Tag: narcissism

Pretty Maid Ibronka.

Once there was a pretty maid called Ibronka who was quite the most lovely of all the young women in her spinning circle but who alone among them had no sweetheart. This went on so long she eventually muttered up a prayer to have a lover even if it was the Devil himself… That evening a dashing young man in a sheepskin jacket with a bright feather in his cap came through the door of the spinning circle and sat down next to her, wanting conversation and showing her every attention.

Ibronka was flattered… and charmed. All the attention made her a little dizzy and at one point she dropped her spindle. When she felt around for it on the floor she touched his foot and found… a cloven hoof. Well, Ibronka was very disturbed by this and went to the wise woman of the village to tell her what had happened and what she might do, wondering where this young man had come from and where he might live. The wise woman advised her to take a ball of yarn and when he next visited to secretly attach one end to his coat. When he left she could pay out the yarn and then, in a while, wind it up so as to find out more about him. She did so, though, horror of horrors, the yarn led her to the door of the grave yard and when she looked through the keyhole spied him sawing a head in half like a melon and sucking out the brains.

Ibronka fled home, but the Devil had heard her and realised he’d been followed. He chased after her and just as she got home and bolted the door he appeared below her window calling up, ‘Ibronka, Ibronka, what did you see through the keyhole in the churchyard?’ Ibronka was terrified, ‘nothing did I see’. ‘You must tell me,’ he demanded, ‘or your sister will die.’ ‘Nothing did I see, if she dies we will bury her.’

In the morning Ibronka’s sister was found dead. Ibronka ran all the way to the wise woman’s house and told her what had happened. The wise woman soothed her, telling Ibronka to put her sister in the outhouse. That evening the Devil returned. ‘Tell me what you saw through the keyhole or your mother will die.’ ‘Nothing did I see. And if she dies we will bury her.’ And so it went, the mother died, then the father until her whole family was swallowed up. Each time their bodies were placed in the outhouse. Each time the wise woman comforted her and when eventually only Ibronka was left told her gently, ‘and now he will kill you too. Don’t worry. Tell your friends that when you are dead you mustn’t be taken out by door or window, they must cut a hole in the wall and pass you through it that way. Nor must you take the wide path to the churchyard but be taken across the fields and through the woods. Nor must you be buried with the others but in the ditch to the side of the churchyard.

Ibronka left instructions and in the morning she was found dead. Her friends followed the instructions carefully and buried her in the ditch. There, overnight, grew a beautiful rose. In the morning a King came by in his coach and saw the rose which he picked and took home, putting it in a vase in his private apartments. He soon noticed that food laid out for him disappeared before he could sit at the table. Puzzled he hid himself before dinner and saw the rose suddenly become a beautiful, and ravenous, young woman. Meantime the Devil was trying to track Ibronka down. He interrogated the door of her home, ‘did Ibronka pass through here?’ ‘No’, said the door. He asked the same of the window, ‘no’, then of the road, ‘no’, and so it was that he couldn’t find her, though he resolved there and then to make himself a pair of iron shoes and to wear them out before giving up his quest to discover her whereabouts.

The King soon asked Ibronka to marry him. She agreed, provided he never asked her to go to church with him on Sunday. He agreed though as the years passed the people began to complain that their Queen never went to church and put pressure on his majesty who eventually persuaded Ibronka to go to change her mind. ‘Very well, but no good will come of it.’ Once at church the Devil appeared with a grin, ‘I swore to track you down Ibronka and tonight I will come for you.’ The royal pair waited anxiously until eventually the Devil called through the window, ‘What did you see through the keyhole Ibronka?’ and this time Ibronka replied, ‘ I was the prettiest girl in the village… but to a dead and not to a living soul am I speaking.’

‘What did you see through the keyhole, Ibronka?’ ‘A young man came to the spinning circle and began to woo me…. but to a dead and not to a living soul am I speaking.

‘What did you see through the keyhole, Ibronka?’ ‘I dropped my spindle and discovered his cloven hoof, but to a dead and not to a living soul am I speaking.’

‘What did you see through the keyhole, Ibronka?’ ‘I then followed him by tying a ball of yarn to his cloak, but to a dead and not to a living soul am I speaking.’

