Jung – Page 2 – Andy White Blog

Truth will Out.

You have the right to remain silent…

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

And you do…

Conscience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this happen? Shakespeare explains..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How we Heal.

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

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

I feel your pain…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jung observes that when the cramp is particularly severe..

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

The need for electrolytes is a delicious metaphor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear of Freedom.

People are weird.

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

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

And then….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What gives?

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

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

Some state it even more boldly..

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

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

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

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

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

What could these primal anxieties be?

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

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

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

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

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

so long as you have someone else to blame…

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

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

If..

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

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

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

rather than face…that Mother is gone.

Healing the Narcissistic Wound.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hercules becomes the proto-type of the deprived child.

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

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

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

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

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

I pretend I am not pretending to pretend….

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

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

‘If you don’t ask, you don’t want.’

and

”I want doesn’t get.’

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

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

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

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

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

”door’s open you know”…

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

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

I thought I was living the bohemian life..

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

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

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

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

May as well go and pilfer the drug store..

or start a fight.

There’s nothing else to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tunic consumes him….

and he throws himself on a pyre begging for death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy who wanted to know Fear.

Some post-doctoral research has recently been done titled, ‘Reconditioning the brain to Overcome Fear. ”http://scitechconnect.elsevier.com/reconditioning-the-brain-to-overcome-fear/

How scary is that? I don’t fancy being reconditioned. I like me the way I am, warts and all , some of which has been shot at, stabbed and incarcerated. What I really hate is folk trying to get into my soft mushy parts with the AI equivalent of a monkey wrench.

We seem to have forgotten what fear is for.

A story that exemplifies this is, ‘The boy who wanted to know Fear’, or, ‘The boy who wanted to Shudder”.

A man had two sons. The eldest was smart. The youngest was supposedly stupid and made to feel the more so when he expressed as his deepest wish to learn how to shudder. His father and elder brother mock him and turn him out to seek his ‘foolish’ quest.

He spends a night beneath hanged men whom he tries to warm by his fire. He kicks the local sexton down the stairs who’d dressed up as a ghost in the attempt to frighten him. He plays with and kills ghostly cats and dogs that attack him. He plays skittles with skulls and ninepin bones. Corpses revive and try to choke him… Nothing works.

Finally he marries the king’s daughter because of all this ‘courage’. She, on the advice of her chambermaid, fetches a cold bucket of water from the stream full of tiny wriggling minnows and soaks him while he sleeps. At last he learns how to shudder.

The story suggests that there is something about fear that is necessary to human development, that to know fear is a kind of quest.

”Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.” Kierkegaard.

The obvious bit is that fear warns us of danger. It flags up our fight or flight response. It reprioritises. And if its spiders that scare its because we’ve already ‘reconditioned’ ourselves not to be afraid of some legitimate childhood horror and have had to crush authentic being for the sake of going-on-being, an effective strategy that manages to project and concretise undigestible experience.

Our story says that there is something essential about fear, and not just of circumstantial things, but also of objectless…

”…anxiety from below, calling out to each one of us concerning our very being. Learning to be anxious in the right way will involve coming into dialogue with this messenger.” A.S. Soderquist.

The process of growing up means an encounter with the Other, with Not-me. Both the Not-Me out there in the world and the Not-Me in ‘here’, that wells up from beneath, that informs while we sleep, that leaves its trail all through your backyard.

”He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled.” Gnostic gospel of Thomas.

The plague of psychological enquiry is its insistence on trying to understand. Jung himself confessed to..

”..wanting to understand above all else.”

which, given the vastness of the Unconscious, is a bit like being captured by a fascination for cream crackers at a gourmet dinner. All in lieu of the spine tingling realisation that what you are looking for is also looking for you… and won’t be understood precisely because it transcends comprehension.

”It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.” S. Kirkeggard.

Which is why characters from the bible are always in mighty dread of one form or another and Arjuna from the Bhagavad Gita begs Vishnu to hide his true face.

