aspect of the psyche, Kali-like, which feeds upon the child’s vitality. The gradual return to life of feelings, the grounding re-establishment of the child’s subjective reality, changes the relationship, and the face, of the unconscious, which then serves to revalue the hated body, the dirt to which Earth has been relegated. There it can find meaning in dark embodiment and invest in ordinary life. Practically speaking, in therapy, this entails having ‘disturbed self esteem as the focus’, (C Asper). This exposes the shaming which has led to hatred of the body and makes it possible to turn the old question, ‘why do I have such little value?’ into a new question, ‘why have I been so devalued’?

Fear of Freedom.

People are weird.

We’re not just self destructive. We also party to the precipice.

We amass more than we need but care more about how it’s packaged than the slice of time it’s supposed to save, as though time itself were ripe for consumption.

And then….

having worked so hard to gather more nuts than you can eat, be persuaded to part with it all at the drop of a hat and marched into a hail of gunfire on the strength of some brocaded phantom you can be sure is elsewhere at the time..

So, though we might destroy ourselves in all kinds of colorful and flamboyant ways, the silent running by which folk give away what they say they most want is stranger still…..

which is why the very different revolutions of modern times all seem to have a strange something in common. Within a generation the level playing field so dearly fought for is given back into the hands of tyranny.

Within fifteen years after the storming of the Bastille and the biggest hate fest since Nebuchadnezzer, Napoleon was crowned Emperor.

Tsar Nicholas 11 of Russia was finally toppled in 1917, yet these brave revolutionaries also struggle to bear their liberty for any longer than the French, managing to replace him with Stalin who’s Great Purge of 1934-39 made the Russians all sentimental about the good ol’ days of brutal serfdom under Bloody Nicholas.

The Chinese revolution shortly after that has the same odd twist. In 1949 political equality for all was ensconced in law along with equal rights for women. Land reallocation produced massive shared wealth among the poor and yet, by 1964, just fifteen years later, the Great leap Forward had succeeded in starving 30 million of them to death.

‘After eating the grass roots and the tree bark, they ate the earth.’ Lin Chun.

In each of these historic upheavals you see the same thing. With the gates to real equality and prosperity for all thrown open, the victorious people then turn on one another, sending their own to the guillotine or the death camp. In China this was expressed in it’s most bizarre form by the civil war between the Red Guards in 1968. You’d think the two sides had different leaders and objectives but they were both loyal to Mao and went into battle with one another both bearing his image, waving his little red book and chanting the same party slogans.

What gives?

There must be factors involved other than those we might normally consider to be a priority. Psychology 101, Maslow’s  hierarchy of needs, says that people’s primary motivation is to first find shelter, food, security; and only thereafter does the hairless ape need belonging, intimacy or creative expression.

Subsequent explorations, particularly out of the Existential and Jungian schools of psychology show that meaning is sometimes more important than bread and that people will readily sacrifice comfort for cause.

Some state it even more boldly..

‘If you take care of the body at the expense of the soul you will lose them both.” Weatherall

Generally the kind of cause that makes people sacrifice their primary needs is all too clear. A call to arms, the beloved in peril. But sometimes the details of even a common cause are not that obvious and folk can wind up sabotaging their own best efforts, goals achieved somehow allowed to slip between proverbial fingers.

The work of Wilfred Bion might assist us. He suggests that within any group there is invariably a gap between the stated assumptions of the group and the way it actually operates.

”Groups have aims far different from the overt task… [These aims] have the characteristics of defensive reactions to psychotic anxiety. In fact I consider this the ultimate source of all group behavior.” W. Bion (p. 476).

In Bion’s view, what matters in group behavior is way more primitive than Freud’s conviction, that despite pretensions to self determination we still need powerful others to determine our fate and relieve us of the fear of being punished for daring to stand unaided. Bion says we have to go deeper, the ultimate sources of our distress are psychotic anxieties, and much of what happens in groups is as a result of defenses against them, so that they need not  be consciously endured.

What could these primal anxieties be?

Dark terrors are invariably to do with what is most ancient in us, both in the early life of the individual and in the ancestral memory of the collective. The deepest of these, for both individual life and cultural roots is loss of Mother.We know full well what happens when individual children are deprived of their mothers. What of Nations? What millenial impact the shaming, the humiliation and demise of the sacred feminine, on the darker hallways of the collective psyche? What shadows will they throw?

