AJA talk. The Two Old Friends and Snow White.

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

The Two Old Friends.

There were once two old friends who lived on different sides of the mountain. One of the old friends was so hungry he decided to go out into the forest to see if he could find some nuts but all he found were oak apples. He thought he’d go down into the village and try to sell them anyway. Perhaps some idiot would buy them. Meantime, the other old friend was so hungry he had gone out in search of poppy seeds. He came home empty handed but filled up his sack with ashes, thinking to go and dupe some poor fool in the village below.

Half way there the two old friends bumped into each other. They clapped one another on the back and boasted a bit about how wonderful life was on their respective sides of the mountain. Finally, they came up with the brilliant idea that they would swop the sacks and save themselves a journey down into the village which, in any case, surely didn’t merit being graced by their presence. So each returned home chuckling about how they had outsmarted the other.

When the first old friend got home he opened up his sack of poppy seeds to discover nothing but ashes. He was furious and ran around the mountain armed with a rake to teach the other old friend a lesson. When the other old friend got home he opened his sack of nuts to find only oak apples. Enraged, he grabbed a hoe and rushed around the mountain to demand justice. When they met in the middle they beat one another black and blue before dissolving into laughter.

”I never could cheat you brother!’

‘No, and I never could cheat you….’

So they decided to go cheat someone else together, two heads being better than one, and hired themselves out to a rich man for a few days thinking that when they got paid they might see where he kept his money. Sure enough, when the time came, the rich man drew up some gold from his well and so that night the two old friends snuck into his garden to liberate the remainder.

One old friend lowered the other old friend down into the well where he filled up his sack with gold but not to the brim. He knew full well he would be left behind if he sent the gold up first so he left room for himself and climbed in after. Sure enough, once the gold was hoisted up, the old friend set off at speed, with no more thought for the other old friend until he popped his head out of the sack, thanking him for the ride. The old friend was so exhausted from all this effort of carrying both gold and man he set down to rest and soon fell asleep whereupon the other old friend shouldered the gold and slipped away.

When the old friend woke and found the gold missing he connived a cunning plan. He tied a thread to a stick and cracked it like a whip as though leading an ox and cart. He knew the other old friend was lazy and would wait for the prospect of a free ride. Sure enough, around the bend of the lane sat the other old friend with his thumb out. He was so tired from his exertions that he had fallen asleep with all the waiting. So the old friend now took back the gold and ran all the way home, telling his wife to hide it in her wooden chest and bury him in a shallow grave so that the other old friend would think him dead.

When the old friend arrived he was shocked to find the weeping wife, then suspicious, but also moved by the woman’s tears. Perhaps he was a bit upset himself now and so they wept together long and hard for the demise of the old friend. Then the old friend asked to see the other old friend’s grave to pay his respects. The clearly hasty arrangement of things aroused his suspicions once more and so he began to make sounds like an angry bull about the mound of earth until the other old friend cried out in fright and leapt up from his pit.

‘Don’t tread on me, my old friend will find me.!

‘I found you already old friend..’

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

……………………………………………………

Snow White.

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

A Queen dies giving birth to a princess, as white as snow, as red as blood and as black as ebony wood. The King soon married again, a proud and vain woman who hated Snow White and wanted her dead. The Queen had a magic mirror which she would consult, asking, ‘Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of us all?’ And each time the mirror would reply. ‘Thou, oh Queen, are fairest of all.’ One day she asked and it spoke differently..

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

The furious Queen ordered a huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and kill her, bringing back her lungs and liver as a token. But the huntsman let her go out of pity. He returned with the lungs and liver of a boar he’d killed instead which the Queen promptly had Cook prepare with parsley and a light balsamic glaze. Once she had cleansed her pallet she again went to the magic mirror and was astounded to hear it tell her..

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

The Queen disguised herself as an old peddler and went to the dwarves cottage, crying: “Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap.” Snow-White unbolted the door and let her in. “Child,” said the old woman, “what a fright you look; come, I will lace you properly for once.” But the old woman laced her so quickly and so tightly that Snow-White lost her breath and fell down as if dead. “Now I am the most beautiful,” cackled the Queen to herself, and ran away.

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

When the wicked witch went back to the mirror it answered as before…

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

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

When the Queen got home she again consulted the mirror which answered as before;

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

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

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who in this land is the fairest of all?”

it answered at last—

“Thou, O Queen, art the fairest of all.”

Then her envious heart had rest, in so far as an envious heart can have rest.

The grief stricken dwarfs made Snow White a transparent coffin of glass and they laid her in it. They wrote her name upon it in golden letters and took it in turns to watch over her. One day, a king’s son came into the forest and was amazed at the glass coffin with the beautiful Snow-White inside. He begged the dwarves to let him have her, so struck was he by her beauty and had it carried away by his servants on their shoulders. It then just so happened that one of them stumbled over the root of a tree and jolted the coffin. The shock dislodged the poisonous piece of apple caught in Snow White’s throat and before long she opened her eyes and was once more alive.

“Oh, heavens! where am I?” cried she. The King’s son, full of joy, replied, “You are with me.” And soon they came to be married with great show and splendour.

The Old Queen was invited to the wedding and when she arrived… they were waiting for her. Iron slippers had already been put upon a roaring fire. The red hot shoes were brought over with tongs, and set before her. Then she was made to put them on and dance until she dropped down dead.

Fairytales as psychological paradigms.

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

Adhesive Anxiety.

You will be familiar with Bowlby’s attachment styles, though this may well hamper any efforts to think about which particular attachment styles might give rise to either narcissistic or borderline phenomena. We are happily saved from this dilemma by the work of Esther Bick who introduced the concept of adhesive attachment in the 1960s as part of her work on early infant development, particularly in her paper “The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations” (1968). She used the term adhesive identification or adhesive attachment to describe an earlier primitive mode of relating in which the infant relies on physical contact prior to any differentiation between self and other.’

Bick proposes that the skin is the infant’s earliest symbol and experience of containment. It is not only a biological boundary but a sensory modality of cohesion, safety, and “being held together.” which keeps the infant’s experience organised.

If the time and quality of being in arms dips below a certain threshold, the infant’s parts are left feeling as though they have no binding force amongst themselves. The infant must then develop a compensatory ‘second skin’, a defensive structure which forms when it experiences:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jung saw narcissism as an inflated, defensive ego which resists deeper self-awareness, hindering true psychological growth and individuation. The theft of the rich man’s gold captures this sense of arrogating the numinosity of the Self to partial ego states. Otto Kernberg emphasises the ‘use of others as instruments….. as tools for the maintenance of self‐esteem or the grandiose self, rather than as partners in a genuine relationship of mutuality.” (p. 123) Ledermann advances Kernberg’s thinking, ‘lack of love for oneself and concomitant feelings of aloofness arise as an early defence against the terror of not being able to be related to and of non-existing’. “I am afraid’, says Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘they might someday find out that there’s nothing inside me, that I am only the skin of someone, and that inside, under my arm, perhaps, there’s nothing but emptiness.”