”When I see you touching the sky, blazing with many colours, with large fiery eyes, my heart trembles in fear and I can find neither courage nor peace. Be gracious, O Abode of the Universe.”

In the Grail legend we find Lancelot attracted to a room in the castle from which emanates a bright glow. He sees the holy vessel on a silver table, approaches too close and is scalded by a hot wind that stikes him deaf, blind and paralysed for twenty four hours.

So there is something intrinsically scary, something awe-ful, about encounter with Not-Me, and not simply because its bigger than us but because we are changed in the process.

”The hallmark of the transpersonal is that it acts upon us.” S. B-Perrera.

Our hero is not initiated into trepidation by his father, who both fails and rejects him. The contempt of this father is thinly based hostility at the boy wanting his own destiny. Its also the inheritance of a social model based on kingship where father/son relations are mared by power struggles you don’t find in societies that have chiefs.

In modern times we may not resort to the excesses of Edward the third who stuck a red hot poker up his dad’s bum, or even an Abraham willing to slit his son’s throat cos god told him to, but we have ‘lost’ the initiation of sons by their fathers which might better manage life’s fears and prevent us from approaching fear as if it were synonymous with illness.

I went to see my analyst once, shoulders hunched and all sorry for myself, ”I feel so disillusioned, ” I proclaimed. He hesitated a bit and then said, ‘..but that’s a good thing.”

Learning the meaning of fear is essential to resolving any narcissistic adaptation. Fortunately for our hero he realises this and goes looking in the world for what his father cannot provide.

The DSM specifically mentions this curious absence of fear in the Narcissistic personality. The reason is that the Narcissist hasn’t yet had the initiatory encounter with Otherness. Everything is an extension of his world. So there is no loss, abandonent or death. He has yet to experience what Fordham calls ‘de-integration’, the structural unbundling of the Self that is encounter with any altering Other. Jung was fond of saying that good therapy is when the analyst is changed as well….

Our hero does not learn how to shudder from his own efforts. He’s even asleep at the time. But his longing to discover the secret brings him into relatedness with his wife and the ‘Nursemaid’ who sees what is needed and kindly rains on his parade. This sudden awakening is rude and unexpected. It can’t be otherwise since what’s at stake is a paradigm shift in consciousness from self-as-centre to being one-amongst-many, the psychological equivalent of Galileo’s shock that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around.

Such realisations are bound to be resisted even while we do our best to enquire into them because of the ground breaking consequences to our perception of reality that is involved. So if you feel stuck you might cut yourself a little slack. Growing is a scary business.

And anyway what could two PhD’s in Engineering and Telecommunications do with research that suppressed fear? I mean, other than weaponise it….

How scary…

Narcissism, Compulsion and the Soul.

There were once two psychiatrists. The one invites the other for dinner. The guest arrives, asks to use the bathroom and disappears for an hour. Eventually he emerges with a knowing look.

”You have a serious obsessive compulsion,’ he says to his collegue, ”there are 542 bars of soap in your bathroom. I know, I counted every last one.”

Of course psychological conditions are bound to overlap but Narcissism and OCD seem to have a special relationship.

Why?

I was watching a Ted Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of ‘ Eat, Pray, Love’. She made the point that people who became very successful had a tendency to go mad and top themselves because they confuse themselves with the ‘Genius Loci’ who served as their muse.

The solution, she said, is to remember that ‘genius’, is its own thing. Not-me.

Very Interesting, but what is your point?

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

Narcissism notoriously lives out only one corner of (an idealised) life. Both the dark Brother, the less than salubrious aspects of himself, and the unlived potential, The Self, have to be projected…

and then come banging at the castle gates again and again.

And because the contents projected are always the same…

the banging is also the same…

and so interpersonal scenarios are endlessly repeated..

as are ritualised patterns of behaviour behind closed doors.

We live in a time of relative spiritual malaise. We also live in a time of marked obsessiveness and compulsive behaviour.

Could there be a connection?