There are layers of our collective psyche that are traumatised. Culturally we are the kids of divorced parents who aren’t allowed to see Mummy anymore, can only recall her indirectly from the time worn assumption that tomorrow must be as depleted as today, as a vague feeling of loss and emptiness. Where she used to be is Weber’s alienation, Durkheim’s ennui, Freud’s melancholia, Jung’s loss of soul. The Divine Mother who has suckled the Earth for longer than memory has been cast into the sea.

”Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts o’ her tenderness:
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.” Francis Thompson.

Fortunately this desperate state can be mediated by several big guns in the paranoid arsenal. Firstly the feeling of lack can be palmed off onto inferior others to be purged in a colourful variety of nights of the long knives. Secondly, you can have some Glorious Other seem to embody everything you lack and then identify with them in a ‘participation mystique’, a fusing of being, to the point that your own destiny with all its trials and even your own safety are of little consequence.

It’s not simply that power or wealth may become one’s own possibility, just a dice throw of chance or opportunity away, but that even if you are trodden into the mud you can still be one with the Miraculous Other despite your empty belly and freezing feet.

so long as you have someone else to blame…

Sartre gives the example of the coach driver waiting for his feasting master in the winter sleet, their differences swept aside once he emerges, taut from his soiree, not by meat and drink but by an anti-semitic joke which gives the miserable coach driver a momentary warm glow of being in one mind with his oppressor.

To live in greater abundance brings perspective with it, asks how you have been living, breaks co-dependence, contradicts basic assumptions of scarcity rooted in a half forgotten story of violent loss.

If..

“Groups approximate to very primitive phantasies about the contents of the mother’s body, the elements of their emotional situations so closely allied to phantasies of the earliest anxieties that the group is compelled, whenever the pressure of anxiety becomes too great, to take defensive action (Bion, 1955, p. 456).”

then what do you think is going to happen when habituated oppression is suddenly lifted, when associations to the Great Mother’s body are ones of evisceration and dismemberment?

The new utopia cannot be entered into. Opportunity has to be passed up, conflict created, even if it is absurd and ridiculous…

rather than face…that Mother is gone.

Healing the Narcissistic Wound.

Despite the prevelance of Narcissism in our culture, the literature offers little to help us understand how such things have come about.

We have to turn to more ancient, deeper sources of wisdom.

“Myths are a primordial language…  psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul…. healing the conflicts which threaten the child.” CG Jung

So we refer back to myths as a form of public dreaming in order to become reaquainted with our preverbal experience, that within our individuality that likewise seems lost in the mists of time.

”Myths are clues… that have to do with deep inner problems. They carry rich, live, vivifying information [so that] experience will have resonance to our own inmost being and reality.” J Campbell.

A myth that gives us some clues to the problem of Narcissism can be found in the story of Hercules. It describes not only the resolution to psychopathic behaviour but helps us to see how and why it manifests in the first instance.

We will turn to the well known  labours shortly but lets begin with the circumstances of Hercules early life in order to get a sense of the provisional life that besets Narcissism and why it is that creativity and relationships are so problematic.

Hercules’ problems start very young. He is the child of queen Alcmene of Tiryns and the God Zeus. Hera, Zeus’ wife, was none to happy about this. Even though he had been named after her as a gesture of appeasment she vowed revenge….

Alcmene, fearing Hera’s retribution, abandons the child Hercules in a field hoping the gods will take care of him.

The disenfranchisment of the Divine Feminine is sweeping across the known world. Everywhere the goddess is being unseated, cast out and humiliated. A wedge has been driven between women and their sacred counterpart so that mother/infant relations have become unbearably strained.

On the one hand Hercules is ‘special’, the son of Zeus. On the other he is deprived of nurture and care. Alcmene invests all her spiritual longing into her redeemer son. She needs him to fill the gaping hole in her psyche where once her sacred femininity was lodged and with which she is now hopelessly at odds.

Meantime Hercules struggles with being the contradiction of being the future lord of all Greece whilst being left forgotten in the dusty stubble.