The old friends’ beatings and quarrels do not break their bond, they reinforce it,
acting like the “positive reinforcing function of negative attention” (Gallimore, Tharp & Kemp. 1969) When skin to skin needs are unmet by nurture they must be set in place by other means. Aldous Huxley makes the brilliant observation in ‘Chrome Orange’ that the nascent Central American Republics went to war with one another after gaining independence from Spain (15th Sept 1821), in order to know themselves as nations. Indigenous culture had been eroded by colonisers who, now too, were no longer. This crisis of cultural identity and the need for internal cohesion was resolved by going to war with one another, each waving their flag, freshly filled with the glue of patriotic fervour and sticking together.

Adhesive Attachment in Snow White.

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

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

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

Erasing and incorporating is how the wicked witch preserves her sense of self. I came across an example in the street the other day. A mother is striding along at great speed. Her three year old is running to keep up. She asks angrily, ‘Why are you running?’ He replies, ‘because I am not.’ To remain congruent with mother’s denial of reality, that he’s having to run to keep up with her, he has to deny it himself, even if this gobbles up his embodied experience.

Fordham’s “symbol formation.”

Now let’s think about the emerging differences between the stories as they approach the threshold of symbol formation. For Fordham the Self is a primary, innate totality which de-integrates and re-integrates through-out development. Symbol formation is the psychic activity by which these de-integrations and re-integrations are managed, linking inner and outer worlds.

‘My interior,’ says Jung in the Red Book, ‘gives birth to the children of chaos of the primordial mother. He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, he melts. The formed in him dissolves and binds itself anew with the children of chaos.’ (p179)

Fordham’s ideas about de-integration and re-integration illustrate the psyche’s innate capacity for self-healing by describing a dynamic process through which the self continually disassembles and reorganises its structures in response to inner and outer experiences. Thus, symbol formation exercises the self’s developmental potential, its ability to transform raw experience into meaning and is predicated, to paraphrase Katerina Serafidou, on loss; a recognition that giving credence to the sovereignty of others is the price we pay for exercising our own.

Symbol Formation and the Two Old Friends.

The two old friends operate almost entirely on the level of the concrete and pre-symbolic. The exchange of sacks, nuts for oak apples, poppy seeds for ashes, is fraudulent, a distortion of symbolic exchange. That which purports to be nourishing is not. They cannot imagine meaning beyond the object itself. So they enact transactional trickery and theft in place of imaginative transformation. When my younger brother was about six or seven he took a ten pound note from my mother’s purse and encouraged his friend next door to do the same. They then swopped the notes so it wasn’t stealing any more. They were so sure of themselves that they proudly announced what they had done and were most upset when no one else thought them quite so clever.

Failure to Internalise the Other.

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

Symbol formation requires a capacity for inner space, the ability to tolerate separation between ego and Self, subject and object. Narcissistic structures tend to collapse this space. Symptomatic lack of empathy is more deeply rooted in a failure to experience the other as sufficiently their own person to have feelings about them in the first place.

Death and rebirth.

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

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

Developmentally, both the wooden chest and the earthen grave suggest Winnicott’s concept of “maternal reverie”, the process by which a mother takes in the infant’s raw emotional experience, processes it internally, and returns it in a more manageable form. Her wooden chest and the earthen grave are ”holding environments,” psychological spaces within which the infant’s unintegrated anxieties can be contained and transformed through her empathic responsiveness. The old friends are mostly stuck in their repetition compulsion until a containing third gets involved and their closed circuit can become transformed into a developmental arc.

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

Snow White and symbol formation.

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

The Queen, as destructive maternal introject, harries the child’s emerging autonomy, enviously attacking her in order to split off psychic pain which cannot be consciously represented or symbolised. Such denial both negates and depersonalises in the same breath. It is helped to do so by what Meltzer and Segal call concrete equation thinking, the confusion of symbol and thing, or of being and behaviour. The Queen doesn’t just envy Snow White’s beauty; she equates it with life itself. To destroy Snow White is to do more than rid herself of a rival, it is to ensure ontological security rooted in the wish to dominate and control.

The Queen cannot distinguish being admired from being alive; or being eclipsed from being annihilated. Hence her terrifying conviction, if Snow White lives, I die. She must succeed in her quest to kill Snow White, ‘even if it cost me my life’ because there is no symbolic space to separate self from other. This is managed instead by the systemic shaming that splitting entails and that suffuses their interaction, ‘what a fright you look, I will lace you properly for once.’ Her need to diminish and extinguish seem to be fundamental to her own inner peace. She achieves this by getting the child to believe that she is doing her a favour. ‘Being helped’ and feeling guilty begin to blend in deadly poison to eros and autonomy. The problem is not too much defensive closure as with the two Old Friends, but too much psychic permeability and fragmentation.

Shame and Guilt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion.

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

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

The Allure of Misery.

Once there was a miserable couple. They hardly spoke and slept in separate rooms. Every day the man would reluctantly chop wood, making sure to splinter it up beyond use and every day the woman would cook biscuits making sure to burn them a little. One day, whilst splintering the logs, the man decided he’d had enough. He dug the axe blade deep into the chopping block and walked out of the garden gate, down the hill, into the town. There he caught a boat and sailed the seven seas for a decade or more. One year his boat moored up in his old home town. He walked through the town, climbed the hill and lifted the rusty latch on the garden gate. He pulled the axe out of the block where it was still wedged, splintered some wood and went into the cottage. His wife was stood in the kitchen. ‘There’s your wood!’ he said aggressively. Without looking up she reached for a plate of something dark and mouldy, thrusting them down onto the table with a crash, ‘And there’s your biscuits’.

Why do people stay in unhappy relationships? Is it because they both believe they can save the other? Or be saved by them? Or ‘make them see’? Is it ‘for the sake of the kids’? Beneath such reasons there is invariably something darker, less available for consideration, more painfully uncomfortable to face. It’s what you are used to. It’s the devil that you know. Beneath the desire to save or rescue, beyond the kick of emotional intensity mistaken for intimacy, or the despairing reluctance to start over, is the compulsive repetition of familiarity’s hard wiring.

But there’s another layer still. It’s so simple it’s easy to miss, yet so obvious that when you say it out loud you wonder how it got evaded for so long. Preoccupation with the other’s issues, remonstrating with their idiosyncrasies and focusing on their problems means you don’t have to confront your own. You can stay with, ‘she let me down’, rather than the more corrosive, ‘I chose badly’. ‘Why does she treat me that way?’, is easier than ‘why do I let myself be treated like that?’ The poor me of, ‘how can she behave like that?’, is more comforting than, ‘why do I tolerate it?’