‘What did you see through the keyhole, Ibronka?’ ‘I looked through the keyhole and saw him eating the dead, but to a dead and not to a living soul am I speaking..’

‘What did you see through the keyhole, Ibronka?’ ‘ I went to the wise woman who comforted me and told me what to do, but to a dead and not to a living soul am I speaking.’

The Devil was about to scream his question one more time but suddenly turned purple and collapsed, disappearing forever in a puff of smoke, leaving nothing behind but the smell of burnt chicken feathers. Ibronka’s family then woke up in the outhouse, stretching from their long sleep and wondered what on earth had happened.

Normally, when we think of narcissistic behaviour, there’s a tendency to frame it as a kind of selfishness, lack of consideration, or absence of empathy. When we talk about the way this shows up in relationship there is likewise a tendency to describe the way narcissism operates in terms of a lack of relatedness or exploitation. The mindset you find all over social media is that narcissism is effectively an unconscious experience of lack which a person then tries to fill up by ‘taking’ from the other. It’s framed as a kind of mugging or having your pocket picked. We use terms like extraction and supply. We speak of ‘takers’ or ‘users’ who are after your energy to feed their ego. All these ways of describing the interaction focus on the one-way street of being drained of resources, like the Devil in our story feasting on the brains of his victims. The assumption is that the motivation is all about feeling powerful.

What seems so useful in the story of `Ibronka is just how desperate the Devil seems to be, which makes you wonder what all this desire to be powerful is for. Moreover it seems to highlight the sleight of hand involved in all this focus on what the narcissist wants from you and shifts the emphasis towards the less visible aspect of the interaction, what the narcissist is trying to deposit into you.

Feeling powerful and wanting your energy and attention is only half the Devil’s story. The other, way less obvious but far more important, is what gets off-loaded. This is graphically represented in our story by Ibronka’s terror at the serial deadening of her family which seems to symbolise in an outer way the killing off of her inner resources/ security.

The cool calm of the narcissist masks over a terrible internal turmoil, the eternal battle with unbearable feelings of inferiority and deadness that he or she desperately wants to be rid of. So relationships tend to be predicated upon efforts to get others to provide lodgings and residency permits for any and all aspects of themselves which contradicts the narrative of superiority. To this end others must not only be objectified but also persuaded to buy into their objectification. The gaslighting necessary to bring this about is way more subtle and pervasive than simply blaming or humiliating others, it’s about getting the other to believe it, to thank you for it. Nowhere has this been more blatantly evident than at Trump’s recent rally in Michigan where he publicly made lustful remarks about Nicki Minaj’s body, made her stand up so that everyone could get a look ‘at that ass’, and then got her to praise him and thank him in front of the slavering crowd. ‘ I love you for ever and ever….’ followed by hysterical laughter.

What happened there is a perfect example of how narcissistic gaslighting works. Trump was offloading his own feeling of deadness and inferiority into that poor woman and then compelled her to identify with his demeaning attitude, only truly satisfied and reaching for cleanex once she had expressed sufficient gratitude for having been so shamefully objectified.

The scene looks ‘normal’. Everyone is having a rare old time. But that’s how gaslighting works. Abuse is normalised. If you have a problem with it that’s your fault. Without a wise woman present to slap his wrist the woman having hundreds of people encouraged to gloat over her bum has to tell herself she’s enjoying it. She has to collude with her abuser, deaden herself. What’s the matter? Can’t you take a joke?

Having internalised the support and comfort of the wise woman and then aligning herself with a more positive male image in the form of the king, Ibronka is then sufficiently empowered to break the spell the Devil is attempting to cast and manages to prevent his projections from lodging in her. She does this not by direct confrontation or by trying to get him to mend his ways but by refraining from being drawn into his hypnotic narrative as she had been at first and reminding herself what she is dealing with. She refuses the emotional pressure to engage with his interrogation of her, depriving him of control over the narrative, choosing instead to reiterate events from her own perspective, turning her focus back to her own sense of reality, her own inner sense of knowing. She is thus able to retain her mental clarity and doesn’t need the defensive posture of self justification or counter argument. She tells her story from her own ground and at every step reminds herself, ‘it is not me that is dead but you, it is not me that is shameful but you, it is not me who is weak but you.