By chance, Hera and Athene wander by and see the child. Hera, unaware of his identity, picks him up and suckles him, but he sucks so hard that she  throws him down in anger. Athene, more patiently, takes the child to Tiryns and gives him to Alcmene to be bought up as a foundling. Alcmene, overjoyed, hopes the three drops of milk that Hercules has managed to suck will preserve him from Hera’s ill-will.

Its not to be. Hera finds out what has happened. She’s furious and sends two pythons to kill the baby while he sleeps.

”One suspects that there is often a kernel of truth in paranoid delusion.”       S. Freud

The raging goddess, once the archetypal container of infancy, is now dead set against the child. Her devaluation by Zeus throws her into revolt and overwhelms the maternal instinct to care and protect.

Hercules becomes the proto-type of the deprived child.

As our story indicates, emotional deprivation is not simply the absence of nurture. The emotional vacuum is constued as an aggressive attack the best expression of which is paranoid fantasy. Something, somewhere is trying to get me.

”Maternal failures produce reactions which interrupt going-on-being and [constitute] a threat of annihilation.” D Winnicott.

The snakes symbolise the intrusive, cold-blooded, devouring quality of emotional deprivation lived out on a human scale by the curious detail that Alcmene now raises her son as if he were a foundling. She is a mother playing at being a mother which can only produce a child pretending to be himself.

This pretence is what RD Laing calls ‘elusion’. He quotes an example from Sarte of the waiter in a cafe who is not ‘in’ what he is doing. He is somehow not himself. Not that he is pretending to be someone else, which would be less confusing, but insofar as he is pretending to be himself. He is playing at being a waiter in a cafe and has that touch-me-not quality of Narcissus.

”He is never invested, never completely interested, never “all in”.  From fear and diffidence, he always keeps the essential part of himself out.” K. O’Brian.

I pretend I am not pretending to pretend….

Hera’s snakes are an envious double bind, an attack on both the  burdensome dependence and the dismissive autonomy of the child. Her devalued status makes her cling to him and try to live through the child whose own destiny and unique unfolding gets in the way. Whatever he does he cannot get it right.

In my family this took the form of the contradictory injunctions,

‘If you don’t ask, you don’t want.’

and

”I want doesn’t get.’

There is no way around such a double-bind. Like the twin snakes it can choke the life, or at least the aliveness out of you. Mother, in urgent need to elude ambivalence and pretend not to be pretending reads the ensuing ..

”extraordinary passivity and listlessness as satiation.” G Miller.

It gets worse. The child, faced with mother going through the motions of being herself must follow suit and tie himself up in the knots of pretending to be a small boy. Such pretense must exclude creative possibility since..

”any striving is construed as malign ingratitude..” ibid

I dreamt I was in a jail, like out of a spaghetti western with bars all down one side against which I was smashing a club, screaming to be let out. Behind me, lying down on a bunk with his hat pulled over his eyes is, ‘the-man-with-no-name’. He says,

”door’s open you know”…

I throw down the club and cower in a corner… terrified at the thought that I could leave at any time..

The dream shocked me. I thought I was mature. I thought I was free and creative, despite my substance abuse at the time and the fact that I had no greater aspiration than to turn admiring heads at the traffic lights with my expensive motorcycle….

I thought I was living the bohemian life..

and so long as the life I was living was not my own I could coast along unchallenged..

secure in the knowledge that family and friends would eternally excuse my narcissistic life style and save me from the real world.

The fact was that all this being let off the hook was not the loving indulgence I took it for but rather the active witholding of Life’s Rule Book in order that I continue to accept the constrictions with which I had been raised.

My abberant lifestyle was not ‘rebellion’ at all, but a profound yet hidden conformity that my own destiny was a taboo for which I was both under-resourced and had no permit.

May as well go and pilfer the drug store..

or start a fight.

There’s nothing else to do.

Hercules does not have to play by the rules. Its his compensation for having his soul hi-jacked. And because no-one will discipline him or be sufficiently involved to teach him the ropes he is effectively caged and feral despite being given ‘every advantage’. One day kills his music teacher Linus for daring to correct his playing and instead of having to face the consequences his family spirit him off to the countryside where he can continue to be symbiotically attached to mother by whom he is..

”worshipped like a god and denigrated like a demon.” D Mathers

Hercules is not allowed to grow up. His psychopathic behaviour increases. He goes mad and kills his children in a fit brought on by the hidden hand of Hera, determined that he should not have his own life or live in his own world.