When the mirror is held up like this something profoundly uncomfortable happens. You realise that what you thought of as projection is way more complex than at first appears. Generally we tend to think of projection as limited to the shadow, the attribution to the other of all one’s own ‘negative’ traits, hate, anger, greed. But projection is about more than ridding oneself of inferior qualities. It is primarily about preserving the status quo. To that end we are just as likely to project our depth, wisdom, and inner gold if it serves the purpose of preserving psychic equilibrium.

So there is actually a twofold process happening with the stuck and unhappy couple. On the one hand, focusing on the speck in the other’s eye means being able to ignore the beam in your own. Alongside this however, and at the other end of the spectrum, we also attribute the other with all kinds of positive qualities they don’t deserve, so as not to have to fulfil our own potential or be challenged by it. This both divests oneself of the responsibility for personal growth and lends ballast to an otherwise rocky situation by affording the other with more credit than they are due. Thus the unhappy relationship both provides a person with the opportunity to rid themselves of, or at least ignore, feelings of inferiority on the one hand and renounce the gauntlet of unlived potential on the other. The unhappy relationship gives a person the chance to idealise themselves without having to grow, to be powerful or at least hard done by without having to be vulnerable. The shining knight always gets to show up in a full suit of armour.

Projection achieves an added twist when a partner is made responsible for your happiness. It’s no longer simply a question of the shadow being projected but of the anima or animus. Anima/us projections are from a deeper layer of the psyche and comprise issues of meaning, potential and fulfilment. Such projections require the other to live up to something they are ill-equipped to shoulder. When this inevitably falls short there is bound to be both disappointment and the plaintive insistence that the now diminished partner ‘recover’ their capacity to make us feel good about ourselves. This can become an embittered project. Couples can co-exist in such an unhappy tryst for a lifetime. It is however the lesser of two evils. The alternative, which is to be the author of one’s own meaningful destiny, is a much greater challenge, devoid of blaming and ‘if only’.

“A marriage is more likely to succeed if the woman follows her own star and remains conscious of her wholeness than if she constantly concerns herself with her husband’s star and his wholeness. When a woman experiences the mystery of creativeness in herself, in her own inner world, she is doing the right thing and then no longer demands it from the outside — from her husband, her son, or anyone else close to her.” (Jung in conversation with Esther Harding)

Jung was just as unequivocal in his thoughts about men, ‘The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing … He must obey his own law…The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization — absolute and unconditional— of its own particular law … To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being … he has failed to realise his own life’s meaning.’

The combined effect of shadow and anima/us projections, whilst initially relieving tension, ultimately make for a very particular kind of psychic poison. Whilst it rids a person of both inferiority and responsibility, the resulting righteousness hardly compensates the misery and listlessness entailed. Individuation, with all its trials and tribulations, is no longer the discomforting and gristly morsel the Fates would have you chew, but so too does everything else then grind to a halt. Out of the blue you are now the victim of circumstance, all for the privilege of a feigned and unfulfilling innocence, which, for all its protective promise, does not sustain or satisfy.

Now let’s apply these dynamics to political leadership in order to try and understand how the unpopular and tyrannical, likewise, manage to stay in place. Like the unhappy romance which persists despite its miseries, so too the betrayed election promises, the gross revelations, the hidden tax returns, the body odour of the reviled leader, all would seem to be enough to end the affair. Yet the tyrant stays in power way longer than you would think possible despite the protestations of the disaffected electorate.

You wonder about the teflon effect, where every valid grievance magically comes to nothing. From Tiberius to Trump we seem to expect the impunity, perversity and corruption of the powerful. The liberty, equality and fraternity of 1789 gave way to Napoleon crowning himself Emperor of France and its colonies within the space of a single generation. Of course we say out loud how much we wish for benevolent leadership just as the cuckold holds out for true love, yet where would we be without some aberrant lord to revile, rehabilitate, indict or condemn?

The reviled leader does not survive despite his miscreants but because of them. A milder sinner would not last half as long. His incoherence, bigotry and pussy grabbing preserve him in a way no amount of statesmanship could afford. It serves us to think of him as an aberration so as not to be reminded of our collective predilection for corrupt leadership, just as the ardent lover thinks of their current misery as an exception to the rule, forgetting the trail of disappointments which preceded it. Whether individually or collectively, there is this defensive need for the appalling other against whom one may yet measure one’s own upstanding forbearance.

The corrupt leader is also kept in place, like the failing lover, by more than the need for a hook to hang the shadow upon. They too are maintained by the projection of hopes and dreams alongside the stabilising effect of exported contempt. One of the features of kingship is that they are appointed by god, all of which alleviates the rest of us from the burden of having to have our own difficult tussle with the divine. We collectively project the Self onto the leader in order not to have to suffer the vicissitudes of spiritual growth. After all, ‘the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego’. (Jung 1974)

Part of the process of individuation is that the ego is forced to relinquish its claim to being the centre of everything. It’s a rather unpleasant and disorienting deflation to realise you are not captain of your ship. Its far easier on us to have someone else appointed to do the mediating with the gods on our behalf, especially if it means being able to hold onto the idea that the psyche is what I know of it. So, whilst wannabe kings are scary, immoral and persecutory so too does their divine appointment leave them with the difficult task of having to deal with the gods even if they manifestly fail at the job.

In ancient times a ruler was held responsible if the crops did not grow, because he had clearly failed to propitiate the gods. The ruler was not just a political leader but the mediator between the human world and the divine or cosmic order. If crops failed, floods came, droughts persisted, or epidemics spread, people frequently interpreted this as evidence that the ruler had lost divine favour or failed in ritual duties. The Chinese had a specific name for it, the Mandate of Heaven. Emperors sometimes issued public confessions after crop failures, acknowledging their own moral shortcomings and ordering acts of repentance, whilst the starving peasants were at least comforted, if not by full bellies, then at least by clean conscience.

We collectively tolerate the tyrant’s boot on our neck in the same way the unhappy person goes home to their abusive partner. We can be preoccupied with his ills rather than our own whilst skilfully handing over sovereign responsibility for what happens next at one and the same time. The jesus/tyrant, like the partner in receipt of anima/us projections can be lumbered with the terrifying responsibility of having to intercede/mediate with the gods on our behalf, leaving us free to renounce the dread prospect of having to do the job for ourselves.

The Adventures of Baron von Trumphausen.

Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Munchausen (1720–1797) was a German nobleman whose adventurous life was later fictionalised in literature and film. Munchausen was a man whose extensive and vivid imagination surpassed even the grandeur of his title and many names. One of the most famous of Baron Munchausen’s exploits references an occasion he once found himself drowning in a swamp but managed to save himself by pulling himself out by his own hair. Of course he had many other tall tales, riding across a battlefield on a canon ball, flying to the moon, being swallowed by a giant fish but somehow its this capacity to rescue himself from the most dire of situations that captures the imagination, an image of heroic and magical self-sufficiency which will constitute the focus of our attention today.