..’to a dead and not to a live soul am I speaking….’

This mantra protects her from the Devil’s efforts to inveigle her inner world with his own hidden feelings of fearfulness, inferiority and emptiness. The projections, like chickens returning to roost, have nowhere to land and so he is compelled to withdraw from prey he can no longer sink his teeth into. She manages to achieve this not by remonstrating with him, nor by any attempt to engage him in a fight but by rooting herself in her own truth and identifying the deadness which threatens to envelope her as being ‘not-me’. It seems strange to think that we can have feelings which are effectively not our own, but that have been lodged in us and given residency permits as naturalised citizens of our inner worlds. Learning to recognise them, primarily via just how indigestible they are, is a potent defence against being manipulated by third parties. The spell breaking moment is to be able to say to oneself, ‘hang on, this feels off. Whose inferiority is this? Whose shame is this? Who does this deadness actually belong to?’

The Adventures of Baron von Trumphausen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Narcissism of Small Differences.

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

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

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

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

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

“To be like you,” said Toad.

Frog listened to Toad croak again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thanks to Dr Dale Mathers for the inspiration….

The Hedgehog Prince.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear of Life.

My grandfather died on a mountain of beans. Not planting a flag mind you. Not victorious in any way. Just dead, in bed. When they found him, the cans of beans were discovered underneath, piled high from one end of the bedstead to the other. Not, one might surmise, because he thought he might have felt a bit peckish in the night, but to ward off actual starvation, which was a bit odd considering that he had enough cash to buy both the shop he bought the beans from and the bakery next door.

My other grandfather was more fortunate. He died of falling fifteen thousand feet in the twisting, burnt out fuselage of a Lancaster bomber.

Though the circumstances of their deaths were entirely different their final moments did have something in common. Fear, though what they were afraid of was worlds apart. The young anti-aircraft gunner, trapped in his cage of glass and steel, choking and struggling to free himself as he plummeted Earthwards, knew he was about to die.

You’d think the much older man, having had a full life, lying quietly in his bed with his boots off, was blessed with a more benevolent fate. But the mountain of beans belied the hidden reality of someone loveless, disconnected from a world by which he felt abandoned and against which he’d pitifully shored himself up with a horde of staple snacks.

Our more conscious fears are of the plummeting variety. Fear of Life seems incomprehensible, even petty by comparison, yet tomorrow’s Unknown sometimes has a way of eclipsing even Death itself.

and rather depends on the fantasy of what you think tomorrow will bring.

We Westerners think of ourselves as ever so evolved but we are caught in a cultural double bind that puts a severe crimp in aliveness. We think of the pursuit of happiness as a constitutional right but entering into the feeling that happiness brings means a letting go of control few will entertain. To the extent that you are invested in image and have learned to play the power game, so must you stay in control…

”because loss of control evokes the fear of insanity.” A. Lowen.

This fear is not immediately obvious until you look at how much talk there is about ‘negative feelings’, whole service industries whose sole purpose is to help steer you away from ‘toxic emotions’.  Entire psychological theories and therapies exist to facilitate the process of dominating feeling life with rational egoic constructs to help us ’emote appropriately’.

But feelings are not produced by the ego. You can’t make yourself laugh or cry. Not without looking as though you are auditioning for a part on Broadway. To the extent that you are invested in the holy grail of appearance, so must feelings and spontaneity be suppressed and secretly regarded as the enemy, there to upset the status quo, ready to ambush your pretensions and overwhelm defenses. Feelings, particularly the more vulnerable ones of dependency and need, become equated with madness.

And so, with the greatest of irony, what we fear most, more than death, is our own authenticity which really does have the power to intrude upon preferred self-constructs and shred them like confetti.

So ordinary pleasures, a hearty cackle, the relief of a good cry, the beating heart of desire, the joy that demands we let go for a moment, has to be fended off as if they were the devil himself and substituted  with multi billion dollar entertainment industries that amuse and help us pass the time without making any demands or rattling the bars of our cages.

People pay for this privilege by living lives of quiet desperation

”and go to the grave with the song still in them.” H. Thoreau

though it is not greed per se that leads people to want more and more luxurious and unnecessary things, but the fear that underpins it. Making ego king casts the rest of our souls in the role of enemy at the gate. A siege mentality is the inevitable result, dominated by fear and lack and loss.