Fortunately, Hercules now has to pay his dues. He becomes depressed and accepts being sent into the service of Eurystheus, his cousin, who makes him perform many labours, a metaphor for the hard work of the psychotherapeutic process.

He has to become aquainted with all his split off aggression symbolised by the Nemean lion, the Cretan bull, the Styphalian birds, his bullshit symbolised by the filthy stables of Augeus, the Hydra that hides in the swamps of his unlived potential.

He has also to realise his own spiritual gifts, all those aspects of his own soulfullness he’s had to put on one side in order to be a vessel for others. These are represented by his task to fetch the Golden Apples of the Hesperides whose whereabouts are hidden deep in the Unconscious that require a night sea journey in a great cauldron for a boat. The metaphor is one of being slowly cooked, being transformed and being able to be taken in.

But Hercules doesn’t quite make it. Despite his successful labours he is tricked by the centaur Nessus who gives his second wife Deianira a poison tunic to give him should his affections wane, which you could pretty much count on given his habitual lack of relatedness.

The tunic consumes him….

and he throws himself on a pyre begging for death.

Then, as now,  your clothes are statements of identity, embodiments of personae. The poison tunic is an identity not one’s own, that stifles soul and gives rise to self destruction.

”Unlived life does not sit idly on the shelf. It will turn around and bite you” ML von Franz.

The great tragedy for the narcissist is not just the poverty of his early years but that it renders him so hogtied when faced with the enormity of his own potential. The first words I ever said as a client in therapy were, ‘I have more energy than I know what to do with.”

”The possibility that a once great capacity for positive living and other potentialities may have played some part in the development of psychopathy.. is worthy of careful consideration…. in reverse they might deserve the estimate of genius.” H Cleckley.

So the narcissist is doubly burdened, firstly by all the split off rage, confusion and pain at being un-mothered and secondly by the creative tension in him that demands expression.

The bonus is that all the material he has to integrate is already his own authentic Self. The difficulty is that he is at one and the same time much smaller than his puffed up image of himself, yet much bigger inside than he could imagine.

If we can accept that our own labours are noble and redeeming, worth doing for their own sake, that our creativity will both unhinge and restore us, that there is meaning and aliveness in suffering, we might fare better than Hercules who at the very least gave us a template for our own experience.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

 

Narcissism and the Bottomless Pit.

In thirty years of practice as a psychotherapist I never came across an indigenous person with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The reason is that native people generally have a way of raising their kids that is  radically different to parents in the ‘civilised’ West.

This does not mean that Western women are bad mothers, but that they have to contend with a split reality endemic in our culture that makes it difficult for baby to cross certain developmental thresholds.

On the one hand the child, as depicted in the majority of psychoanalytic literature, is a voracious power hungry little monster who battles mother for dominance and has to be brought to heel at all costs.

”Babies have become a sort of enemy to be vanquished by mother…on the premise that every effort should be made to force baby to conform when it ’causes’ work and ‘wastes’ time.’ J. Liedloff

On the other hand, and by way of compensation, we have the effusive and liberal face of Dr Spock, whose sales of his book ‘Baby and Childcare’, come second only to the Bible on the best seller list. Spock advocated ‘childcentric’ households which effectively have children ruling the roost. Detractors claim he cultivated Narcissism in millions as the most trusted name in childcare and parenting since 1940 and even hold him personally responsible for the moral decline of  western culture.