Its curious that the definition and symptoms listed by DSM5 for a diagnosis of OCD (which includes praying!) sound distinctly like the ritual contents of religious ceremony. These include,

”repetitive behaviours, according to rules that must be rigidly applied.”DSM5

like a church service….

Precisely. Sacramental acts are also, ‘aimed at preventing or reducing distress or preventing some dread event.’

What’s the connection with Narcissism?

Waaal, Narcissism is particularily prone to OCD not just because the dark brother is eternally projected, but because the ego is identified with the Self. This means that there is no real spiritual life.

I don’t get it.

Spiritual life necessitates a relationship with God..

yeees…

but if you are identified with God then there is no relationship. Instead of having a religion, the religion has you…

By the scruff…

And marches its children off to war….

or down to the supermarket for a dozen bottles of bleach and a pack of toothbrushes so you can purify the pelmets of your appartment at 4 in the morning…

or out in the rain to buy cigarretes while every bone in your body is screaming, ‘DON’T DO IT!!’.

or muttering shameful babble to appease the fates whilst not realising that the person next to you on the bus is lookin’ at you strangely…

or washing endlessly in lieu of a genuine cleansing.

”It is not a matter of indifference if one calls something a ‘mania’ or a ‘god’. To serve a mania is detestable and undignified. But to serve a god is full of meaning and promise.” CG Jung

Narcissism won’t share, has no story, nothing to be a part off…

because there is no relatedness or participation in that which transcends it.

And for the want of partness in the greater whole we have compulsive patterning instead.

Like a stuck gramaphone record doing the same thing over and over. Round and round. Instead of meaningful sacrament we have chaotic excrement.

Instead of being drawn we are driven.

The fantasy that we are the captains of our own ships beckons the raven’s claw.

”Whoever sets himself up as judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.” A Einstein.

For want of having a story to belong in we are caught eternally on the same page.

And more than that, for want of the Principle of Relatedness that gifts us with both belonging and the internal flexibility of a conversation between I and me, we are robbed not just of meaningful context but of our own humanity..

which is perhaps why the DSM5 definition of OCD uses the language of automation, describing the phenomenon as ‘the brain’s junk mail.” Though it significantly acknowledges that OCD is responsible for, ”communication errors among different parts of the brain.” Ie. there’s a problem with internal dialogue.

meaning…?

That without the capacity for self-reflection we are driven along like leaves in the wind.

The legacy of Western Civilisation is effectively the deification of consciousness. Having cast out the divine feminine, the principle that mediates between Logos and ego, the two are bound to get confused…

like when you don’t have a soap dish and so you leave the soap in the bath and it gets all mushy and your mum yells at you?

Exactly, ego gets ‘god-almighty’, which is all very well for a bit…

until the mush begins..

and soon starts behaving as though there were no limits and as if nothing mattered save itself.

The psyche responds with a big fat neurosis to bring about some sense of proportion in lieu of actual awareness. Instead of the cleansing renewal he was hoping for the bath room hero finds himself compulsively feeling about the teensy yet glorified space into which he’s soaped himself.

…pretty sure he’s in there somewhere.

Monkey Business.

When I was a kid growing up in Zambia we used to go visit a local zoo/nature reserve outside Lusaka called ‘Mundawanga’. I privately called it ‘Mundawanka’ because the Vervet monkeys were always masturating…

and would look you bang in the eye while they were at it.

There were a dozen or so males of various ages in a cage the size of your living room, all with their dicks out…..

all day…

every day.

In their cramped and unnatural captivity, all pressed together in a space not suitable territory for one, they had found a neurotic solution to their claustrophobic situation. After all, as every good Vervet knows, the correct behaviour when encounetring someone having a wank is not to encroach. Leave them alone and let them get on with it.

Space and separation…

which is good..

But rubbing yourself raw…

not good.

The monkeys were also great thieves. Loss of territory had led to loss of honour, relatedness and rules of engagement. Everyone was fair game. Woe betide any young child with a bar of Aero who thinks he can go put his fingers through the mesh and hang on the wire cage. They know about pockets and will fleece you something rotten.

