Jung – Andy White Blog

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’?

The Shepherd and the Snake.

Carl Jung identifies two distinct kinds kinds of thinking. The first is rational, problem solving and rooted in language. He calls it directed or reality thinking which originates in,

‘the first stirrings of a cry to our companions that water has been found, or the bear been killed, or that a storm is approaching, or that wolves are prowling round the camp.’ Jung

The second kind of thinking is very different and way older, fantasy thinking. This kind of mental activity is not rooted in language but in feelings, images and daydreams.

‘The former operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless, working as it were spontaneously.’ ibid

Jung agreed with Freud that fantasy thinking is archaic, but stopped short of labeling it infantile and even less, as pathological. We moderns have become so identified with rationality and consider ourselves so emancipated from our forebears that we regard the products of fantasy thinking as a problem to be solved, as something to be grown out of. Ach! Stop daydreaming! Instead of using the two different types of thinking together, the one is pitted against the other. And we wonder why we are so split…

..having failed to delineate what Hiedegger calls the difference between ‘what I want to think about and what wants to be thought.’

That which is primitive is not the same as that which is mad. Far from being material that rational thinking must either dismiss or reductively interpret, fantasy thinking often serves to compensate the lopsidedness of the overly rational mind, a wellspring of wisdom it would profit from re-discovering. Unfortunately, our modern education values the one over the other, treating fantasy thinking as a poor relation hardly worth bothering with rather than the poemagogic font out of which rational thinking has itself only so recently emerged. Fortunately, not all thinkers are so prejudiced..

‘I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Einstein

Curiously, this tendency of the rational mind to deny and degrade the instinctual wisdoms of fantasy thinking, with its concomitant erosion of meaning, is something that clearly troubles the deeper reaches of the Psyche which then produces compensatory images and dreams to try and rectify the balance, its newly impoverished status notwithstanding.

The following story, ‘The Shepherd and the Snake’, from Hungarian folklore, represents the efforts of fantasy thinking to have its contribution re-evaluated.

Once there was a Shepherd Boy who spent all day long in the mountains with his flock. When he was not protecting the sheep from wolves, he spent his time racking his brains with thoughts of how to become rich. It seemed so unfair to him that some were rich and others poor.

He sat thinking and thinking..

when he suddenly became aware of the sounds of crying. ‘ Help, help!’

He went to investigate and saw a fiery pit in which a Yellow Bellied Snake was writhing.’ Help me Shepherd Boy! Help me and I will repay your kindness!’

So he helped the snake out of the pit, which immediately instructed him to follow and wriggled off, soon coming to a large forest in the center of which was a flat stone. The snake slithered under the stone commanding the shepherd to follow. He lifted the stone and saw steps leading down and down.

Eventually they arrived in a field made of diamonds in which stood a palace made of gold and precious stones. ‘This is my father’s palace,’ said the snake and led him inside, through a great arch of writhing snakes, where they found the Snake King sat on his throne. The Yellow Bellied Snake explained to his father that the Shepherd Boy had saved him and so the Snake King offered him the choice of two rewards..’You can be given the gift of understanding the language of animals, or you can have a large bag of gold.’

The Shepherd Boy considered his options. He really, really wanted to be rich… but he also thought he would never again be given the chance to learn the language of animals so that is what he chose. When he re-emerged into his own world he sat reflecting upon everything which had happened. Above him, two birds conversed in the branches of a tree. ‘If only that poor Shepherd Boy knew what lay beneath the roots of the tree he would be poor no longer!’

That night the Shepherd Boy returned with a spade and dug up the tree to find nestled in its roots a great treasure of gold and jewels..

Many heroes of myth and legend are heroic by nature of their brave deeds, by defeating dragons or giants. Less glorious but just as important are the heroes who are receptive, kind and make counter-intuitive decisions in favor of the irrational.

‘Their heroism resides in that they have drawn their goals and their vocation not only from the calmly ordered course of events which the reigning system has consecrated but also from an underground source in the inner spirit whose content is hidden and which has not yet broken through the surface of actual existence.” Merleau-Ponty

The Shepherd Boy is heroic because he makes a decision against rational thinking which must have been screaming at him to take the gold. You can imagine the pressure..’What, are you crazy? How can you make your way in the world learning the language of animals? Of what practical use is that? Do you want to be poor and herd sheep for ever? TAKE THE GOLD.

Yet something has already begun to stir in the Shepherd Boy’s soul. He’s had a whole morning of talking snakes and underground kingdoms, things he could barely imagine and so he goes with the flow and makes the irrational choice against his own ego. In doing so he aligns himself with a deeper sense of self which in turn produces the synchronicity of the talking birds who just happen to know where the earthly treasure is to be found.

”Synchronicity is like a collaboration with fate, its when the ego is no longer the driving force in your life.” Wayne W. Dyer.

Our story seems to be pointing to more than the necessity of fantasy thinking. It seems to suggest that allowing dream/reverie, affording it with value and, following where it goes not only yields a new connection with the instinctual basis of life but also brings about the earthly agendas renounced in the process. In deciding against the gold, he gains both the language of animals and the gold as well.

‘‘If, against all your own wishes and plans, you obey that voice which deep in your soul is subject to no rational control, then roads open up of their own accord which lead to the preservation of what you thought you have given up.’ Weatherall

This means taking fantasies and daydreams seriously. It means wondering about the significance of bothersome intrusions which interrupt the more noble sentiments of coherent reasoning. It means giving space to musing and reverie, paint and mud. It means being curious about the ear-worm going around and around in your head, the doodles you make in the margin of more ‘serious’ work, the embarrassing slips of the tongue which draw attention to there being more under consideration than the ego’s rational intent. Moreover, as our story seems to suggest, when we pay attention to these counter-intuitive impulses nagging at the fringes of consciousness, many of our more immediate concerns resolve themselves.

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

The Hedgehog Prince.

Once upon a time there was a Poor Man, a Merchant and a King. One day the Merchant was out hunting in the forest and became lost. For three days he tried to find his way out. Eventually he exclaimed, ‘if only someone could show me the way out of this terrible forest I would give him three sacks of gold and the hand in marriage of the most beautiful of my three daughters. Immediately, a small hedgehog appeared and said, ‘come with me, for three sacks of gold and the hand in marriage of your most beautiful daughter I will show you the way.” The Merchant agrees in a flash and in no time he was sat back at home in his comfy chair recounting tales of his brave adventures.

The next day the King went hunting in the forest, He too became hopelessly lost and could not find the way out.’ Oh, if only someone would help me, I would give them three carts of gold and the hand in marriage of my most beautiful daughter,’ whereupon the Hedgehog once more appeared and promised to show the King the way out. The King agrees but only after he’s really thought about it.

Then the Poor Man went out hunting and like the others soon became lost. ‘Oh’. he exclaimed, ‘I have nothing to give but if someone were to help me out I would make them my own dear child.’ Once more the hedgehog appeared and led the Poor Man to the edge of the forest.