”When a society becomes out of control, it is because its members elevate self-indulgence and lack self-control…and [have] come to see gratification as a right.” R. Bradley.
.
 These radically polarised veiws of parenting presented by Freud and Spock, often operating without reference to one another under the same roof, have something strangely in common. Both the liberal, anti-authoritarian mandate of currying entitlement in children and the cold hearted philosophy of ‘you did it to yourself’ inherent in Freudian theory, marginalised the fact that women have been having babies for seven million years without the input of opinionated men in lab coats.
.
 Both men’ knew better’ than the feminine soul. To the extent that these theories were imposed upon women’s natural instincts, their innate knowing, their connection to their own mothers and to the Divine Feminine that presided over childbirth and motherhood, so too was their role undermined, ancient wisdom eroded and intrinsic understanding of what was right and proper, subverted and injured.
.
So whilst it may be true that excessive permissiveness fosters narcissistic tendencies and a sense of entitlement, it is also the case that narcissistic wounds are inevitable when the bond between mother and child is intruded upon by someone who thinks they know better than Nature herself, irrespective of the received ‘wisdom’ under consideration.
.
You’re probably familiar with the educational maxim ‘would you teach a fish to climb a tree?’ but we forget that its even more undermining to teach a fish to swim.
.
A centiped was happy, quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, ‘pray which leg follows which?
This raised her doubts to such a pitch
She fell exhausted in a ditch,
Not knowing how to run.
.
“If we have learnt certain [things] so that they have sunk below the level of conscious control, then if we try to follow them consciously we very often interfere with them so badly that we stop them”. Carl Popper.
.
It follows that if mother has it instilled in her that she doesn’t know her job  without instruction from a clipboard wielding MD then baby will be similarly confused and struggle with developmental tasks, understandably preferring the relative safety of remaining partly fused with mother in a state of  ‘symbiotic omnipotence’. (M. Kahn).
.
This interupts the process of separation and healthy growth, preventing the child from crossing the threshold associated with ‘symbol formation’. This is significant because it is symbol formation that is responsible for the experience of others as persons in their own right, and for the development of values associated with feelings about others having their own purpose and destiny. The child can get eternally caught  in the concrete thinking of symbolic equations where, for instance, worth is measured in terms of money,  loveability in terms of sexual conquest, power in terms of domination of others, all the things we recognise as symptoms of NPD.
.
‘No-one loves me, because you don’t wipe my chin.’ Liedloff.
.
The figurative representation of ideas, conflicts or wishes cannot be experienced and so metaphorical notions of honour, faithfullness, duty, empathy and so on remain conceptual ideas rather than lived and experienced realities…
.
”from which intellectualism is only to ready to emancipate itself.” C.G. Jung
.
This is most obvious in our relationships because Narcissism does not really experience the Other as such. Their humanity remains conceptual. The notion that others have equal rights is an abstract idea to be rationally concluded without actually being lived.
.
Racism and sexism are the most common outcome of such a mind set, but the irony is that the Narcissist has equal trouble conceiving of ‘his own’ in fully human terms unless they remain entirely joined at the hip. Humanity is not experienced, it is deduced, much as Socrates ‘worked out’ that one day he would die.
.
‘Socrates is a man. Men are mortal. Therefor Socrates will die.’
.
On the basis of such abstract deduction ordinary instinctual care for one another is occluded. One’s own self barely exists in its own right, how shall another fare any better?
.
The developmental threshold of symbol formation affords not only the recognition of the otherness of the Other, it also affords value and significance to the otherness of oneself, in other words to the fantasies, intuitions and aspirations emerging from the archetypal layers of the psyche that take over the job of feeding the child, as it were, from within.
.
This leads to a lack of faith, not only in others but towards life itself which cannot be trusted to provide. The child becomes a consumer…
.
‘clinging to objects and people, investing them with magical powers, ferocious in [the] demand to possess and control.” Liedloff
.
Asking Narcissism to share is thus experienced as an attack on all that is holy because money and resources have been imbued with a kind of spiritual manna. Losing hegemony over it is tantamount to desecration. The paranoid tendency of the Narcissist  is not simply that someone is out to get him, but that all he holds sacred is under attack.
.
And so the predominant experience of life is one of being a victim, no matter how much one has, nor how much there is available. It is like being a planet without a sun, or worse, having a black hole to revolve around which threatens to drain and crush at every turn. Without the inner ‘other’, there is nothing to mediate the dark forces of the cosmos.
.
”Our connection with a sacred centre [gives] a sense of real existence that counters the terror of chaos and nothingness, helps [a person] find their bearings and makes order of the Universe’. Bizint
 .
Since what we cannot integrate is invariably projected it will seem to those who stub their toe on at the threshold of symbol formation that some illegitimate other has stolen the key to happiness. He lives, not only in a state of lack but as if his divine inheritance is being withheld. And because he’s in the bind of having to deny what he needs, his lack and being witheld from is acted out in the world, which perhaps explains the conundrum of how it is possible for the richest and greatest nation in the world to sweep one of its most powerful men to high office on the shirt tails of the  slogan, ‘make America great again’, as though it were a mere dispossesed guttersnipe on the fringes of the stage.