This fear permeates our culture as absence of concern for others, as pathological competitiveness, as a doubling down on whatever yesterday’s truth might have been.

 ‘The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but it is really fear.’ Ghandi

The extent to which our lives are dominated by the unconscious fears associated with staying in control and projecting an image of ourselves that is dissonant with the true self has been artfully demonstrated by an experiment at Yale University conducted by professor John Bargh.

He observed that minorities are often attributed with the characteristics of germs and bacteria that threaten, like unwanted feelings, to invade and destroy. He reasoned that making people feel safer about ‘germs’ could change racist attitudes and political convictions about immigration policy.

So he set up a questionnaire on political affiliation but reminded a control group about the recent H1N1 epidemic and casually asked if the participants had their shots. This control group responded unanimously by filling out their forms with a conservative bias.

Then he set similar questions to another control group, reminded them of the recent epidemic, but this time handed out hand sanitizer before they picked up their pens….

‘A simple squirt of Purell after we had raised the threat of the flu had changed their minds. It made them feel safe from the virus and (by association) from immigrants as well.” J. Bargh.

Fear governs who we vote for, even if we don’t like the guy.

In the Yale experiment ‘germs’ were symbolic of ‘infectious’ minorities. But the minorities themselves are symbolic, of  ‘inferior’ and invasive feelings, ‘intrusive’ thoughts that like-wise want to be on the inside.

And so, if the world is to become a more gentle place, power withheld from tyrants, then the inner tyrant busy controlling experience and walling off a full emotional life needs a little friendly chat.

Protection from cruel overlords begins at home, begins with recognising the fear of being really alive, the loss of control over self and others such liberation brings and the fear of madness that attends daring to be our true selves.

Most of us prefer to die peacefully in our beds at a ripe old age. But if its atop a mountain of beans are we really resting contentedly? I think not. We might make a virtue of being so prepared, of looking out for number one, of being First and Only, but if its at the expense of being so alienated from authentic feelings that we spend that life wanting to ‘get away from it all’, then the plummeting version  begins to look like the better choice.

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.

Bad Baby.

Children need attention. If they don’t get it they will create it. The badly behaved child has simply had to resort to extreme measures in order to elicit something from otherwise empty vessels.

Even dog trainers know this.

It’s the owner.

The ‘naughty child’ is then rewarded in his efforts with shaming, which, though it has a pitiful prognosis, still gives emotional impoverishment a nucleus around which to cobble some semblance of going-on-being.

The problem with this, the price to be paid, is that such a child must then continue to behave in a way that elicits shaming in order to confirm their identity and continue to shore up that poorly self construct.

The Rule of Intentionality says that things have a way of panning out as they are supposed to. If you married someone who runs you down, then they are fulfilling a sacred service and ought to be paid. If you wake up after a drinking binge full of remorse and self loathing then that’s the purpose of getting so drunk. Many a junkie is equally addicted to the identity of being failed and shameful, formed way before they ever laid hands on their poison and much more difficult to give up.

Fulfilling expectation is instinctual. The Psyche takes a bet that baby will be born into adequate environs. Neural pathways are wide open to any signal or stimulus that gives baby information about herself on the basic assumption of a good enough environment that she’s hardwired to expect.

So the child attributes parental failing to herself. The parent is full of distaste because baby is distasteful. So that’s what she has to be. And sometimes it’s so close that you can’t see it. In fact it..

”may go unnoticed for the simple reason that s/he cannot conceive of an alternative kind of relation of Self to Other.” Jean Liedloff.

The feeling of intrinsic shame cannot be readily endured and so the Psyche grabs hold of the next best thing to bonding which is to identify with mother instead. She accepts the booby prize of being special, more like sisters now, which both hammers a few rusty sheets to her ramshakle hovel and shields her from the shame that underpins it, now invisible but still an enduring structure in the Psyche. Whilst being special and praised for all kinds of other things that have little to do with you may get you through the day, the underlying need to confirm the shame is biding its time.