It would be an unfortunate act of preemptive foreclosure to dismiss Munchausen as a mere liar. He was more of a master raconteur with a gift for poker faced embellishment, a kind of oral magician with a mesmeric capacity to beguile and blur the lines between fantasy and reality. His ‘lies’ were compelling confabulations which riveted his audiences, inspired imagination, enticed and enchanted. The great and the good fought for a seat at his myth-making dinner parties, competing for the privilege of being seduced into fantastical narrative told with performative exaggeration.

Munchausen’s ‘stories’ are important because they underscore how much we like to be deceived by the improbable and the impossible, why we ourselves are often moved to fib, prevaricate and dissemble, why it is that cheaters do in fact prosper. We may feel offended by the mendacious fudging of a barefaced lie, but our moral high ground runs the risk of getting in the way of exploring the purposes it might serve. Why it is that we collectively tolerate and even delight in pejorative cozenage? The story of Munchausen pulling himself from the swamp by his hair needs to be analysed both for its symbolic content and for its capacity to capture the imagination.

We normally associate lying with the attempt to avoid consequences and tend to regard the lie with opprobrium because it expresses the wish to simply get oneself out of trouble, or to remain at the centre of attention. Whilst Munchausen’s “lies” are exuberant, mythic fabrications expressing omnipotence and imaginative freedom, Munchausen Syndrome describes a psychiatric condition in which similar fabrications are focused on illness rather than adventure, a form of possession by the Trickster archetype, organised around a wounded child seeking care and recognition. In its most extreme form it involves deliberate falsification of symptoms and elaborate pathological storytelling motivated by the desire for attention, care, and psychological containment in order to avoid the rigours and demands of life.

Dig a little deeper and there is the lie which expresses the anxious need to stay congruent with a particular view of oneself, the lie which seeks to avoid not only consequence but also cognitive dissonance. Such a lie serves not only to avoid retribution but also to augment internal cohesion, congruence designed to avoid getting into trouble with yourself by minimising internal conflict or contradiction. This shifts the focus from the lies we tell others to those we tell ourselves.

Then there’s a deeper level still, a descent from naughty to nasty, in which the lie is designed not just to avoid censure or to help you feel better about yourself but when it is yoked to the kind of desire for power over others which tolerates and even requires collateral damage and the suffering of third parties. Such lies are meant to fuck with your head and destroy relatedness, the kind of lie designed not to get yourself out of shit but to put others in it. At this juncture the lie is synonymous with sadistic cruelty. Its purpose is deeper than intra-psychic consistency and becomes more a question of preserving a sense of self via the persecution of others. The shift here is Copernican because the lie is being actively employed to depersonalise and project inferiority. Its maintenance requires jackboots and active victimisation.

The most pernicious lie however, encapsulating all of the above but not limited to them, is the one symbolised by Munchausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his hair. I am sufficient to myself. I don’t need you. The other is not simply victimised but eradicated.

Whilst Munchausen syndrome is a pathological possession by the Trickster archetype, in which the ego constructs grandiose illness narratives to secure maternal containment and narcissistic mirroring while defending against fragmentation and dependency, the story of him pulling himself out of the swamp by his hair serves the same purpose, but by identifying with the opposite, absolute invulnerability. Trickster is now augmented with Magician.

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard refers to such a condition as a ‘sickness unto death.’ Kierkegaard defines the self as essentially relational. It relates to itself and is grounded in a power beyond itself. When this relation is misaligned despair threatens, requiring further efforts to secure oneself by even greater efforts to be one’s own ground. The individual refuses to experience themselves as dependent. Instead, they attempt to author and sustain an identity by sheer will and imagination. The Baron pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair is the symbolic representation of Kierkegaard’s defiant self. This is not healthy autonomy, no self can provide its own ultimate foundation. The attempt to do so leads to increasingly elaborate performances of self-sufficiency, ultimately a magnificent but impossible effort to become one’s own creator.

Where Søren Kierkegaard diagnoses the spiritual structure of defiant selfhood, and Carl Jung interprets the archetypal symbolism, Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers asks a distinct question, what kind of human possibility is disclosed when a person lives within stories that are factually impossible yet existentially meaningful? What does the fabricated narrative accomplish for that person?

A return to Kierkegaard provides the answer, behind defiant self-assertion often lies the opposite despair, an inability to tolerate one’s ordinary, vulnerable identity. The grandiose storyteller implicitly says, ‘The self I have been given is intolerable, therefore I will invent another.’ The impossible adventure covers a more painful reality of utter dependency and disastrous insufficiency.

According to The Washington Post Fact Checker, President Trump told 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first presidency. They all fall, with chillingly precision, into the different categories detailed above. From the attempts to garner sympathy and avoid consequence with his factitious bone spurs, to the lies he tells himself about crowd sizes and how popular he is, to the lies about migrants involving the justification of putting children in cages, to the lies about being exonerated from responsibility for having appeared on every other page of the Epstein files, to the bombing of Iran based on the lie that they are developing a nuclear weapon. But the scariest lie by far is the image posted on Truth Social of him as Jesus. In that image, Trickster and Magician are now bolstered by Saviour, come together to form a truly unholy trinity.

Perhaps the only thing that should concern us more is that Trump is not the problem. He is a symptom of the problem. The anti-christ is neither the devilish opposite of Jesus nor even the poor fool with nuclear codes who mistakes himself for Jesus, but the pervasive collective sentiment which no longer cares whether the most powerful man in the world lies, rapes, steals, cheats and kills… or not.

The Juniper Tree.

A brief study of evil.

Once upon a time there was a young woman who bore a son. She died during childbirth and was buried according to her wishes beneath the Juniper tree in the garden. After some time the boy’s father married again and had a daughter by this new wife, a harsh and moody woman who always found a reason outside herself to explain her ill temper. It seemed to her that her new son always stood in her way, both to her husband’s affections and to her daughter’s legacy. The ‘evil one’ filled her mind with this until she hated the boy, the poor child having to live in continual terror and unable to find any peace.

One day her daughter asked her if she might have an apple from the chest of drawers. As she was helping herself she asked if her older brother might also have one when he returned from school. The woman stiffened, and, as if the devil had entered into her, she snatched back the apple and told her daughter sharply that she had to wait for the boy’s return. When the boy got back from school the same devil made his step mother ask him with unusual sweetness if he would like an apple. Then it seemed as if she was forced to say, ‘come with me..’ and when he began to help himself from the chest of drawers the devil prompted her once more and she slammed the lid shut with such force his head rolled off.