Time passed. The King, the Merchant and the Poor Man had all but forgotten the Hedgehog. One wintry night when the Poor Man was tucked up in his bed he heard a plaintive tapping at the window. ‘Father, father, let me in, it is I your son.’ The Poor Man was puzzled and went to the door to find the Hedgehog all covered in snow. ‘My son! How happy I am to see you!’ He let the creature in and made up a bed for him. In the morning the Hedgehog asked, ‘Father if you have two pennies, would you go into the village and buy me a black cockerel and an old saddle?’ The Poor Man agreed and when he returned the Hedgehog saddled up the cockerel and rode away like the wind, soon arriving at the house of the Merchant who was shocked and not a little put out to see him. He grudgingly called his daughters forward and the Hedgehog chose the one he liked best but she cried and threw herself to the ground wailing and beating the floor with her fists.

On the way back the Merchant’s daughter continued her refrain. ‘Are you still crying?’ asked the Hedgehog. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘and I will continue to cry to my dying day!’ ‘Oh dear,’ said the Hedgehog, ‘well, you’d better go home then.’ So he sent her home…but kept the gold.

Once he had dropped off the gold with the Poor Man, the Hedgehog rode away on the black cockerel to the King’s castle. ‘Do you remember me?’ he asked. ‘I wish I did not but I do,’ sighed the king and called for his daughters, the most beautiful of which was chosen by the Hedgehog who was only too happy to repay the favor shown to her father. The king was glad he had such a kind-hearted daughter but was also sad to lose his only kind-hearted daughter.

The King loaded up a coach full of gold and diamonds. Then the Princess got in as well and, with the Hedgehog riding alongside, they set off. After a few hours the Hedgehog put his head in the window and was pleased to see the Princess was not crying. ‘Why do you ride when you could be sitting here with me?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’ he replied, ‘and don’t you find me ugly?’ ‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘I know you will do me no harm..’ and with that a great miracle occurred. The Hedgehog was transformed into a shining Prince and the Black Cockerel into a prancing stallion. A great palace appeared and celebrations prepared. Invitations were sent out to everyone in the land and all attended the great feast except the Merchant and his daughter… who were too busy crying.

The Merchant, the King and the Poor Man represent three distinct attitudes to life, identified in the Gnostic tradition as Hylic, Psychic, and Pneumatic. They symbolize stages of psycho-spiritual development.

The simplest and least developed of these is the hylic Merchant and by extension his daughter who only have a single point of view. Events can only have one inevitable outcome. Everything is preordained.

“The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.’ H. Marcuse.

You can only chose a path if you have tried the others and know where they go. Those who have only one ‘take’ on life have not chosen. They are compelled, by the partisan interests of persona which creates self affirming realities. These realities then justify knee jerk responses which create in turn a kind of negative feed back loop or self fulfilling prophecy. Everything is always awful or hopeless whether the daughter is being carried off or returned, whether they get invited to the wedding or not.

The problem for the hylic Merchant and his daughter is that they have not evolved sufficiently out of narcissistic self pre-occupation. They can’t take in or relate to the Other and so real meaning and purpose is denied them, hence the true origin of all those tears.

‘Where there is no “other”, or it does not yet exist, all possibility of consciousness ceases’ Jung (1950: 193).

Instead of consciousness the Merchant has only reason. He reasons that he should pay the Hedgehog’s price for giving him safe passage out of the forest, then he reason’s once he’s safe that he has made a bad investment, followed by reasoning that they have been robbed of an opportunity once the truth of the Prince comes out.

“Reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own … constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining. In short, reason can only find what it is looking for; it may, however, not be what really matters.” ibid

The King is what the Gnostics identify as psychic and represents a more evolved kind of consciousness, one that is complicated, full of moral problems and ambivalent attitudes precisely because he acknowledges the Other and is no longer constrained by black and white thinking. This is most poetically expressed by his happiness and sadness about the same thing, that he has a kind-hearted daughter. He can walk and chew gum at the same time, though it’s because of his complexity that he suffers and prevaricates and dithers.

The Poor Man represents pneumatic or spiritual consciousness. The Greek word ‘pneuma’ means ‘breath’ which was held to be identical with a person’s essence or life force. He is poor in that life’s complexity has collapsed into the tolerance of paradox. His strange new son is something he accepts without being troubled by its irrationality. He doesn’t understand what’s happening and he doesn’t need to. He can go with the flow and accept what life brings. He knows life’s treasure is a matter of heart.

The ‘hidden’ fourth in this triad is the Hedgehog himself, the Spirit of Nature who becomes humanized by the trust and gratitude of the kind-hearted daughter. The alchemists used to describe the difficulty of transforming base material into the precious philosopher’s stone as ‘the problem of three and four’. Why? Because three into four won’t go. Consciousness and the Unconscious have a way of flying off from each other like magnetic opposites. They are tenaciously irreconcilable.

‘Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky. Jung CW11

Yet, despite all this and perhaps because of this, these opposites can be bridged once a feeling of loving kinship can be established between the Poor Man and the Hedgehog, a necessary precursor to marriage with the blithe and trusting spirit of the kind-hearted daughter.

The Virgin and the Unicorn.

The perennial story of the Virgin and the Unicorn sprang into our popular imagination at a time when monotheism and the moral codes of kings supplanted the subtle distinctions to be made between spirit and soul with faith and being good. A living connection with the gods which had thus far kept people in charge of their own religious life was broken. Spirit and soul had to go underground, burying themselves in the universal symbolism of a collective dream.

There are few perennial stories. So when you find one, its worth psychological inquiry. The tale of the Virgin and the Unicorn can be found throughout European folk lore. The exception is in Greek mythology but only because the Greeks attributed it to the fauna of India. The Chinese have stories of Unicorns, as do the Persians. In fact the wee beastie features from Patagonia to Japan, from Scotland to Mongolia and spans a time period dating from Adam.

Apparently, Noah had to leave the Unicorns off the ark because they were so troublesome. Several thousand years later Emperor Fu Xia of China supposedly spotted one, as have other notables, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Confucius. The fact that no-one ever actually produced one doesn’t seem to have prevented people all over the world believing in them since time immemorial.

The unlikely Cosmas Indicopleustes, a 6th century merchant from Alexandria, made a voyage to India and subsequently wrote about things he had seen along the way. He tells of a brass unicorn he spotted in the palace of the Ethiopian King and recounts the story … “It is impossible to take this ferocious beast alive,’ He says, ‘all its strength lies in its horn. When it finds itself pursued and in danger of capture, it throws itself from a precipice, and turns so aptly in falling, that it receives all the shock upon the horn, and so escapes safe and sound.”

The Unicorn’s horn is the focus of it’s universal fascination. Despite the great differences in descriptions available everyone agrees on the horn and it’s qualities of purification and healing. According to legend the problem with obtaining such a medicine is that Unicorns are almost impossible to catch.

‘The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap.’ Leonardo da Vinci.

Then and only then, can the Unicorn be caught and killed, though even this is not the end of the creature for it is often depicted thereafter, alive and well, lain beneath a Pomegranate tree having broken the chains which had previously restrained it.

This motif of resurrection caught the Church’s attention and the story has been given ecclesiastical overtones ever since, though this seems inadequate for a myth which predates the birth of Christ by several millennia.

What then can we make of this story? What is it that’s common to human experience that it could be so universally represented by the motif of the Virgin and the Unicorn?