The Single System system, concentrated power in concentrated space, is just like that monkey cage. They all have their dicks out and will rob you in a heartbeat.

Concentrated power in concentrated space breeds paranoia throughout the cage and the need for space which, barring despair, only compulsive behaviour will give you.

Back in the day, some Pacific Islanders ritually killed their kings once in a while. Any one who wanted to be king could nominate themselves. One would be chosen and for a year he would enjoy all kinds of inflated priviledges and being above the law…..

until your twelve months is up.

Then you get handed a sharp knife. Sometimes you get to have sex at the shaky end of a log pile.

And then they start over..

which seems like a very sensible thing to do.

Culturally, the killing of the king brought fruitfullness to the land and life to the people. Psychologically, it induced an encounter with the archetype of Kingship itself, for anyone can step forward. It would be both terrifying in its awesome power and seduction, overwhelming with its fantasy of limitless possibility, acrid with the fumes of death…

…like Galadriel’s encounter with the Ring.

which is why we prefer the Single System system whether its skull cap or dog collar. We can depend upon it to help us suppress our experience of numinosity for the sake of our ontological security.

‘Religion is a defense against the experience of god.’ CG Jung.

We need our all-powerful and oppressive Caesars who constantly behave as though they were above the law, like Gods, so that we need not differentiate too closely between what to render to one and what to render to the other. We do this despite the loss to our own inner journeying and the raw rub of eternally marking time that this will cost us.

It is our version of the Vervet’s neurotic solution. The loss of inner creative space that is the price of abdicating a personal relationship with Psyche leads to endless masturbation, thievery and the kind of frenetic apathy, the aggrieved restlessness that is the curse of any child who is both intruded upon by a parent/state/zoo keeper whilst simultaneously being abandoned by it….

the monkey in the equation develops a quite understandable conscientious objection to reality.

Any moment that might still retain a bit of it must be evaded with all speed..

‘and so he mounts his horse and gallops furiously in every direction… ruthless in the destruction of potentials that must mature in their own form and season..’ F Wickes.

The effect on relatedness and creativity is catastrophic….

I once lived in a tiny English village in which there was a little old lady with a title and a massive house. She had been raised in a cage even more gilded than mine. Her capacity for relatedness was shot to pieces. She was a millionaire but the neighbour’s kids had to pay to use her tennis court. I fixed her flat tyre for which she immediately thrust a bottle of wine at me, unable to bear the bonds of simple co-operation. I had to be paid off directly.

Her grasp of other’s needs was catastrophically warped. A local man found a disraught motorist at the side of the narrow lane that wound steeply up through the village. He was clearly distressed.

‘Are you all right?’

”No, I broke down at the foot of the hill but a little old lady offered to tow me up.”

‘Oh dear, you didn’t accept?’

”Yes.”

‘Much damage?’

….. All the energy that might have gone into something nourishing builds up and turns back on whatever, or whoever, is handy. The dissociated potential has grown horns and a tail. Genuine feeling or inspiration gets dumbed down into moods, knee jerk reactions and wild low gear ratios.

though the smooth and satisfied surface of the inner millpond that is the inheritance of God’s chosen people remains unruffled.

But without being affect-ed, there is no affect-ion.

No being rooted in love.

and so we too become masturbating monkeys having passed up…

‘the troublesome germ of individual king/queen ship.’ F Wickes.

Around about the time that humanity started caging monkeys they also started caging kids.

sacrificial dormitories.

Mine really did have cages on the windows. Grenade screens. Our pre-eminence as the kids of the White elite rulers made attack from African terrorists (people who didn’t like us taking over their country) a very real threat. I spent many a night standing guard over other sleeping teens, armed with a lee-enfield .303 rifle and listening for any sound.

Bling has this tradition of sending the kids away, as a display of wealth and obeisance to the centralised power. The very real suffering involved propitiates the Gods and eases parental paths to greatness.