Then she was overwhelmed with terror, ‘if I could but make them think it was not done by me,..’ She propped him up at the table and put the poor head back on its slender shoulders with a handkerchief wrapped around his neck to conceal the awful wound. She then put the apple in his open hand and went fussing about her business. When the daughter came in asking for her apple now her brother had returned from school she said, ‘of course, you may have his apple and if he does not give it to you, box his ears.’ When the young girl asked her brother for his apple and he failed to respond she boxed his ears and of course the head rolled off to the hysterical screaming of the terrified girl.

‘What have you done?’ scolded the mother, ‘come we must hide your crime and make him into black pudding.’ So they chopped him up and made him into black pudding, the girl crying terribly all the while. When the father came home they served him the black pudding and he ate up the whole lot. Beneath the table, the traumatised girl gathered up her brother’s bones, wrapped them in a handkerchief and went and lay under the Juniper tree weeping tears of blood.

Then she fell asleep and when she woke the handkerchief of bones had gone. At the top of the tree she saw a beautiful bird which sang the most incredible song,

‘My mother killed me, my father ate me, my sister gathered my bones, tied them in a handkerchief, laid them beneath the Juniper tree, kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I’

The bird flew off to the nearby mill and sang his song once more…

‘My mother killed me, my father ate me, my sister gathered my bones, tied them in a handkerchief, laid them beneath the Juniper tree, kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I’.

The millers were amazed and asked him to sing once more to which he agreed but only at the price of the millstone which he then carried through the air with ease back to his parents house where he sang once more..

‘My mother killed me, my father ate me, my sister gathered my bones, tied them in a handkerchief, laid them beneath the Juniper tree, kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I’.

The wicked mother rushed out with a broom to shoo him away but when she appeared he dropped the millstone upon her head and killed her outright. When father and daughter went out to discover the source of the commotion the young boy stood before them whole once more.

What is evil? Is there a line to be drawn between bad and mad? How can you tell the difference? And how do you work with it?

Such questions are made more difficult by the further consideration of whether evil is about acts or whether it is about intentions. Not to mention that evil often masquerades as good, ‘I’m just being honest….’ St Augustine was once asked how to be sure of what you are dealing with given the propensity of evil to camouflage itself in virtuous clothing, ‘by the taste in the back of your mouth.’ he replied. Your body will tell you.

That being said, what is evil? The church has a variety of responses, none of which seem entirely satisfactory anymore. Augustine, despite his visceral response, seems to shy away from the problem by calling evil the ‘absence of the good’, a concept central to his doctrine of the ‘Privatio Boni’, a theological feint which prefers not to give the problem of evil too much attention, nor the devil too much adversarial power. The Protestants don’t do much better in so far as evil is defined as defiance of god’s will, as if anyone could know what that might be and not withstanding the inflation presupposing it were even possible.

The Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers don’t bring much in addition to the table. Socrates and Plotinus both echo notions of ignorance and privation of good whilst Plato and Aristotle prefer the argument of failures of character or reason, elaborate forms of lack.

Even Nietzsche, whom you might think would have something meaty to say demures, reducing evil to a mere envious value judgement of the have-nots. He argues that the weak, resentful, or oppressed redefine the natural expressions of strength, power, and vitality as evil in order to morally condemn their superiors and elevate their own traits (like humility and obedience) as ‘good.’

For Schopenhauer, evil is a real feature of existence but only in so far as it is rooted in the blind, insatiable “will-to-live” that drives all beings. He argues that because every individual expression of the will strives at the expense of others, life is inherently marked by conflict, suffering, and cruelty. The only palliative is the emergence of compassion (Mitleid), which restrains the will’s harmful tendencies.

One way or another evil is treated as though it were ‘nothing but’. It seems to fall to Jung to break ranks with this dangerous mitigation, which you cannot help but think has actually given rise to the contemporary evils we are faced with, after all, ‘The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.'(Baudelaire)

An exception to this rule is the writing of 13th C. poet Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy might have had him burned at the stake if he had not already been exiled. His contrasting descriptions of Hell and Purgatory are telling instruction as to the nature of evil because the two realms are remarkably similar with one crucial difference, those trapped in Hell are determined in their self-righteousness. Their evil is depicted as a definite ‘something’, perhaps not so much a set of actions or behaviours as the set of unquestionable values which gave rise to them. In fact, the passage from one realm to the other is called the Adamant Gate, a threshold upon which intransigent conviction has to be renounced.

Jung’s approach to evil made him equally unpopular in certain quarters because he, like Dante, is unequivocal in his assertion that evil is a definite something. It behaves like a real, active force in the psyche. Treating it as “nothing but” leads to denial and projection. Historically, this matters because if a culture insists it is aligned with pure good it becomes blind to its own shadow. Such blindness allows destructive tendencies to grow unchecked and to appear ‘out there’ as enemies, heretics, presidents etc.

Jung’s thinking here is that what once supported life can, when it becomes outdated, turn into an obstacle and become harmful or destructive. ‘I saw which vices the virtues of this time changed into, how your mildness became hard, how your goodness became brutality; your love became hate… (The Red Book)

The idea that everything out-dated becomes evil is a compression of three Jungian ideas:

Psychological forms have a lifespan
When they outlive their usefulness, they become rigid
Rigidity turns life-supporting structures into destructive ones

In other words what once served life, when it becomes fixed and outdated, tends to turn into its opposite. Something can be genuinely good in one stage but when it outlives its role, it blocks further development and becomes potentially destructive. When we are little we have definite ideas about who we are, all of which are largely commensurate with one another. As we grow and identity becomes more complex we are faced with the developmental task of containing contradictions and anomalies. I am both good and bad, loving and hating.

If such complexities cannot be entered into they are either repressed and find expression without the benefit of conscious mediation or they are projected onto others where they are no longer able to be sublimated or transmuted. The good then turns into its opposite because it refuses its opposite. So, development requires a kind of betrayal of the old good in order to inhabit a more compendious sense of self.

The opposite of evil is not good, it is growth. What this means is that even the good can become evil if good, as an identity, cannot be renounced. This is why Christianity is in such a pickle and why the halls of both political and religious institutions are replete with crucifix bearing zealots protecting paedophiles.

The mother in our story cannot grow into the realisation that she is not simply ‘good’. She cannot entertain the fantasy that she also harbours ill intent towards her step son. It seems that some external force makes her do bad things for which she has no responsibility or remorse. She understands intellectually what she has done but is limited to the self interest of ‘what if I am caught?’ Her need to preserve her ‘good’ name, her sense of self as a ‘good’ person then means she must sacrifice the very daughter whose station she hoped to elevate by killing the boy.