The Alchemical tradition might provide us with some clues. The various descriptions we have of the Unicorn, though they are widely divergent, do have something in common. It is depicted as a composite creature. Marco Polo describes it as having the body of a horse, head of a boar, feet of an elephant and the hair of a Buffalo. Some traditions throw in a lion’s tail. The Chinese afford it green scales, the tail of an ox and the body of a stag. In the Arabic tradition it has the wings of a vulture, the head of an elephant and the tail of a dragon.

Such descriptions are reminiscent of the monstrous personifications of the ‘prima materia’, the starting off place in the alchemical process, symbolized by a confused mass or complex of opposites all jumbled together, the unvarnished and contradictory personality of the alchemists themselves replete with illogical admixtures of vice and virtue, a ‘complexio oppositorium‘ whose hermaphroditic nature further befuddles efforts to apprehend it.

Such a contradictory melange of traits and attributes is very much like the human personality with all its strange foibles, conflicts and idiosyncrasies, it’s strange admixtures of light and shade out of which eventually grows, all being well, a one-pointed sense of centerdness, of ‘I’ which transcends the chaos of conflicting traits.

‘ I suffered for years on the horns of a dilemma before I discovered it was a unicorn.’ D. Winnicott.

This emerging sense of identity au dessus de la melee, transcending the chaos of conflicting drives and the tension of opposites is qualitatively different from the content of the personality, all the various soapbox oratarios being held by the vested interests of being a son, a brother, an artist or a biker. Its different from the hodge-podge of lion’s tail and dragon’s scales. It has assumed a singular identity, symbolized by the horn out of which cups for kings were supposedly carved to protect their majesties from the poisoning of life’s cruel vicissitudes. The horn is..

‘an emblem of vigour and strength and has a masculine quality but at the same time it is a cup, which as a receptacle is feminine. So we are dealing with a uniting symbol.. C G Jung.

As such the Unicorn represents spirit, the still point, the hub of the wheel, what the Hindu tradition calls Atman. But even so the Unicorn is still wild and intractable. S/he lacks context and so peace. This can only be found in the Virgin’s lap.

At the time these tales were written, what it meant to be a Virgin had a broader meaning than it does today. It went further than chastity to the sense of belonging to oneself, which seems like a good way of describing the anima/us, the soul or psyche which represents the autonomy of the unconscious. Its something you can’t integrate like the repressed stuff of childhood because it was actually there first. It is not a part of you. It is a partner of you, with its own life, in whose lap peace may finally be found.

Humanistic psychology, as benevolent as it is by comparison with what preceded it, has much to answer for because it does insist in placing the ego at the center of the psyche. It still manages to view the unconscious as a rubbish tip of stuff repressed from and therefore originally belonging to consciousness. ‘Everything in your dream is part of you..’

All of which goes to show how centuries of repression can dry clean numinosity from experience, leading people to believe that the unconscious is ‘nothing but..’ the derivative, edited clippings of ego. There could not possibly be interior, a priori factors in the psyche; autonomous, archetypal complexes which have had to take to the woods like outlawed bandits. Despite and perhaps because of their disenfranchisement, they continue to raid and harass the now civilized citizens who have disavowed them.

Cultures relatively unscathed by monotheism have managed to preserve the felt sense that we humans are full of gods. Shamanic culture in particular recognizes, and uses, the fact of the inner other. It recognizes that if this connection is lost it can constitute a loss of soul which is why the Unicorn is so wild and ill tempered.

Its not enough to be ‘spiritual’. There has also to be a felt sense of the inner other.. the ‘not-me,’ in whose lap meaning can be found that the Unicorn cannot provide for itself.

In alchemy this figure, the Anima, is equated with Mercurius, the agency of transformation, who appears as ‘most chaste virgin’. {Jung Alchemical studies.} She is the representative of a depth of experience previously unknown to the Unicorn, peace and dream and belonging. The double edge of this homecoming is that it also involves a death, the end of a mind set seduced by notions of its own self-sufficiency, a de-integrating initiation into a new inter-relatedness which, though mortally wounding to ego-constructs, breaks the chains of its isolation and places it at the roots of the Pomegranate, the Tree of Life.

The Devil’s Sooty Brother.

A decommissioned soldier down to his last crust happens upon a dark wood. Unable to find work or food he throws himself on the mercy of the forest and wanders in. Suddenly a strange little man is stood before him. He promises him wealth and riches if only the soldier will come down to Hell and serve him seven years. In addition, as with the story of ‘Bearskin’, the soldier may not wash or cut his hair and nails as he goes about his duties.

The soldier agrees and the Devil takes him down, down, to the kitchens of the Underworld where he must tend giant steaming cauldrons bubbling with hell broth and feed the furnaces burning white hot beneath them. The Devil further admonishes him that under no circumstances may he peek in the cauldrons on pain of something only the Devil could dream up and so the soldier sets cheerfully to work.

After a long while of dutiful labor, dragging about great stumps to throw into the furnaces, sweeping up the twigs and bark chips behind the door just as the Devil had shown him, he became curious about what might be in the smallest of the cauldrons. One day when the Devil was out he set up a ladder against it and climbed up for a peek. There he found his old corporal looking pensive in the bubbling stew.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, and climbed back down to throw some extra big logs onto the fire.

After a much longer time of exemplary service the soldier became curious about what might be in the second larger cauldron, a great metal vat suspended from massive beams. He shimmied adeptly up the side of the cauldron and had a look inside. There was his former ensign with just his head sticking out.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, and climbed back down to throw the biggest logs he could find onto the fire.

The old soldier continued to work at his duties long and hard. He tended the flames and swept the floor every day, careful to put the sweepings behind the door as he had been told. Meantime his hair became long and matted.. His beard had grown to the floor and his nails stuck out like claws.

Finally, his curiosity about the third and largest of the cauldrons, an infernally wrought ark mounted upon a tripod of fossilized trees and fed with whole saplings, got the better of him. So he clambered up and there, with just his nose sticking out of the broth, was his old General.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, and climbed back down to feed the greatest furnace with some gnarly stumps he had been saving for a special occasion.

By this time the old soldier has become unrecognizable. Layer upon layer of ash and soot is mashed into hair become mane and his beard has to be knotted to keep it out of the flames. One day the Devil looks in to see how he’s doing and lets him know his time is up and that he can go home now.

‘How did you get on?’ asked the Devil.

‘Oh quite well,’ he replied, ‘I did as you asked….

‘Ah, but you did peek in the cauldrons didn’t you, matey?’ said the Devil with gritted teeth. ‘I should bring down all kinds of unspeakable suffering upon you but because you’ve performed your duties so well and kept the fires so wonderfully bright, he added cheerily,’ I will let you off. Here are your wages…’ and he hands the soldier a satchel full of sweepings from behind the door. ‘When people ask you who you are you can tell them, ‘I am the Devil’s sooty brother and my King as well.”

Pleased to have gotten away without wetting himself but peeved at his meager wages the soldier sets off for home. He decides to dump the satchel before too long only to discover that it is now full of gold…

The first motif in the story, the disbanded soldier without prospects, is the ‘all revved up with nowhere to go’ experience of the personality which has fought its battles and become accomplished but has started to ask, ‘what for? To what end and purpose? Who am I besides the roles I’ve been given? What lies beneath the surface?’