Attack on the Child.

In order to understand the pathological need for wealth, fame and consumption that typifies Western Culture, we need to look further than mere greed. Having the moral high ground is not enough. You might still miss what’s so interesting about wanting more than you need….

The Rule of Intention says that the way things pan out has to do with the intentions of those who are involved.  If children in their millions are starving then someone is witholding the spoon. If thousands have no education then that’s by design. If families are living on the streets someone put them there.

So then what does it mean that we collectively aspire to more than we need? Why is it that we regard excessive consumption differently from obesity? You’d be shocked if a person’s goal was to gain a hundred pounds…

and yet

”We are screwing the planet to make solar powered bathroom thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.” G Monbiot.

Are we then simply diplaying our wealth? Is there some arcane connection between wanton destruction and attractiveness? I think not, but whatever the answer it  lies deeper than our greed or stupidity.

Symptoms of dis-ease are never arbitrary or simply unfortunate. They are the unconscious expression of something yet to be named. There is hidden meaning in desperately pursuing stuff you don’t actually need, stuff whose production enslaves and destroys into the bargain. Calling it addiction doesn’t quite work either, despite the added caveat to greed that there is more at work than mere self indulgence.

Believing we can convert the rhythms of work into cash so that real life might then begin may feel worth the price to be paid by aliveness, but what many of us do in our leisure time is just more of the very same consuming of life from which we most need to a break. In our millions we become even further absorbed…..

”in the electronic reproduction of life, the passive consumption of the twittering screen.” A Watts.

So we save up for our hols, to get away from it all, when proper enjoyment can get under way, only to find that it too is also somehow pasteurised, with boxes to tick and schedules to fill. Been there, done that…  We wait to be amused, wonder what’s  next and if we’ve had our money’s worth.

All of which..

”gives rise to a culture devoted not to survival but to the actual destruction of life.” ibid

So is our devouring of life a form of collective suicide, a Chomskian rushing to the precipice?

No, its scarier than that.

It is an attack, not just upon ourselves, but on our children. The planet that their parents are pillaging is, after all, their inheritance. The spiritual malaise and attendant acting out of the developed world is far greater, far more malicious, than mere apathy, denial or disinterest.

”Once you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Sherlock Holmes.

If we want to understand consumerism and its attended ravaging of the planet we need to ask what it is that people are really hoping for with the must-have item on their bucket list. Irrespective of its concretisation, the new car, the fancy vacation, the latest gadgetry, what people seem to be striving for is a sense of worth, of being safe and held and fed.

Collectively we are seeking the in-arms experience of infancy which, as a culture, we have simply not yet had.

‘When the expected does not take place, corrective or compensatory tendencies make an effort to restore stability.’ J. Liedloff.

Consumerism is a parody of contented infant satiation. We want life dribbling down our chin. We want to be in the ‘lap of luxury’. We want the safety of maternal embrace whose alternative is the poor substitute of being gripped by her dark and compulsive sister, (mater)ialism.

‘The infant (like the guru) lives in the eternal now, in a state of bliss; the infant out of arms is in a state of longing, the bleakness of an empty Universe. Want is all there is..’ ibid

Amassing the unnecessary to the detriment of  life on Earth looks entirely crazy until we consider it in a symbolic light, the unfulfilled need of a culture seeped in denial about what is truly indispensible. Mother.

This denial reaches its acme in psychoanalytic theory with Freud’s Drive Conflict theory which entirely marginalises Mother as relevant to baby’s health or illness.

According to this theory dis-ease is not down to how we are treated, whether we are held and loved, but on dysfunctional ‘object relations’. You did it to yourself, a doctrine of victim blaming that also constitutes the final eradication of Mother’s relevance to life. In thirty years I have never found Freud to use the word ‘mother’ even once.

This denigration of life’s most important role impoverishes our entire culture but it does far more and has consequences you might not have considered.

Not only does the dominant form of spirituality in Western Culture fail to nourish, but our anxious preoccupation with and eternal focus on the future with its promise of salvation…at some point…does have the appeal  that the indiscretions of today may be swept under the carpet, but in the process of ducking conscience we are also bound to be gripped with envious spoiling for those who are able to be in the moment where real life happens, where all bliss, joy, gratitude and celebration are to be found.