It is the very prejudice of goodness, ‘I could not say or do such a wicked thing because I’m not that kind of person’, which constitutes a kind of cancer of the soul and unleashes the disaster. Whatever we choose as our definition of evil has this as its precondition, denial, the now autonomous impulse being cast down into the underworld where it is free to grow horns and a tail.

The fact that the boy is reconstituted and returns to hound his step mother to death feels like an afterthought and is missing from earlier versions of the story whose primary message seems to be that without growing out of naive conceptions of oneself, destruction is bound to follow. The best defence against evil is to keep it close to you, to recognise your own capacity for hate and envy, to have the humility to recognise primitive stirrings and vengeful impulses such that they can then be contained, so as not to be let loose upon the world, or upon your loved ones.

I like M Scott Peck’s definition of evil from his chilling masterpiece, ‘People of the Lie’, “Evil is the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion in order to avoid spiritual growth.” In other words, evil is the means by which efforts are made to maintain the status quo and, ironically, to keep oneself small. The alternative is indeed difficult, involving any number of inner deaths, and having to hold the tension between opposites such that contradiction can be re-forged as paradox. An alchemical saying, devoted to growth and transformation, captures this best, ‘a warring peace, a sweet wound, a mild evil’. I once asked Chuck Schwartz, who was an internationally recognised ceramicist as well as a training analyst with IGAP how he dealt with the desire for fame and riches. ‘I tip my hat to it’, came the reply.

The Unconscious, a Horse Egg?

based on an Hungarian folktale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lao tzu begins the Tao to Ching by saying

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

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

The Narcissism of Small Differences.

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

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

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

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

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

“To be like you,” said Toad.

Frog listened to Toad croak again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thanks to Dr Dale Mathers for the inspiration….

🌙 The Tale of The White-Bear Prince

(inspired by ATU 425A: Animal (Monster) as Bridegroom — e.g., East of the Sun and West of the Moon)

Once upon a time, in a humble village nestled under northern stars, lived a young woman named Inga. She was kind and good-hearted, but she carried a secret sorrow: she felt that who she was on the inside was somehow hidden from the outer world. She felt unseen and small, as though her inner self and the outer world were strangers to each other.

One evening, a great white bear appeared at her father’s door. The bear spoke with a voice like distant thunder, offering riches in exchange for Inga’s hand. Though fearful, Inga agreed, believing that perhaps something as yet unforeseen might come of it. The bear carried her away to a magnificent castle that rose above the clouds, where golden halls gleamed under frozen skies. Every day, Inga tended small chores in the castle — she fed the hearth fire, and spoke kindly to the silent rooms. At night, a human voice would whisper to her, gentle and warm, but Inga never saw its face. Each dawn, a bear’s roar called out..

One night, driven by longing to see the face behind the voice, Inga lit a candle even though she had been warned never to do so. In the flicker, she caught sight of a prince beneath the bear’s fur — a prince cursed by some ancient enchantment. At that moment, his trust and pride dimmed, and the castle’s brilliance seemed to shudder and fade. The prince was suddenly gone, farther than the eye could see, to a distant realm “beyond east of the sun and west of the moon,” where his outer form was locked in stillness.

Inga set out to find him. She crossed dark forests and craggy mountains. Along the way she met three wise women. Each gave her a golden gift — an apple, a comb, a spindle.

At last she reached the realm where the prince waited. In the hush before dawn, she polished the apple, combed the bear-man’s tangled hair, and drew threads of hope from the spinning wheel… and by her steady, inward resolve, the enchantment was broken and the prince then stood fully human before her.

At that moment, the world around them reorganized itself: winds sang, frost became gentle dew, and what once was distant and fragmented drew into unity. Inga understood that the seeming outer realm — castle walls, enchanted paths, distant horizons — had always been shaped by her inner perceptions, whether of fear and limitation or of courage, patience, and vision. And the prince, once seen as some mere part of her, can be acknowledged both as an autonomous other and as mirror of her own evolving soul. They return home and wherever they walked together thereafter, the valley bloomed into life.

This variant of the myth of Cupid and Psyche is very different, or apparently so, from the Greek version as told by Apuleius. Inga is helped by the three crones wheres in the Greek version Venus sets a series of incredibly difficult and even impossible tasks which seem so punitive that there’s a whisper about whether its all a matter of jealousy. ..

M.L.von Franz observed that these tasks were in fact more detailed amplifications of the golden apple, sacred comb, magical spindle, in so far as the now more differentiated symbols which give us clues about the dangers and ways forward in relationship with ‘the Other’. The tasks also seem progressive, as though they were stages of development towards conscious reunion with Cupid.

At first glance Venus seems vengeful. It is her impossible demand that Psyche sort out a pile of mixed seeds. Of course, she couldn’t do it and Psyche wept bitterly…. whereupon a great army of ants suddenly arrived and sorted it all out for her.

Next, Venus ramps up her seeming fury by sending Psyche to gather the golden hair of wild and savage solar boars in the forest which will surely tear her to pieces. In despair she is ready to throw herself into a nearby stream when a reed spontaneously begins to speak, telling Psyche exactly what she needs to know. She must wait till the cool of evening when the boars are calm and then gather only the golden hair from thorns and branches.

Next she has to fetch waters from the source of the Styx, river of Death, flowing from a towering rock face guarded by snakes. Again, she is faced with the limits of herself, though Jupiter suddenly appears as an eagle and helps her scoop some up.

The fourth task is even more perilous, she must descend to the underworld and ask Prosperina, Queen of the Dead, for some of her beauty. Psyche again despairs, there is no return from the `Underworld. She climbs a tower, prepared to throw herself down when the tower speaks, ‘Stop. There is a way to go about it.’ The Tower instructs her, ‘speak to no-one, take coins in your mouth for the ferryman and spiced cakes for the watch-dog of the Underworld, Cerberus. Only then may you make safe passage.’

Each one of the tasks are initiatory, giving Psyche the opportunity to have successive learning experiences which develop her sufficiently to be able to meet Cupid again. Venus is not simply a villain. She is an agent of transformation. On the surface, Venus appears purely destructive. It’s as if she only wants to break Psyche. But the voice from the reed reveals something deeper.

The tasks are not arbitrary cruel. They are structured challenges which compel Psyche into alignment with deeper reality by facing her limitations, as well as her dependence on and gratitude for loving help received. Nature herself supports Psyche’s development—once she listens. Venus is a psychopomp, both the humbling force and the guiding helper which supports and directs Psyche’s journey.

These sequences follow the famous maxim of Uber-alchemist Maria Prophetissa (c. 100–200 CE), “Out of the One comes Two, out of the Two comes Three, and from the Third comes the One as the Fourth.” This odd quote describes, in as condensed a way as possible, a process of differentiation and reintegration.