”Instinctive forces do not reason. They assume the immense weight of their experience of Nature’s ways that it will serve the individual to be stabilized according to his initial experience.” ibid

So even though the narcissistic character is full of vanity and bluster, full of the archetypal power of mummy, consumed with specialness, so is he compelled by yet a deeper force to end up in the gutter one way or another, to bungle life despite himself.

In my opinion this is why Mr Trump seemingly does everything to hasten his own demise. Alienating his own secret service, making enemies of people who have dirt on him. He’s mocked for doing stupid things. These stupid things have an agenda, the end game of which looks like self-destructiveness but they might actually serve to keep him out of hospital. In the meantime the mockery and vilification will do nicely.

Sometimes things don’t make sense until you include in the mix a need to be scorned and hated. The apparent goal of domination and control is actually the means to an end, to obtain that which serves internal security better than loyalty, philanthropy or crushing your enemies. Humiliation.

Who is a stinky baby!

And so while it seems that fate comes to him from the outside, from the woodwork, from people dishing enough dirt, enough stink; it has all been carefully if unconsciously orchestrated and for a while shame and specialness will share the stage in a masochistic self-immolation of First and Only.

While all this entertainment is going down the rest of us run the risk of forgetting that Mr. Trump is a symbol. He is an expression of the Collective Psyche, the natural product of a culture that denigrates Mothering and rejects the Divine Feminine. This cancer runs through all of us Chosen People. Are you not special? Do you not have a political system so superior that it is exported through the bomb bay doors of Magnanimous Benevolence killing other mothers and babies for their own good every day of the week?

or at least if there is profit in it?

Strangely the number of enemies killed by our generous instruction in Afghanistan these last couple of years is not as high as the number of our own soldiers committing suicide in the privacy of their barracks.

Not to mention a hundred people a day in America alone who die of opioid overdose and the fifty thousand others a year that find more creative ways of commiting suicide in the face of unbearable shame.

Why else does a person kill themselves if not because they can no longer hold up their head? Behind all the Western facade of technological and moral superiority lurks a syndrome whose ultimate purpose is dark implosion.

and its way bigger than Trump.

Shame is systemic in our culture. If we do not wish to be ruled by tyrants then getting rid of them is only the beginning.

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 Psychology of Privilege.

My mate Kevin was a privileged white boy. He was so privileged that none of the rules applied to him, like wearing clothes in the street or pissing behind the dumpster if he had to go for a leak and pretty soon he got in trouble with the law. Last time I saw him he’d helped himself to my apartment while I was out and ‘rearranged’ it. It just seemed trashed to me so I threw him out..

oh the ingratitude..

but I was pretty pissed off so I went round to his house at the crack of dawn the next day to find him standing naked in the living room, knee deep in shredded paper, with a can of kerosene in one hand and a box of matches in the other.

Another day in the psychopathology of white privilege.

When I was old enough to look over the steering wheel my father bought me my first car, no MOT, no insurance, no license. Every breach of the rules lost in his bestowing gift.

I abandoned it on the road side within a month. It wasn’t running right so I left it mounted up on the curb, got my stuff out the back and went off to buy a motorbike instead. No license, no experience, no insurance, no helmet. I crossed the first junction on one wheel and very nearly killed a pedestrian on the far side.

I was privileged. I didn’t have to play by the rules. But the almost-accident bought me up short and made me begin to question my entitlement.

Entitlement was what held my parents together, and the racially segregated community of which we were a part. It was their legacy to me and so I soaked it up like you do…

…being all there was on offer.

I began to realize, not only that it was all a con, but that this special-ness and privilege and being exempt from the rules was compensation for lack of love. I was given a pile of ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ cards in lieu of affection.

It had a lot to do with the intensely patriarchal world in which I was raised. Colonial Rhodesia was an Edwardian garden party of Pimms, boaters and 9mm side arms. It was a man’s world in which women were pegged just a tad above livestock and Nature was just cover for gooks that hadn’t been cleared yet.

No surprise that the Sons of Empire mostly turned out pretty narcissistic, or completely barking like Kevin. Tin pot princelings who’d sell each other out, and their grandmothers, for any extension of rights and status, that would bring on suicidal gestures at the slightest frustration.

The motif at the local monument read, ‘ That Might have Right, and Have it More Abundantly.’