‘‘In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death:” Dante’s Inferno.

In his diary Tolstoy writes of this experience,’ at first it was moments of perplexity and arrest of life as though I did not know what to do or how to live.. expressed by the question, ‘what is it for?’

Such a state of mind is bound to evoke a response from the Unconscious personified by the mercurial ‘little man’, who we could also call Shiva, Loki, or Hades. This encounter prefigures a descent into the Underworld. In ordinary life this is often experienced as some form of crisis, a failed marriage, the death of a loved one, a bout of inexplicable depression, the development of symptoms.

This descent, like the descent of Innana from Sumerian mythology, who had to relinquish a garment at every one of seven gates leading down to her dark sister, Erishkigal, involves the difficult process of boiling consciousness down to its essential elements, symbolized by the sulphurous steaming cauldrons and their grizzly contents. Sulphur is the element of transformation. Its the rotten egg smell of decomposition, of one thing becoming another.

The soldier must tend these cauldrons with their respective men inside just as the alchemist tends the fires beneath his alembic vessel,

‘a kind of uterus from which the filius philosophorum, is to be born.’ C G Jung

In the smallest kettle we find the corporal, a man of low rank who nevertheless had power over our soldier in his former life. A corporal is forever at your shoulder, micro-managing life with a bunch of directives not unlike the introjections of childhood which may be designed to make life work more smoothly, yet can become values designed to keep you in line at the expense of your individuality. You can only transform what belongs to you. The ‘not-me’ of other people’s opinions and convictions have to be separated out from what I think and feel, like meat from the bone.

People sometimes lament,’ oh, you can’t change the past,’ as though working on oneself were hopeless because the past is carved in stone. In fact, what it often boils down to is not the facts of the past but our relationship with them. Do you have them or do they have you?

The corporal used to have the soldier much as blind adherence to unquestioned authority ‘has’ the personality when it is unconsciously identified with something which runs it from within, something which you’ve swallowed down without noticing so that life can be lived without reflection. The corporal, like the inner critic, can make your life hell. He has to be boiled and boiled so what’s useful and constructive can be separated out from what is oppressive and life denying, so that internalized values can become the possession of the personality rather than it’s master.

In the next cauldron, which requires a great deal more emotional heat, we find the ensign, a man of higher rank who commands a squad, a varied, integrated personality with an organized structure capable of effective and responsible action…

..which is all very well, but its all still happening in the barrack room of the personality. Not only does the ego need to be formed it needs a context and so regardless of its contents and whether they get along or not so too is there the need to disidentify from it, to experience the personality, whatever it is, as something you have rather than something you are, to have a vantage point, a superordinate perspective au dessus de la mellee, above all the activity.

‘What ho… you used to have me but now I have you,’ he said, and climbed back down to throw the biggest logs he could find onto the fire.

The problem with such emancipation is that it invariably gets inflated along the way. Having chucked off the ‘not-me’ introjects of childhood and achieved the heroic crafting of a well oiled unit , task oriented and adapted to reality, the hero is bound to over reach himself, having forgotten the ‘not-me’ within his own collective psyche, sweating out in the third giant cauldron.

Inside this mighty vessel he finds the General, a collective figure with whom he is inflated and therefor still possessed by, much as he might tout his freedom from more earthly, barrack room constraints.

The third cauldron requires whole trees in its furnace, so great is the energy needed to develop a relationship with the collective psyche without being swamped by it.

I dreamed an alien queen was coming to earth and I had to prepare an environment for her that was nitrogen rather than oxygen based. She arrives, I dare not look at her… ”Humm, very good, now why should I keep you alive? she purrs. ‘Er, to be of continued service to your majesty…’

and so you stoke the great fires till sweat binds grime to skin in testament to vigil over the flames whilst Self is gradually brewed in the largest of the cauldrons and alchemical gold spun from floor sweepings.

The Devil’s role in all this is initiatory, he shows the soldier in the door and gives him his duties. This somewhat relativizes what we have come to consider to be evil. It means that the bad things which happen also help you to grow into the person you are to become.

“The manner of [our] growth is by abrupt occurrences, crises, surprising events, and even mortifying accidents. Everything is forever going wrong; and yet, that is precisely the circumstance by which the miraculous development comes to pass.” H. Zimmer.

So the Devil gets consciousness evolving. At the end of the process he lets the soldier off for disobeying him and gives him a satchel of gold..

and a bath.

Can you imagine Old Testament Yahweh being that nice? Me neither. His response to Adam and Eve for doing the same kind of thing was to punish curiosity. Yahweh likes his flock neutered. The Devil lets the soldier go because he knows there is no consciousness without flouting the rules, without thinking outside the box, without the grit in the oyster. What was important was not that the soldier obey but that he went about his duties as sacred tasks and devotedly fed the fires. It is this which makes gold of sweepings. Through both devotion and disobedience the soldier brings together his own opposite natures so that he can finally say, ”I am the Devil’s sooty brother and my king as well!”

Bearskin.

Grimm’s fairy tales have a number of stories about the Devil. They all have a pronounced theme running through them. He is instrumental in the protagonist’s transformation and wants not their souls but their old worn out identities.

Before the Church got hold of the Devil and gave him responsibilities absent from his job description, it was widely recognized that the Shadow of Consciousness had to be carefully propitiated in order not to run foul of it. In other words, the Devil had to be given his due, not by way of succumbing to wickedness, nor even by the psychological hygiene of respectful gestures and diplomatic compromises to ward off his worst effects but by the recognition that he played a meaningful part in the evolution of consciousness.

‘A warring peace; a sweet wound; a mild evil.” Alchemical saying

Grimm’s stories show that trying to run the Devil out of town on a rail ends very badly, creating all kinds of splits, disasters and neurotic conflicts. You can see this in our culture’s obsessive preoccupation with combating ‘negative emotions’, political correctness turned moral crusade. In full blown Orwellian tradition becoming whole now involves dividing the psyche against itself, a collective spiritual bypassing of such proportions it has its own service industry and several shelves of any good book store.

We no longer burn witches, we just neuter them with guilt inducing self help books, chokka with any amount of advice to get rid of all those warty, all-too-human parts of you which fall short of perfection’s tyranny, forces which are all the more powerful because they are denied and therefore beyond influence let alone transformation.

A story which can teach us something about negotiating with the shadow and give some hope for integration over enactment, is Grimm’s ‘Bearskin’, written down by the brothers in 1812, but with its roots in the pre-Christian psyche.

A discharged soldier had nothing left to live on and so he took himself off into the forest in despair of what was to become of him. Suddenly there appeared a little man who looked right stately but had a hideous cloven hoof.

‘I understand well what you need’, said the Devil, just as the soldier was about to speak, ‘but there must be some fair exchange’. The soldier agrees provided their arrangement does not compromise his salvation for he knows only too well to whom he speaks…

The Devil’s request is subtle, poetic and symbolically intriguing. The old soldier must show his courage in killing a bear and then wear it’s pelt for seven years during which time he may neither wash nor cut his hair or nails. If the soldier survives this experience he is free to go with great riches.

