Tag: Jung

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:

  1. Psychological forms have a lifespan
  2. When they outlive their usefulness, they become rigid
  3. 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:

  1. Unity (unconscious identity)
  2. Separation (hierarchical cosmos)
  3. Detachment (objective science)
  4. 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.

TaskPsyche’s actionCosmological modelRelationship between observer and universe
Sorting seedsPassive, ants helpAnimisticObserver identical with nature
Golden woolIndirect approachPre-CopernicanObserver subordinate to cosmos
Styx waterEagle retrievesGalilean / NewtonianObserver detached from cosmos
Underworld descentPsyche herself descendsQuantum physicsObserver 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

The Hedgehog Prince.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Virgin and the Unicorn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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