The One divides into Two. This is the emergence of polarity, light/dark, spirit/matter, conscious/unconscious, male/female. The original unity becomes duality. From Oroboric self encapsulation there is now I and Thou. It’s like the Big Bang of Consciousness, suddenly there is ‘between’. Presiding over this is the Third, Venus, the Three old Crones, who gift the kind of life lessons necessary to develop a sufficiently propitious attitude to bring about the fourth, a conscious relationship between ego and self in which the former is neither inflated nor washed away by the latter.

Maria Prophetissa’s formula describes the basic pattern of transformation:

unity
division
interaction
reintegration

This pattern appears everywhere in alchemy, myth, psychology, and cosmology.

The first stage is a transition away from having the world simply Ready-at-hand (Heidegger’s zuhanden) where objects and people are barely distinguishable from our use of them as mere tools seamlessly integrated into action and experienced as invisible, functional equipment in the background of our engagement with the world which now exists in its own right. Psyche intrudes upon Cupid because she is still in some considerable degree of unconscious identity with the Other and like a careless lover, takes him for granted, disregarding his sovereign dignity, treating him as an object of her intellectual curiosity. His response is to disappear across the event horizon, back into the undifferentiated, unknowable.

Reparation requires the skilful intervention of Venus as the Principle of Relatedness as well as the co-operation of Psyche who gradually learns how to take advice, the value of respect and that she is worth helping.

The four tasks of Psyche correspond not only to cosmological layers, but to the four historical modes of consciousness through which humans have perceived the universe. Each task reflects a different quality of relationship between observer and reality.

This is the gradual separation and reintegration of psyche and cosmos. In intellectual history, it is the evolution from participation mystique to quantum relationality.

Let’s describe them carefully…

First Task: Sorting the Seeds. This mode of consciousness is Animistic and is characterised by unconscious identity with Nature.

At this stage, Psyche is still embedded in the world. She does not stand apart from it. This corresponds to what anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called participation mystique — a state where subject and object are not clearly distinguished. Margret Mead emphasized that in animistic thinking, the line between humans, animals, plants, and natural phenomena is fluid, undifferentiated.

In animistic cosmology rocks, animals, plants, and humans share consciousness. Intelligence exists everywhere. Everything is meant. There is no detached observer. To this massa confusa must come some order. The ants represent this distributed, separating, intelligence which begins to differentiate self from other.

Second Task: Gathering the Golden Wool

This mode of consciousness is represented by Pre-Copernican cosmology. Here Psyche encounters the solar sheep — embodiments of divine cosmic power. She cannot confront them directly. She must wait patiently and gather what they leave behind. This corresponds to the medieval and ancient cosmology where the cosmos is hierarchical, celestial bodies are divine and dangerous, humans must approach indirectly through symbol and ritual.

In this geocentric system, Claudius Ptolemy established that Earth is the center, the heavens are perfect and divine and that humans are subordinate to cosmic order. Knowledge comes through revelation, not direct intervention. As yet there is no Jacob’s ladder. Humans do not yet evoke cosmic forces. They only receive them.

Third Task: Fetching Water from the Styx

This mode of consciousness is the Galilean/Scientific Revolution. Now Psyche must obtain water from a precise, inaccessible cosmic source. She cannot do it herself. The eagle of Zeus retrieves it. This marks the emergence of a new principle, Reality operates according to universal, abstract laws. This corresponds to the breakthrough of Galileo Galilei and later Isaac Newton. Nature becomes lawful, measurable, objective. The universe becomes governed by consistent laws whilst renouncing being at the center. The observer stands outside and studies the system. This is the birth of objective science.

Fourth Task: Descent into the Underworld

This mode of consciousness is commensurate with Quantum physics. This is the decisive transformation. Psyche must enter the underworld herself. She becomes both observer and participant. In quantum theory, as developed by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the observer affects the observed, the act of observation changes reality. Reality includes the observer intrinsically. Space and time are dynamic. This returns Psyche to conscious participation. Not unconscious animism, but conscious relationality.

The progression forms a complete cycle:

Unity (unconscious identity)
Separation (hierarchical cosmos)
Detachment (objective science)
Reintegration (conscious participation)

Quantum physics reveals something ancient myths already knew symbolically. The observer cannot be removed from reality. Psyche must enter the underworld herself. She cannot remain outside. The soul must participate in the structure of the cosmos. The inner and outer are no longer separate domains. They are reflections of the same underlying reality. At-one-ment.

I’ve often wondered about a line in the apocryphal book of Thomas, amongst the many others emphasising that the kingdom is both within and without. It is the bit where Jesus takes Thomas aside… ‘and spoke three words’. When Thomas returned, the others asked him what was said. Thomas replied, “If I tell you, you will pick up stones to throw at me, and fire will come from the stones and consume you.”

I wonder what those three words were… Then I imagine a lively group gathered around a crackling desert fire discussing interesting stuff. Two of the group peel off and step beyond the circle of the fire momentarily for a leak, gazing now up at the night sky. The Milky Way arcs across the Deep. Vast and still. The one turns and whispers to the other, ‘thou art that.’

The full progression.

Task	Psyche’s action	Cosmological model	Relationship between observer and universe
Sorting seeds	Passive, ants help	Animistic	Observer identical with nature
Golden wool	Indirect approach	Pre-Copernican	Observer subordinate to cosmos
Styx water	Eagle retrieves	Galilean / Newtonian	Observer detached from cosmos
Underworld descent	Psyche herself descends	Quantum physics	Observer participates in reality

The Shadow King’s Gold.

Long ago, there ruled a King of Perfect Order. His crown was of pure gold. His robes were pure white. His laws were just and.. well, whatever he decided that day. Under his rule, every field bore grain. Every river ran full. Every tower stood straight. He believed nothing existed that he could not see. The world was what he knew of it. And because of this, he believed himself complete. He gathered flattering courtiers about him who understood the king should never be questioned. They plied him with gold, fed his lusts, erected his statues and indulged every whim. Nothing was denied him. No law constrained him. None drew breath without permission.

But beneath the roots of his kingdom, something waited.

At first, it was only a subtle change. Former envoys from neighbouring lands no longer paid tribute. Allies fell away. His lackeys began to bicker with one another. Servants whispered uneasily. Animals grew restless at night. The fruit ripened more slowly in the orchards. The land grew dry. People fell sick. The King noticed none of it. He studied his maps, invaded some places, killed a few enemies. He polished his crown. He issued decrees. But the land no longer listened. The rivers withdrew into themselves. The grain stores slowly emptied. The market places grew silent. And one morning, when the King rose, he felt a heaviness in his limbs. His strength had begun to leave him. No physician could explain it. No priest could cure it. He grew weaker with each passing day. His crown grew heavy on his head.