Once the soldier agrees, the Devil throws into the bargain his own coat, whose magical pockets are always filled with gold,…

which was nice of him..

allegedly.

Because why else would a trickster who delights in mischief give you magic pockets full of gold other than because he was a really nice chap?

And so it was that the newly dubbed, ‘Bearskin’ went out into the world ‘refraining from nothing that did him good’, though slowly, year by year, his appearance deteriorated. Bearskin’s hair matted into his beard. His face arms and feet became encrusted with filth. He smelled like a drain and though he showered the poor with golden ducats to pray for his soul he couldn’t shower himself, so he was invariably shunned wherever he went…

In the fourth year of his travail he stopped at an Inn whose landlord would not receive him, directing him to the stable instead. There he sat alone until his attention was drawn by someone crying. He went to see what was the matter and found a ragged old man weeping bitterly in his room.

At first the old man is terrified of Bearskin but then perceives him to be human. Bearskin shows him kindness, inquiring into his suffering and soon the old man tells him all his troubles; his daughters have no-one to support them and he is about to be imprisoned for debt.

Bearskin hands him a small sack of gold, resolving all his problems in one go. The old man is so grateful he offers Bearskin the hand of one of his daughters in marriage. The older two are totally put off by the filth and the stench but the youngest sees only the kindness of his gesture towards her father and volunteers herself. Bearskin vows to return once his tenure to the Devil is paid and gives her half a gold ring, keeping the other half himself.

Eventually the seven years are up. The Devil admits Bearskin’s success and is compelled to wash and comb him, to trim his nails and shave his beard, to dust his coat and polish his boots. Then the restored Bearskin hightails it back to his beloved who recognizes the handsome stranger by his half of the ring.

At the beginning of our story we find our hero at the end of his road. Peace has broken out and his old wartime identity is redundant. This is the classic existential crisis. You have fulfilled your collective obligations but feel internally bankrupt, a crisis which compels exploration of the dark forest..

...’where you discover that there are some things in your nature which can forge your signature”. M. Gurevitch.

This sudden complication of life at just the point you feel the Universe ought to cut you some slack is bound to leave you feeling a bit desperate, a bit vulnerable and diminished. Where it wasn’t before, there’s now perplexity about whether infinity is a number or not and what an expanding universe might be expanding into…what dreams mean and where they come from. Suddenly everything seems dangerous and overwhelming, throwing the personality back on its own as yet unacknowledged depths with considerable loss to normal functioning.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” C G Jung

Once Bearskin agrees to the proposal the devil gives him his coat to wear beneath the Bear’s pelt. It is a magical garment, like Mithral, whose pockets are always full of gold to both sustain and yet to tempt the personality with inflation as he begins to explore the forest.

Bearskin is impelled to discover who he is besides his socially adapted ego identity which no longer provides him with meaning. It’s not going to be fun. Suddenly he is swamped by the numinous pelt with its primal associations of ancient gods, of archaic tooth and claw. The great hide is disorienting, clumsy making, inveigling him with wild and shaggy, closing round him as a cocoon, sequestered from the world as much as rudely thrown into it.

In many shamanic traditions the initiate must identify with an animal spirit and regress into a primitive state before being returning to the community enriched. Many a modern mental illness has similar connotations…. crises born of the psyche’s own need to become more conscious, to cross developmental thresholds which are inherantly disorienting and weigh the ego down with archaic collective material.

So the Devil is not out to get our hero. Rather he sets in motion the individuation process with an initiatory challenge. Like the alchemical Mercurius, he provides both the difficult test and the means to accomplish it. When the time comes he admits defeat and honors Bearskin’s success with a generous preening session.

Bearskin manages to survive his foray into the unconscious because he develops the capacity for relatedness. When he arrives at the Inn it seems that his suffering and wretchedness can be endured because they have also given rise to kindness and the capacity to be touched by the suffering of others. He wants to hear the old man’s trouble without knowing if there is anything he can do about it because he has learned what value there is in the simple charity of giving comfort and lending a sympathetic ear.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories. C G Jung

Relatedness and the sharing of stories anchors the soulful life. Without it consciousness itself is diminished, leaving you isolated and unable to be fed. Bearskin discovers, through the humble recognition of his dependence on others, the value of his own being there for another despite his terrible state.

You can’t help wondering if the old man is the Devil in disguise come to test Bearskin, to see if he has become sufficiently tender to survive seven years on the fringes of the community and perhaps at the edges of his own sanity.

‘The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life. Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle. A tree that is unbending is easily broken.’ Lao Tzu

So perhaps the gold goes full circle, as do the two halves of the ring at the end of the story. This transitional gesture of seeking out the crying man protects Bearskin. He has found that the strength to endure his liminal experience is through charity and being together. He’s invested beyond himself.

Wordsworth says of the redeemed wanderer..

‘Unoccupied by sorrow of its own, His heart lay open; and, by nature tuned And constant disposition of his thoughts To sympathy with man, he was alive To all that was enjoyed where’er he went, And all that was endured; for, in himself Happy, and quiet in his cheerfulness, He had no painful pressure from without That made him turn aside from wretchedness With coward fears. He could ‘afford’ to suffer With those whom he saw suffer.” W. Wordsworth

Bearskin survives and is transformed by The Devil, who hosts his inaugural bath by way of celebration and an end to his ordeal. It purifies and coroborates the hero’s capacity to ‘bear’ the strain of his arrangement with the Devil. It speaks to the humble kindness Bearskin develops along the way which has an apotropaic effect (the power to avert evil influence) on events, and so he makes it through the forest not only in one piece but with a deeper sense of wholeness and belonging..

……………………….

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The Valiant Tailor.

Our much loved tale begins with a charming domestic scene in which the diligent tailor is going about his legitimate business in his fine work shop with a song in his heart and a trill upon his lips. Passing school boys think how grand it must be to be a tailor and wish they could become like him when they grow up.

It seems too good to be true and sure enough the underlying situation is soon revealed. ‘Oh how Hungry I am to be sure ,’ cried out the little man eventually, ‘but I must finish his Lordship’s coat before I eat a morsel.’ and he broke into song once more..

His song is not an expression of joy at all. Its fake news, a forced distraction from his emotional hungering for something more profound than momentary identification with authority. His song is camouflage, compensation for inner misery.

Out in the street an old lady is plying her wares, ‘jam for sale!’ It’s a moment pregnant with the possibility for some redemption, an opportunity for honest transaction and being gratefully fed. Instead he makes her climb his steps with her heavy load and rifles through her entire stock, only buying a small pot whose good measure he then calls into question and for which he pays grudgingly. The old lady goes off grumbling and humiliated.

Back indoors, his delight at having beaten the old lady down and pinched every penny, fuels the already inflated identification he has with his lordship. Having landed her with all his own feelings of worthlessness he is exultant, announcing proudly to the empty room that this special jam shall be blessed by God to give him health and strength. His inner emptiness which compels him to triumph over everyone in order to feel alive, easily spills over into messianic inflation.

At the same time, his slavish devotion to authority will not let him eat the jam. He must finish the coat first and only. His hunger destroys the quality of his work. The stitching becomes clumsy. Eventually the conflict between obligation and need becomes so great he blows up, enviously lashing out at the flies who feast where he will not.