Children become fetishistic objects sacrificed on the altar of Bling. Inner Nobility is projected onto glittering others and then chased after. And you do it yourself. You buy into it. I remember my initial pride and the look in people’s eyes when I told them where I went to school. The lurch of respect, the sage nodding, the rush of power whilst simultaneously knowing, completely and entirely, that it was a crock of shit.

where we wanked and stole.

If not each other’s stuff then each other’s pride and dignity, tutored in deception and some being more equal than others.

We think we’re a child friendly society but along with the chihuahua…

”we have the fairly universal civilised belief that a child’s impulses need to be curbed in order to make him social.” J. Liedloff.

This is germane even at the liberal end of the spectrum. We have the basic..

”assumption that the child has an antisocial nature, in need of manipulation to become socially acceptable.” ibid

When this fails, Freud’s infantile sexuality theory sets the seal on the stupid thing breaking itself. Parental influence and cages are written out of the equation. The Church loves it because it chimes so well with original sin. And so for the first time in two thousand years Church and Science agree on something.

You are the bad seed.

So that’s how you will grow.

But not as fast as we can build correctional facilities to house yo’ ass.

Synchro-spam

Synchronicity is orchestral. It orchestrates and has a way of re-shaping

identity,

experienced subjectively, perhaps, as a change of values or aspirations,

”The hallmark of the transpersonal is the experience of being acted upon.” Sylvia Brinton Perera.

Its also true, in a more lyrical way, that we can count on the brass section at the major crossroads of life while the woodwind section is a bit more gentle, everyday kind of thing.

Hopefully.

”Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have the eyes to see.” C G Jung.

You might say that synchronicity was the Universe’s way of….

you are failing miserably to understand

Er, what I was going to say was, how can we be more aware of..

The best way is to stop cursing yourself for nothing….

and so I thought, lets go looking for it.

Synchronicity will occur wherever I’m all riled up about something because the riteous prick in me will always stir stuff up from the bottom of the pond with some kind of reactive drama…

in need of compensation.

So what has me fired up?

You must contact your insurance/medical assistance business immediately if
you should be referred to a medical facility for treatment.

And its not what you’d think. To my shame its not world hunger or political corruption, its the spam on my blog, the bastard scamsters and hackers that slip under the radar and piggyback me through cyberspace for the sake of a mention. Piano lessons in Singapore, Maths tuition in Queensland.

keep up wrinting.

If you were to apply a little method and actually practice what you have been preaching about the philosopher’s stone being found on the dung heap, then you could stop angrily deleting it all, but rather treat it as a waking dream and see what meaning might be found.

Perhaps my angst is that I insist on seeing these gremlins as parasites. And why shouldn’t I have a few parasites? Perhaps they could even be useful… the extent of my annoyance suggests it has more to do with me than I would like to admit, so there’s some gem in there…

To become identified with the fixed reference point of the separate self limits our freedom, entraps our creative potency and hinders our compassion.” P Levy

The thought of approaching my spam as a lucid dream is exciting…. it’s like having a new role…

”and though the soul does not assume the lead by killing off the ego, the ego is demoted, one might say, and given a different assignment in the psyche, which is essentially to submit to the concerns of the soul.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Ok so, most of it is pretty standard, what you’d expect, paranoid delusional stuff about the end of the world, preparing for Armaggedon..

some appeal to my male insecurity…

you too can have a longer penis, build this Extender in the comfort of your own home…

Hmm, before or after building a fallout shelter?

Consider the size of your own.

I am, I am, its just that my attention is now on…

cheap wedding dresses.

lots of stuff about cheap wedding dresses, the appeal strangely riding on the premise that you don’t want your wedding to look cheap.

and keep those straps tucked in girls. A stray brastrap could ruin your big day.

What kind of heavy trip is that? You can see it now..

OMG, a brastrap, you’ve fucked up the rest of my life, you bitch.

But the one that really got me…

was an advert for anal bleaching.

What the fuck is this doing in my psyche? Still, not to worry, apparently its quite acceptable in discussion these days and no longer for just porn stars and bridesmaids….

