Tag: Jung

The Devil’s Sooty Brother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and a bath.

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

Bearskin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

which was nice of him..

allegedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wordsworth says of the redeemed wanderer..

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

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

……………………….

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The Valiant Tailor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

which is grudgingly given.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



A Special Kind of Madness.

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

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

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

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

I had become one of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

having run out of family.

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

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

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

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


Truth will Out.

You have the right to remain silent…

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

And you do…

Conscience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this happen? Shakespeare explains..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How we Heal.

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

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

I feel your pain…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jung observes that when the cramp is particularly severe..

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

The need for electrolytes is a delicious metaphor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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.