Thing is, such a compensation culture is only pitched a notch or two above what the rest of polite society is still up to. The Feminine is collectively devalued. Nature is there simply for the plundering and conventional religion is an old boy’s club that has been resting on its laurels for so long they’ve mashed it into the upholstery.

What all these Sons of Empire never got was that if the feminine is devalued then so is mothering. Their mothers. Their Ground of Being.

The problem for children in the West is that mother is invariably a dissatisfied woman.   S. de Bouvoir.

If mother is devalued but her face remains the primary mirror for a nascent sense of identity what is the child to experience of itself?

What a baby sees in its mother’s eyes is what baby takes itself to be. If the mirror is broken or distorted then baby is also broken/distorted.

‘The precursor of the mirror is mother’s face. What a child sees there is themselves. What she looks like is what baby takes itself for.’ Whitmont

Going-on-Being is interrupted. Baby cannot move forward. Its not safe enough. There isn’t enough containment. If baby is not in his rightful place, in arms, because Mum is drowning her sorrows, or back at work trying to prove her worth, or off at bingo trying to top up on some girl time, or holding baby but gingerly because she’s had her instincts and self confidence eroded to the point that she’s lost faith in her own abilities, then the need to be in his rightful place, is supplanted by entitlement as though it were the Promised Land…

Moreover, if baby is having to shoulder not only mother’s sense of inferiority,   but also projections of the Self (which mother must export given that society has afforded her no schooling or experience of owning this within her own psyche) then baby is landed with a heady cocktail of not being good enough on the one hand and Mother’s divine image on the other…

which is going to blow his own sense of self out of all proportion.

This ‘privileged child’ is then allowed to behave pretty much as he pleases,  desperate to make up for the very real but denied deprivation – and there you have a recipe for all the petty despotism imagination can conceive. Instead of individuation you have omnipotent fusion, feeling like you’re boss of the world whilst being too afraid to step out of doors, craving adoration whilst refusing intimacy, longing for love whilst not giving a shit about other people.

Its not sustainable and secretly the privileged child knows this. Which means the world feels hostile because something has to give and it sure as hell isn’t going to be himself. He’s managed to project all his shadow onto others but in the process has parted with all his decency and integrity into the bargain. So it seems like the next guy has all the goodies, even if he’s dirt poor.

The unfairness of it all eats him up till he just wants to bring the whole world crashing down in an orgy of envious spoiling. It looks like greed but actually its deeper and more dangerous, hate of anything wholesome, anything that doesn’t need or want his silver spoon, anything that can’t be bought and paid for, love, empathy, tenderness.

So its not just that he wants to be boss. He wants to burn the house down.

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.

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 Soulful Sacrifice. 1.

When milk bottles were first introduced, Blue-tits learned how to take the tops off pretty quickly. But the truly impressive aspect of their door step robberies was that they managed to communicate the secret to one another faster than Blue-tits can fly.

How did they do it?

Whatever the answer, Blue-tits are not the only species to have this knack of manifesting collective change without crib notes or peeking over one another’s shoulder.

Give or take a few centuries, humans all over the world changed the structures of their societies without confering nicely or resorting to the pointy end of something more persuasive.

We invented kings and queens.

The characteristics of this new type of leader differed markedly from those that preceeded them. They may look like chiefs with their rides pimped but there are important differences that have an impact on culture and consciousness difficult to get your head around.

”This was not simply a quantative extension of a ranking system, it was a truly qualitative change by which society had entered a new realm.” P V Kirch

These new leaders emerged simultaneously in cultures that had no bearing or influence upon one another which suggests that something greater was at work than big hairy blokes with extra pointy beards wanting a crown.

But what?

Whether you take the Egyptian Pharaohs, or the ancient kingdoms of West Africa, early European lineages or the far-flung Aztec and Chinese emperors from whom they were entirely isolated, there are aspects of this new fangled system of resplendent dudes in metal hats so common to all that you’d think they’d copied each other’s homework.

All agreed, there was to be a fundamental change in how humans got on together with ramifications for Collective Consciousness we can scarcely suspect.

or is that scaredly?

or sacredly?