One night, as he lay unable to sleep, an uncomfortable niggle at the back of his mind became an actual thought… And it was this, even though he could do whatever he wanted, make people disappear, make laws, make whoopee, make his courtiers praise and flatter and adore, he couldn’t fill himself up, he couldn’t make himself happy. He had given it his best shot, stuffed himself like a pig on other people’s lands, wives, daughters, grain stores and livestock, but somehow still felt.. empty.

Suddenly he saw someone, something, something wraithlike, standing in the corner of his chamber. It was perhaps a man, not merely clothed in black—but black as though made of shadow and earth. His eyes shone like distant stars. The King tried to speak, but his voice failed him. The dark figure spoke instead. “You must come with me” he said. The King trembled with rage. “I am eternal master here,” he whispered hoarsely. The shadowy man said nothing. He only extended his hand. And though the King resisted, he found himself rising and following the dread figure down stone steps which seemed somehow to have been freshly cut into the floor.

The murky shade led him beneath the castle. Down and down and down, deeper and deeper, through corridors the King had never seen, along bechasmed galleries, down spiral staircases that had no end, down into the roots of the earth. The way narrowed until the roof tipped his crown from his head and the rough hewn walls pressed in on all sides. He lost his cloak and somehow his slippers. At last, squeezing along, they came to a tiny chamber sealed in glass, filled entirely with a stone plinth just large enough to lie on.. “This is your kingdom also,” said the dark figure. Before the King could answer, the chamber closed around him. He was alone. Time ceased. His strength abandon him completely. He lay down. His breath slowed. His thoughts dissolved. And there, in darkness, the King died.

The king’s body slowly changed. His skin darkened. His robes blackened. His flesh became like ash. He lay in darkness, without movement, without voice, without will. Above him, the kingdom forgot him. His name faded. His laws dissolved.

After an age without measure, water began to fall. A single drop at first. Then another. Then a stream, warm, scented, humming, loving. Slowly, imperceptibly, something began to change. The blackness softened. The rigidity loosened into… a feeling. The feeling became… awareness, of something which had been incomplete.

He opened his eyes. He felt, different, relaxed, composed. He rose, not as the King who had descended, nor as the corpse who had lain in darkness but as something, someone, new. His body felt.. whole. His strength had returned. But it was not the strength of dominion. It was the strength of Being. He looked at his hands. They shone. Not with the gold of his crown. But with a deeper gold. A living gold which seemed to have emerged from within him.

The chamber opened. He rose up through the earth. Up through the forgotten corridors. Up into the light. The kingdom lay before him, but not as it had been. It was more alive than before. The rivers gurgled and flowed. The trees bore fruit. The scent of myriad herbs was borne on the wind. Insects buzzed. Children laughed and played. The air itself seemed awake. And the King understood. He had not regained his kingdom. He had become worthy of it. The gold he had worn before had been an ornament. The gold he now embodied was his substance. He ruled again, not as master but as steward, as one who had died to avarice and been reborn into plenty.

There is a misconception about shadow work which really gets in the way. The idea that it is something you ‘do’ is just more egotism which adds to the already problematic inflation. ‘Working on yourself’ is dangerously close to what Søren Kierkegaard describes in ‘The Sickness Unto Death’, as the “despair of wanting to be oneself”, a spiritual condition where a person defiantly continues to sustain their identity, doubling down, actively insisting on being their own creator, mason to their own stone. By trying to be so self-sufficient, to author their own growth, the person becomes trapped in isolation, endlessly struggling to stabilise an identity which cannot be self-secured. Such despair is deeper than helplessness because it contains pride and defiance: the refusal to accept any deeper foundation. This results in a self that is intensely assertive yet inwardly fractured and unstable.

The rejected, denied, or disowned aspects of one’s personality cannot be approached with the intellectual desire to ‘integrate’ them. ‘Working’ on your ‘negative emotions’ is a contradiction in terms. For as long as an emotion is labelled negative there is nothing you can do about it. Shaming your shame consolidates it. This is why William Blake says, ‘he who persists in his folly will become wise.’

The shadow is ‘that which one has no wish to be,’ (Jung) not simply because it is ‘bad’ or inferior but because it demands we renounce the magical thinking of wishing ourselves into a preferred existence. Sugar and spice and all things nice…. or even slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails, so long as the contents hang together comfortably. To be both sugar and spice and slugs and snails is just a big mess that hardly feels like ‘growth’ at all.

And yet… without this discomfort we are bound to be unconsciously identified with the shadow and act it out, denial leading directly to a form of possession exemplified by an aphorism of Nietzsche…

“I have done that,” says my memory.
“I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable.
At last—memory yields.

The persona can become inexorable and unable to be persuaded. Material facts are like chaff in the wind when faced with the survival instincts of self image. You can present someone with incontrovertible proof of something, but if it runs contrary to their belief system it is worse than useless, you will only be perceived as attacking them. This is one of the reasons dreamwork is so useful, because the commentary is coming from within.

Internal collapse of ‘the old outmoded dispensation’ (Yeats) is what the alchemists termed ‘Nigredo’, the blackening. It is commonly experienced as depression, burnout, the painful end of a relationship, not knowing who you are anymore, feeling inauthentic, a loss of purpose or direction, feeling disillusioned. Falling ill.

Shadow work is the felt sense that such things are experiences of incompleteness. You are depressed for a reason. You are burnt out because you are excessively driven or in the wrong job. The relationship is over because one of you outgrew the other, or you got complacent. Or you caught yourself habitually sweeping your truth under the rug to keep the peace and are losing yourself in the process.

Existence requires both creation and destruction. We do not grow incrementally. We grow via a series of deaths. Analyst Michael Fordham calls it ‘deintegration’. The old structure has to collapse more than a little in order for the new one to emerge. The instinct for change and growth is paradoxically dependent on an equally powerful instinct to chop down the old wood. The dark figure, our split off wholeness, seems ‘negative’ because it ends the hegemony of persona, the King’s illusion of primacy.

When the inner descent is renounced it becomes defensive acts of dissent instead. ‘Unlived life does not sit idly on the shelf,’ ML von Franz will remind us, ‘it will turn around and bite you.’ If the ashes of destruction and the death of the old way of being are not entered into they get played out in the world instead.

Mythologically, Eros and Thanatos are complementary cosmic forces. Eros creates and binds life into form, while Thanatos dissolves it back into formlessness, together sustaining the eternal cycle of existence. Thanatos, which Plato felt was contained within Eros itself, has to have expression somewhere. The grandiose persona can only be identified with eternally by aggressive self-maintenance, all of which needs enemies out there, across the Gulf of America, and one form or another of tearing down your house.

Happily, what the shadow also brings alongside the down going and its feelings of diminishment and collapse, is the subsequent quickening once the nadir is passed, once soul is given time and space to get involved, giving rise to a sense of being restored to oneself, of developing a propitious attitude, of feeling golden and grateful.

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