This torture of emotional starvation rationalized by masochistic devotion to a supposedly higher cause in collision with his own instincts for survival and nurture makes the desperate tailor explode, destroying that which he wants most and accentuating his delusional state.

Seven flies lay dead. He is so impressed by his great new powers that he makes a belt advertising the fact, ‘seven with one blow.’ Then he set out to show the whole town, to let every one know what a fine fellow he is. In order to minimize his devaluation of the old lady and his inability to take in Her good things, he has to spoil the delicious morsel and cut the experience off. That which was a very fine work shop is now a shithole, too small for his valor.

”Nay, the entire world shall know of my bravery!’ His grandiosity is doubled down so as not to mourn the self destructive loss of his divine condiment. With a song in his heart and a trill upon his lips, he steps confidently into the world.

The tailor represents what Melanie Klien calls the paranoid/schizoid position. It is a very early stage of development in which the value of the other has not yet been learned and where the trauma of discovering that good things come from outside of me is dealt with by splitting, projection and envious attacks upon the self.

On his way out the door the tailor pockets a piece of cheese and a bird caught in a thicket. At the top of a mountain, he comes across a giant looking peacefully about. Interrupting the giant’s meditation, the tailor shows him the belt saying, ‘look there and read so you may see what manner of man I am.’ The giant was quite impressed. Then the giant picked up a stone and squeezed it till water ran out. ‘Can you do that?’ he asked.

The tailor took the cheese from his napsack and squeezed till liquid ran out. ‘There.’ The giant was doubly impressed. He picked up another stone and threw it so far it hit him on the back of his own head but the tailor scoffed and said he could throw a stone so high it would never come down and released the bird who duly flew off never to return.

‘Well, you sure can throw,’ said the giant, ‘let’s see you lift. Here, help me carry this mighty oak out of the forest.

‘Delighted,’ said the tailor, and leapt up into the branches whilst the giant had to carry the whole thing. When they got there he jumped down and laughed at the giant, ‘the idea of a man of your size not being able to carry a tree…’ Why are the people of Ohio so stupid?

The story of the valiant tailor, also called the lucky or brave tailor is a cautionary message about the beguiling power of projection so understated that even the most discerning reader can be left with the impression that he is indeed a most clever and charismatic person who deserves to do well in life.

Yet if you look closely he is not at all brave. He succeeds by trickery, deceit and emotional bullying. His courage is simply the lack of critical self reflection to question his own PR and his delight in the projections of others as to his greatness soon become his narcissistic supply.

The tailor arrives in the grounds of a royal palace and falls asleep on the grass. His inflation has now swallowed up any functioning ego left. People come from all sides and read the girdle. They run to tell the king who invites him to be his counselor entirely on the strength of the boast. The castle guard are afraid of the tailor lest they all be killed by such a mighty warrior and ask to be released from service. By now the king is scared as well and sends the tailor to deal with two unruly giants hoping he won’t return but promising his daughter in marriage and half his kingdom if he does.

The tailor creeps up on the giants while they sleep, alternately pelting them with stones until they get in such a rage that they tear up trees and beat one another to death. The tailor has a head for diversion and division.

The king renages on his promise. The new Queen has overheard her mysterious husband talking in his sleep as if he were back in his tailor shop and the secret is out. So the king sets the tailor another great task, to catch a Unicorn who was ravaging the countryside. No problem for our hero who tricks the Unicorn into goring a tree and chops off his mighty horn with an axe.

Again the king prevaricates and sends him off to battle a great boar who’s making great havoc in the forest. The tailor traps the beast in a chapel and adamantly claims his reward.

which is grudgingly given.

The old king then decides just to arrest him anyway but the crafty tailor is forewarned and when the guard comes to his door shouts out saying, ‘I have killed seven with one blow, two giants, a unicorn and a boar. Why should I fear the king’s guard….?’ they all ran away. So the little tailor remained king for the rest of his life and the Queen just had to get used to it. Though he had no experience, real skill or acumen and had lied and cheated his way into power, the people just had to suck it up. The fact that he eventually gains a kingdom and a crown shouldn’t distract us from the fact of his ineptitude, vanity or psychopathic disregard for reality.

The problem is that by the time the story closes after the first telling everyone is cheering for the clever tailor. He has managed to seduce the reader as well as everyone in the story. All of which goes to show how easily otherwise intelligent folk are dazzled by slogans and punchy bravado.

Unfortunately, the tailor’s delusional belief in his own greatness, emblazoned like a political slogan across his belly, can only be maintained by lurching from one crisis to another. If such a hero had his hands on the tiller of the nation, they may cheer less loudly.

In the meantime we might ask how it is that everyone seems to be so taken in by this charlatan with zero qualifications or experience. The answer is that the rest of us secretly subscribe to be like him and harbor more omnipotent fantasies of similarly being able to sweep aside life’s frustrations than we’d like to admit.

”The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.”
Carl Jung – Aion

Trump is more than a man at least as much as his failure to be one. Like the valiant tailor he is someone else’s man but, confusingly, also a brand, a telemarketing clusterfuck of primordial conflicts of interest condensed out of an entire culture’s psychic runoff. He is the amalgamation of all the denied arrogance and aggression of an epoch’s pious pilgrims whose combined efforts become the train wreck you can’t look away from.

When Rep (R) Peter Jolly said the problem was not Trump but the hundred million who voted for him he did not go far enough. He was not put there by a dumb bunch of blue collar hicks. He was put there by a system so convinced in its own righteousness that a Trump could never happen, until it did. He was put there by a system which has been preening its superiority since the battle of Acre. He is the manifestation of denied collective shadow which has been accumulating in the western psyche for as long as we have been exporting belief systems and invading people for their own good.

The valiant tailor is an archetype. He is the trickster-like narcissistic underbelly of an otherwise idealized culture which has denied and projected its shadow to the point of actually manifesting it in office.

”It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses- and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost.” CG Jung

What’s to be done? The clue lies in the beginning of the story, in the tailor’s contorted efforts to palm off his feelings of inferiority onto the old lady who becomes embittered by his measly purchase after much comment and inspection. He uses the interaction over the jam to feed his ego rather than his soul which will not then permit him to feast. Despite the invocation of the gods to bless his jam he never gets to taste it.

Had he treated the old lady decently, bought a fair sized pot of jam and simply tucked into his good fortune, his involvement in life would have obviated the compensatory lust for power and the dangerous blurring of fantasy and reality required along the way. Being a jammy tailor would have seemed just the right kind of thing to be. The problem with being so fortunate is that ..

‘such a man knows whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.’ Jung.

Political change, like charity, begins at home. We have to begin with the tailor within, that aspect of ourselves which is grandiose, paranoid and babyish. Moreover, if I can gratefully give the old lady the time of day, feel nourished by her jam, let the world in, then life is already good despite the world’s dictailors.

A Special Kind of Madness.

I went to a posh white supremacist public school. Its main lesson was in power and how to abuse it. This began with your own abuse and debasement, ‘in order to build you up and create character’.

The new boys had the great honor of being ‘fags’, tending the eighteen year old prefects, warming toilet seats on a winter’s morning, sucking dick as needed, hanging off the hook at the back of his door for an hour..