For crying out loud, what is it with the bridesmaids? Since when might a bridesmaid consider having her anus bleached as part of her maidenly duties? And to what purpose? How might it sit in the collective psyche of the dearly beloved knowing such a thing?

I don’t want to play this anymore.

#If you quit, how are you here?

Ok, but it feels….. shitty.

And not just because of the pervy connotations of it, or even the objectification of women, but because this denial of body, this cut offness from sexuality and this weird alienation from self is given the twist of debonair sophistication.

Barbie is still our aspiration.

How long will it be before you can’t show your face in public because you haven’t had your monthly bleaching? Shaving and waxing are no longer enough. Now you have to peroxide your heiney as well.

The ability to combine analytical thinking with imaginative execution is extremely desirable.

Ok, so we’re mocking the superficiality of modern culture, but yet to get the symbolism of all this. The problem is deeper than depersonalisation.

Its about disgust, before it ever occured to you that you are a person…

who might be… depersonalised.

Babies learn most about themselves and the world before the self/other dichotomy opens up. They learn from their kinaesthetic experience, from mouth, smell, feel and how they are held, the visceral cues about whether the Universe is friendly or not.

Henri Wallon uses the term ‘confiscation’ (Wallon 1949) to describe the emptiness that seems to be, from a western point of view, an intrinsic part of the developmental process. Confiscation implies that something once present has been taken away and indeed it has.

Baby has yet to learn of Yahweh’s divine truculence with the Great Mother but soon does so from the non verbal cues intruded in the personal mother, the loss of her divine representation bound to translate itself as depression and ennui. Baby is then compelled to join mother in her impoverished psycho-spiritual framework and confiscation is the felt result.

‘The loss which lies at the heart of confiscation is no small matter. It amounts to a revolution of consciousness the crucial feature of which is the decision to mistrust the evidence of our senses.’ ie Nature. Berman (1989)

Baby renounces the body as a way of knowing herself. The shared loss of the numinous feminine container which anchors and enrichens everyday mothering means baby is effectively born into an untrustworthy world which she internalizes, sacrificing her own capacity to apprehend reality.

Symptoms develop.

The obsessive’s preoccupation with ‘dirt’ is primarily a concern about how easily love can be lost, the panic of contamination a prelude to rejection and isolation.

The issues are disgust, tedium and whether or not love can be extinguished by diarrhoea. Baby does his best to fall in line by shamefully accepting that his pooh is intrusive, horrible and damaging. Perhaps even baby himself is intrusive horrible and damaging. What he does is still bound up in who he is.

Unmet needs in baby don’t go away. They manifest in adult life as a craving for instant gratification, passive entertainment, getting loved-up, the feeling of being owed a living and the expectation of having someone to take care of all eventualities.

The symbols are the lottery, the red carpet, celebrity.

In the meantime we are so regressed we have to be told what to do at every turn. Life’s simplest operations are governed for us, all the way down to serving suggestions on packets of salt, advice on how to remove a bottle top (twist!) and those oh so necessary instructions on a joint of beef to remove plastic wrapping prior to putting it in the oven.

This makes fewer resources offered to be robbed.

Sometimes we make apotropaic gestures to ward of feared expectations. Invariably, however,

‘the catastrophic expectation has already happened.” D Winnicott.

We project Armaggedon into the future. Its safer there. The Preppers are too late.

We’re facing the wrong way.

arse about face.

Which is perhaps why Jung once said to Marie Louise von Franz,

”I cannot confess to have solved the riddle of the coniunctio mystery”CG Jung

All of which goes to show how even the greatest minds are limited precisely by the mental identification to which they are bound to fall prey. Jung veiwed it as personal failure not to have figured it all out, forgetting that the hierosgamos, the sacred marriage, is not there to be ‘solved’ anymore than the bridesmaids are there to have their bottoms bleached.

The mystery is not a riddle to be surmounted or sanitised by man.

perhaps if the Unconscious could be approached from some vantage point other than being smart arse enough to suss it out then she would simply reveal Her treasures.

excellent listener.

and the bridesmaids might have their honour restored.