Much of the West’s ferocious subjugation of the ‘childlike’ third world has to do with this same improbable truth, that we envy them. Despite their poverty they seem to have something we do not, a living for today where the real riches of life are to be found. And so they are happy. For all our wealth and power in the West we are miserable. Our worrying about tomorrow means we cannot  enjoy our mountain of stuff  today because all enjoyment is Now.

I once asked an African man on a dusty savannah roadside in tropical heat when the bus he was waiting for would arrive. ‘Today”, he answered contentedly.  By contrast and half a world away, commuters on Stuttgart railway station platform follow the digital clock ticking over, . At the exact same moment they all look in disappointed unison at their watches and turn to stare down the track as if they were practicing impatience for a show.

Our collective obsession with time and tommorow means that the aliveness gets sucked out of today.  We become chorus lines to celebrity others whose lives have somehow become more real than our own. The togetherness, the gratitude for simply being alive can’t be entered into and like the uninvited guest, ‘Now’ turns cold, vengeful and wooden.

”Unlived life will not sit idly on the shelf, it will turn round and bite you.” M.L. von Franz.

If a sense of Self that transcends self-interest can’t be embodied it will be projected. The recipients will invariably be the next generation who are as yet untutored in guilt, whose feeling of belonging has yet to be eroded, who have yet to know alienation.

and who are handy…

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. . .’ C. G. Jung.

Whilst we idealise, cosset and run around endlessly with compensatory gestures of slavish devotion,  so too do we silently envy and spoil. The secret bit about narcissistic brats is that they were made that way by parents who first loaded them down with not only their own unfulfilled expectations but with all the potentialities in today that we can’t shoulder for the sake of insuring ourselves against tommorow.

The horror of growing old and dying without first having properly lived is all too much and become split in our affections.

I will pat you on the head whilst I poison your earth.

My father personally favoured random electrocution as a means to express his envious grievance at my blossoming youth. Bare mains wires ran down the walls both inside and outside my room. They would set window frames and brickwork alive, especially when it rained. You might say that most parents are not so pathological and yet the quest for more than you need means you have to go out and take it off someone else, perpetual warmongering for which youth in their millions are most necessary.

I once spent three days as part of a tiny force of  green berets sitting under a tree waiting for the go ahead to take on 300 defected enemy soldiers who’d changed their mind and taken their new commander hostage as a prelude to melting back into the bush with shiny new G3 semi automatics. We all knew it was a suicide mission should the order finally came through, but the predominant feeling amongst us was one of quiet acceptance, the calm of sacrificial beasts under a stone knife, as though fulfilling some preordained narrative.

Saturn is eating his children.

Behind closed doors it’s usually less flamboyant than electrified bedrooms or going to live in a war zone but after three decades of being a psychotherapist I have to say that everyone who ever came to see me had the same issue. Their true self had been attacked and their destinies subverted by someone they were entitled to trust.

Which is why having more than you need is a form of poison. Its not just greedy. It’s a blow aimed at those who would be better stewards of this earth than ourselves, our children.

this article contains excerpts from my new book ‘Abundant Delicious.. on attaining your heart’s desire’. https://andywhiteblog.com/2016/06/11/abundant-delicio…ot-off-the-press/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going Mad to Stay Sane. Reprint.

Self destructiveness can be a spring board for a soulful life like no other if we can realize the meaning in the message, if we refrain from putting a lid on it with medication or inveterate ‘fixing’.

The book tells the story of King Midas from Greek mythology who wished that everything he touched be turned to gold. He only realizes what a curse he’s bought on himself when he embraces his daughter…..

It also tells the backstory, what kind of parents he had and what the family dynamics were that could foster such a terrible desire. How does he live? How does Midas resolve his issues? How does he now approach Dionysus who granted him his hideous wish.

The story uses  allegory to reveal how we grow through adversity and foolishness. It looks at the deeper significance of self-destructiveness, as a symbol of something meaningful that can be transformative.

The book has a new preface by Dr Dale Mathers who is a Jungian analyst with his own new book on the shelf, ‘Alchemy and Psychotherapy’.

Enjoy the book and find new ways to make sense of old patterns.

Books are signed and cost £21 plus £4 p+p (UK), £8 (non-UK).

For UK delivery:

cards
Powered by paypal

For non-UK delivery:

cards
Powered by paypal