Of course, you could rat. But then your life would go from being a living hell to something far worse. There was a suspicious death, a few slit wrists, several disappearances….

and so we swore on our mother’s graves that we would never be like that when we were seniors. We would be different. And yet, and yet, the overwhelming feeling upon passing between the great school gates on the first day of my senior year, raising my straw boater as required, was a rush of power and pleasure… Now it was my turn.

I had become one of them.

People tend to think of corruption in material terms. It is the financial shenanigans or the sexual scandal which catch our attention. But there are some very specific ways in which excessive amounts of executive power do a great deal more than make you drunk. Drunkenness passes. More dangerous is the clinical condition bound to overtake even the most rounded personality when it begins to feel appointed by God…

along with the urgent need to project vulnerability and torment on some third party.

To that end both History and Tabloid are littered with mad kings, and not a few mad queens. The salutary tale of Empress Messalina, auntie of Roman emperor Nero, will tell what curious shapes such inflation can take.

Messalina was true to the homicidal traditions of the Julian family, bumping off several nieces and a good few senators along the way, with failed attempts against her sister-in-law Agrippina who eventually did her in before being taken out by Nero. So, nothing too out of the ordinary.

But Messalina had a double life. She might have been Empress by day but she spent her nights in the whore house. According to the Roman scribe Suetonius, she had a sex competition with the top prostitute of the city, which she apparently won with twenty five men in a day. The detail which concerns us is Suetonius’ throw away line that she then went home unsatisfied….

Messalina’s story is not simply one of privileged immorality, though it’s the salacious details which are bound to grab attention. Here is someone who must have been experiencing profound emptiness to go to such extraordinary lengths .. and still fail in her endeavors.

Meantime her husband Claudius is trying to fill his emptiness by gorging on stuffed hummingbirds. Nephew Nero is gorging on young boys he likes to have fucked to death which I suppose he thought was a shade more wicked than great-grandfather Tiberius who only threw the children he’d raped over a cliff.

What’s the point of that? How can you have fun without blood?

Rubbing shoulders with the Gods leads to all kinds of trouble. Not least of these is Paranoid Anxiety. You’d think that the inflation and omnipotence of being a Majesty would be an ample shield against anything as petty as unnamed fears or delusions of persecution and yet Messalina’s privileged life was seeped in subterfuge and plot.

Freud associates paranoia with suppressed aggression, Klein with unconscious envy; but you have to wonder, in addition to the torturous childhoods many a tyrant endures, just what the fallout of being divinely appointed might be…

For Narcissistic Entitlement to work you have to be at odds with those who are not. More to the point, you have to sell out your own common clay in the process, the ordinary self which identifies with others and with the land while still having its own point of view, which is able to keep company and share togetherness whilst still forging a unique path through the jungle.

When you are Divinely Appointed you have to trade in Belonging for the privilege. The problem with this is that you can own the castle and even the ground its built on but if you don’t belong, none of it can be enjoyed.

which is going to feel like someone is out to get you… or that some hidden hand has taken what is rightfully yours….enough to induce homicidal fury..

Meantime the organic unfolding of the Self must be derailed for the feeling of entitlement to be maintained. So, not only your redeeming ordinariness but also your unique potential has to be projected out into the world where it comes at you, if not as destiny, then as fate.

For Messalina and her exalted family, the paranoia inducing projection is eventually so great that a shooting star is taken as an oracle to mean that an assassination of some mighty person is about to take place. Of course, all the mighty persons want to make damn sure the prophecy is not about them so they become agents of prophecy instead, the right hand of the Gods. Everyone winds up dead except Nero, who will soon turn his blade on himself…

having run out of family.

”People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.’ C G Jung

Facing your own soul has a prerequisite, ordinariness. For want of this workaday humility, being one amongst many, what Klein calls ‘the depressed position’ there is no sense of a vessel to contain the Self, now compelled into the role of a vengeful fiend visiting humiliation on you instead.

Both Nero and Messalina are compelled to act out their common clay in lieu of its integration. Nero tops his auntie’s whore house sexploits by publicly getting some strapping lads to have their way with him as if he were a common slave. He would give performances dressed as a lowly bard… make sure you applaud just right if you feel brave enough to go and watch… you might wind up becoming the entertainment.

Be careful what you ask for. To ‘have everything’ can constitute a loss of soul, the becoming of a hungry ghost, paranoid and insatiable, poor in apparent wealth, a victim behind the safety of castle walls.

Truth will Out.

You have the right to remain silent…

Isn’t it curious.. the first thing agents of law enforcement do upon your arrest is to remind you of the human tendency to blurt out a confession. It is as though, against all the combined forces of your better judgment, including the instinct for survival, you harbored a traitor hell bent on dobbing you in.

And you do…

Conscience.

Having your Miranda rights read to you stems from the case of one Ernesto Miranda who confessed to kidnapping and rape charges while in custody. His lawyers sought to overturn his conviction after they learned during a cross-examination that Miranda wasn’t told he had the right to be protected from self incrimination.

In fact the halls of jurisprudence are filled with examples of people being their own worst enemies. An episode of Judge Judy has the defendant angrily condemn himself while the plaintiff tallies the contents of her stolen purse.

‘Keys, ten dollars, a driver’s license..’

‘There was no driver’s license in the purse!’ he yells out. But… how could he know that unless he had taken the purse? The whole case lasts under a minute.

More serious is the example of Robert Durst, subject of the documentary, ‘The Jinx’, who pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and looked as though he might be headed for acquittal until he took a bathroom break and forgot his mike was still on,

‘There you are. You are caught. What the hell did I do? Why, killed them all of course.’

He tried to wriggle out of it.. if only he had not also kindly supplied the police with a sample of his handwriting at the scene of the crime he might have gotten clean away…

Throughout the debacle of the Russia Collusion you see one conspirator after another inadvertently putting his foot in it, all the way from Trump calmly admitting on live TV that he fired James Comey to obstruct his investigation, through Rudy Giuliani saying, ‘I never said there was no collusion., ‘ to Roger Stone giving the Nixon salute on the courthouse steps after his indictment, a gesture which means the opposite of the plea he had just submitted to the judge.

Literature has a number of famous examples, the best of which is Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘Tell Tale Heart’. A man commits a murder and has gotten away with it.. The police are walking away….

‘‘ Suddenly I could bear it no longer. I pointed at the boards and cried, “Yes! Yes, I killed him. Pull up the boards and you shall see! I killed him. But why does his heart not stop beating?! Why does it not stop!?”

In ancient times we have the story of King Midas who was cursed with ass’s ears. He tried to keep it a secret. Nobody knew but his barber who whispered the secret into the ground and buried it there, but reeds grew up and as the wind blew between them the secret was teased into the breeze…..

How does this happen? Shakespeare explains..

” An oven that is stopp’d, or river stay’d, burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage: So of concealed sorrow may be said; Free vent of words love’s fire doth assuage: But when the heart’s attorney once is mute, the client breaks, as desperate in his suit.” Venus and Adonis.

Something in us defies our own best efforts to lead an easier life. In mythology this is embodied by the dreadful Furies, three dark goddesses in the service of Hades who met out justice and rectify any imbalance in it’s scales.

