Trumpty Dumpty bet on his wall,
Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall,
All of his Base and all Putin’s men,
Couldn’t put Trumpty together again!
Did you ever wonder about the meaning of Humpty Dumpty? A mere cautionary tale for naughty children? I think not…
The nursery rhyme has been associated with Richard 111’s defeat at Bosworth. And with the execution of Charles 1. But the best candidate for any historical origin has to be Charles the V1 of France whose love/hate relationship with his brother Louis resulted in strange behaviour for the normally outdoorsy king. After a number of setbacks he retired to a gloomy room where he remained immobile for hours under the delusional conviction that he was made of glass and might break if moved about….
The glass delusion then became rather fashionable and for the next two hundred years it slowly gained popularity, becoming more and more common until the 1600s,
”when it turned into a genuine cultural phenomenon.”E. Inglis-Arkell.
Can there really be fads in madness? Was the glass delusion a way of faithful if misguided subjects identifying with their leader to the point of sharing his affliction? Or were both king and commoner suffering from some dark zeitgeist of the times?
The glass delusion is much less popular than it was. I have only come across a single instance in thirty years of practice, a man who could not look at me for fear of his malady’s contagion and kept his gaze safely fixed upon the wall for as long as he had to share space with anyone getting so dangerously close..
But even though modernity may not be able to boast of the auntie in the attic who cannot be moved for fear of terminal splintering, you still find more people seeking therapeutic help than you might think whose experience harks back to the fragile vulnerability of Charles V1, who fear being ‘seen through’ and shattered as a result, who feel unable to act for fear of breaking their shell thin self construct.
Without the specific delusion of being actually made of glass, a person is no longer schizophrenic but might still be dissociated to the point of warranting a diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder or Schizo-affective Disorder, both of which are rather confusing terms because what the MPD really needs is loads more different aspects of himself and for them to hang out together, instead of being bounced between one limiting corner of his psyche at a time, wherein he can only have restricted engagement with self and others.
It’s like having most of the village chased off into the jungle and those that remain alternately claiming to be the sole survivor.
Like wise the term ‘schizo-affective’ might lead you to assume loads of emoting but actually denotes the fragility of a very narrow feeling range, like trying to play the piano with most of the keys out of action which means banging out a few chords over and over to make up for loss of nuance and variation….
In modern literature Lewis Carroll’s looking glass fantasy features Humpty…
” as a rather uppity egg who uses words however he wishes to, without worrying that nobody else will understand him. ” Interesting literature.
which is just what dissociation does. Truth is not truth.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” Alice through the Looking Glass.
It looks as though Humpty is all about power but actually it’s about making sure he doesn’t break into a thousand pieces. In order to do that, the meaning of everything becomes negotiable in the effort to stave off experience that threatens Humpty’s precarious perch.
“I know words, I have the best words. I have the best, but there is no better word than stupid.” Donald J Trump.
An egg can symbolize the wholeness of inner unity, but it also represents having all your eggs in one basket, that being-on-the-edge-of-disaster and flying by the seat of your pants which constitutes having just a very few timeworn if familiar faces to show an infinitely more complex and demanding world.
Such restricted perspectives are invariably the fate of Kings, Princes and Special Children who have their hands on the nation’s tiller or feel they ought to because they are compelled to identify with archetypal energies that exclude the Principle of Relatedness. King Ludwig of Bavaria referred to his mother as ‘the widow of my late predecessor’. And that was when he was in a good mood. Otherwise she was referred to as, ‘the Colonel of the 3rd Artillery Regiment.’
If mother is a regiment what does that make baby?
If women have to identify with their masculinity to keep abreast of men then their mothering function will collectively suffer. The mother/infant bond will be invariably undermined where the divine feminine has been driven out or degraded. Mother’s anxiety at being so under-represented has to be parceled off and lived out by the child instead, who must now forgo her own feelings about what is happening into the bargain.
Under such circumstances what is baby to do?
The horror of what is unfolding has to be projected. Mother cannot be the recipient because it is from her that this toxic dilemma has come. So the child hives off the trauma into the future where it can be kept at arms length. True, the child is left with any number of shattering fears about what the future holds, but at least ‘now’ is safe.
”Catastrophic expectation is a memory.” D. Winnicott.
The glass delusion’s fears of being broken can still be warded off with magical protective clothing or by staying super still, or having expensive lawyers, giving the idea that the prospect of shattering can be omnipotently avoided when in fact it has already occurred.
Unfortunately, the Humpty gambit has small print. You may not have to experience your fragility till tomorrow but the bow wave of it will produce paranoia today. Paranoia is the implicit recognition that the resources you have to manage current situations are somehow incomplete and that you can not function optimally in your environment. So it seems as if the world is full of frustrating forces trying to drag you down with only a brittle shell to prevent you getting scrambled.
If such dilemmas remained the preserve of weird historical figures it would not be so scary. The story of Charles V1 and his long legacy of fellow glass citizens suggests that such things not only tumble through generations. They are contagious and infect entire populations.
From the recent best seller, ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,”…
”His madness is catching, too. From the trauma people have experienced under the Trump administration to the cult-like characteristics of his followers, he has created unprecedented mental health consequences across our nation and beyond. It’s not all in our heads. It’s in his…” Bandy Lee
Yes, and….
when the fall finally happens, dancing till dawn in the streets will need to be leavened with the sobering thought that Trump is more than a man who thought he was above the law. He symbolizes the entitlement, the belligerence and the dissocciated fragility of Western superiority itself. After he is gone, we will still have to address the narcissistic shadow of the culture that spawned him within the inner recesses of our own souls.