What this means is that Conscience is not a part of you. It is an autonomous complex with its own agenda. It cares not a hoot for conscious intention or self preservation. Given space and time they have their way and find some form of expression, perhaps in moments of crisis or moral jeopardy.

‘‘All men are liars, certainly. I just let them sit there and lie…. then they begin to tell the truth.” Jung (quoted by Elizabeth Sargeant)

A curious detail to do with the Furies is that the three goddesses have four collective names (Furies, Erinyes, Eumenides, Semnai). They are representatives of what the Alchemists call ‘the problem of three and four’. Three into four won’t go and so the problem of three and four is an expression of the difficulty of bringing the opposites of consciousness and the Unconscious together. They could equally have called it the problem of oil and water, how to find common ground or some kind of bridge between worlds.

Conscience is one such bridge because the Furies are messengers as well as dispensers of justice. They answer directly to Hades and so if they turn up on your doorstep it’s because Hades wants a word. Their retribution is also a form of communication.

Fortunately, the Furies also take orders from Persephone who has a tad more bedside manner and so their justice tends to be of the poetic variety, something you might learn from as well as being left to dangle.

Dying of a heart attack, James Washington of Tennessee told police that he had “to get something off my conscience”. He revealed that he had killed a woman 17 years earlier. The Furies arranged for his miraculous recovery to full health, just in time for his new 51-year jail sentence for murder.

In ancient Greece, Orestes was driven mad by the Furies for killing his mother Clytemnestra, something he was required to do by ancient law since she killed his father Agamemnon who then had to be avenged. Orestes appeals to Athena who eventually acquits him but she asks the Furies to stay on and be patrons of the city.

The goddess of Wisdom understands humanity needs its sense of guilt because it has within it the power to transform omnipotence into a sense of human proportion. Guilt is necessary for the integration of the personality. It makes us aware of limitation, of the possibility of being and doing wrong without which self awareness is impossible. In fact guilt can protect us from….

“a disturbing form of narcissistic personality where grandiosity is built around aggression and the destructive aspects of the self become idealized” H Rosenfeld.

As for Ernesto Miranda, though his case was set aside by the Supreme Court ruling, he was retried and sent to jail. After being released, he was fatally stabbed in a bar fight. His suspected killer was read his Miranda rights and didn’t answer questions from police. He was never convicted.

How we Heal.

Whether or not suffering may be redeemed largely depends on how you think it’s supposed to happen.

The traditional idea of a cure seems to have been bent out of shape. It carries connotations of illness and disease, plus the idea that it can be fixed, a notion only a step away from driving out demons. More liberal notions of healing still tend to conjure the idea that it is something that can be dispensed, the starched white coat or the ecclesiastical frock simply traded in for a mystical cape and just the right incantation.

I feel your pain…

All of which begs the question of how therapy might work and why it’s worth you spending a small fortune on someone you never met in lieu of bread and beer..

How would it be if we considered what ails you, not as sickness, or as a source of shame and failing, or the irredeemable horrors of the past, as a kind of cramp? The kind of cramp anyone is bound to get when you go adventuring. One that need not necessarily require either medication, holy cures or making better?

If we think of syndromes and disorders in terms of particular kinds of cramp then we might approach therapy with less toolkit and more wintergreen.

Physical cramp wants massage, time, hydration and electrolytic supplementation. Metaphorical cramps need the same, in a suitably symbolic way.

First your psychic cramp needs the massage of sympathetic warmth and genuine interest. The cramp wants being paid attention to and taken seriously. It hurts like hell. You have to give the cramp time and space whilst safely hydrating it with the waters of the Unconscious, dreams, fantasies, and imagination that seeks out the sacred in ordinary life.

‘The main problem with life’s conundrums is that we do not bring to them enough imagination.’ T. Moore.

Jung observes that when the cramp is particularly severe..

”often only the hands are capable of fantasy, they model or draw figures that are sometimes quite foreign to the conscious mind.”

The need for electrolytes is a delicious metaphor.

Electrolytes are chemicals that form electrically charged particles (ions) in body fluids. These ions carry the electrical energy necessary for many functions, including muscle contractions and transmission of nerve impulses.

So what they do is facilitate our capacity to respond. They allow information to flow. If information does not flow in the psyche it gets cramp. I wonder if paranoia, besides having historical roots in a childhood and something to be paranoid about, is not also exacerbated by a restricted flow of information, like an inner disjointed and stilted dinner conversation of folk who don’t get on and won’t share what they know.

If something unknown is doing I don’t know what, then you will have plenty to be paranoid about…

Electrolytes are like pathfinders, connecting up disparate parts of ourselves so they can begin to speak to each other, creating the kind of internal dialogue needed for reflection between I and me. I once asked a colleague who specialized in working with manic-depression how he went about it. He replied, ‘When they are depressed I remind them of their energy and enthusiasm. When they are delirious and excitable I remind them of how shitty life can be.’

In the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece, as the initiates were reaching the ecstatic climax of their initiation, a dark cloaked figure would walk among the participants whispering quietly, ‘you’re going to die…’

Electrolytes prevent cramp by virtue of both positive and negative ions being present. There has to be a charge, some psychic tension, some sense of the interplay between different and even opposing forces in order for different parts of the whole to share their stories. Being ‘positive’ is a recipe for disaster. Half the soul gets cut away in the name of what’s best for you.

There’s no better recipe for depression than homogenization, presenting the same groundhog face to the world day after day where blended conformity becomes bland sustenance and finally, blunt instrument.

Thomas Szasz reminds us that the mind is not a noun but a verb, more of an activity than an actor. Without lubrication this activity cramps and has to resort to ‘proto-language’, ie symptoms, in order to catch our attention. Proto-language is cramped communication, having to rely on early modes of interaction that seem like madness but are actually de-contextualized pre-verbal gesture.

Szasz makes the further point that much of what we call madness is rooted in being deceived. When children are lied to the real self is cramped by the contrary injunctions to stand by one’s own experience vs the instinct to swallow parental directives as gospel..

In his ‘Etiology of Hysteria’, Freud the younger, yet to renounce his unpopular views of 1896 in favor of the later drive conflict theory in 1905, says that the damaging seal set on abuse, particularly sexual abuse, is by virtue of its subsequent denial and having to invalidate one’s own experience.

The child has to twist herself out of shape in order to amend her own reality. Restricted access to the truth means the pathways it follows become shut down and overgrown. Opening that traffic back up means truth telling and entertaining the dawning distress of trauma over the masking discomfiture of psychic cramp.

When external constraint has to be internalized as self-restriction, cramp ensues. Our movements are suddenly no longer our own. Borders have to be either narcissisticaly walled off or indiscriminately thrown open, leading to either blockage or invasive borderline chaos in the psyche’s body politic.

What this means for therapy is that specialized cleverness and mantles of office are really quite secondary to paying attention, creating space and being respectfully patient.

”If attention is directed to the unconscious, it will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water.” CG Jung

Cures are contingent on curiosity, healing upon the restoration of untended inner pathways and vocation upon the agonized calling out to the Other that draws attention to the fact you’re running on empty.