Superficially, kings meant centralised power, more rigid hierarchies, increased divisions of labour and more highly organised economies. But the most important difference, the most impactful on their subjects, was a shift in the value of human life and the rules about who you can kill without calling it murder…

so you’ll be pleased to know that Kings are only recent inventions.

”The way of life we now take for granted and on the foundations of which we have built civilizations, occupies but one percent of the time of the big-brain’s preoccupation.” R. Ardrey.

We tend to think of kings as something that belongs to history and by which we are no longer affected. In fact it’s the other way around. The institution is very recent and pervades the very viscera of modern life.

Far from being ousted by revolutions or the democratic aspirations of suitably frightened subjects, kings adapted as only the very youthful can. They went underground, as our serf like devotions to the rich and famous, as the farce of rule by deep state oligarchs, as the proliferation of corruption and being above the law whose daily tabloid shenanigins, violent exploits and eternal wars are just the kind of court intrigue you’d expect from period drama.

There are a number of important differences between chiefs and kings, with consequences for those grovelling nearest, but there is one that stands alone in its impact upon us because it affects our perception of what it means to be human.

Not only is the king a political ruler, he is also the high priest and most significant for those within reach, an incarnation of State-Your-Prefered-Deity-Here. Again, you might imagine this to be some amusing footnote of history, a witty anecdote from The Golden Bough and yet its widely accepted by considerable swathes of people in our time that might has right. The powerful are ordained by and represent God. In everyday life this trickles down and manifests in the wider populace as the feeling that, by virtue of your allegiance, you too are special and/or entitled to be exempt and above the law.

‘I like to be offensive”, said a Charlottesville supremacist. After all, what is the point of being above the law if you don’t demonstrate it once in a while? In fact what other way is there to make the point?

The archives of Ethography are rich in examples of how animals of all kinds obey a natural law which distinguishes between neighbour and stranger. This is so that the aggression necessary for survival within a species does not spill over into communal violence. Snakes won’t use their fangs when they fight. The anxiety of the young male baboon to join a new troop is not just for acceptance but for protection. Herring gulls will erupt into a frenzy of squawking and tear up great lumps of grass when anger boils over, without ever resorting to their rapier sharp beaks.

People are the same..

”All known societies make a distinction between murder, the killing of member’s of one’s own group – and the killing of outsiders.” G. Gorer.

In other words the Principle of Relatedness is more fundamental in its distinction of friend from foe than the inevitability of violent outcome.

”It is the effect of natural arangments, not the inoffensiveness of natural disposition that minimizes violent behaviour in a natural world.” Ardrey

Latent violence is there, but it’s subject to the natural law that distinguishes friend from foe. In a society run by leaders who are not ordained by the gods, nor  believed to be so special that they may not touch the ground, everyone in the community is protected from each other by this natural law. Contact with those who fall outside this protection can be made safer by rituals of politeness, exchange, intermarriage and stylised etiquette..

We shake hands, give gifts, let you have the seat furthest from the lavvy…

For folk who have been chosen by God and doing His Will, this natural law works against the majority because the king is removed from the community by a host of taboos which means that everybody, subjects and strangers alike, are now Other, unprotected by the rule which says that even an angry wolf will instinctively muzzle his bite if a pup merely shows him its belly.

No-one is safe.

In 19th C Buganda, not saying thankyou properly, with just the right amount of dust poured on your head, could get you killed. Oh, and also if you were vaguely related, or caused his Maj’ to touch the ground..or if you were unlucky enough to see him eating…. or caught his eye…

and so life is suddenly very precarious…

security and belonging eroded..

defences kicking in.

The rats start to turn on each other.

The advent of King-ship spills contained aggression into explosive violence. Not just between the king and anybody that looks at him funny but between the subjects themselves who are now also objects just a shade higher in worth than a non-believer and scrabbling to secure their positions.

If just deserts are your thing it doesn’t end well for the king. He is inflated and so must die. Tradition has it that he comes to a very bad end.  In Dahomey, if he’s lucky, he just gets murdered for the crown. If he’s not so lucky he has to be chopped up in bits, sometimes having to do the job himself, while he can, before being ritually consumed by the next incumbent.

Sometimes the king’s violent demise is ritualised at the end of fixed terms. Scandanavian kings ruled for twelve years after which they were put to death or a substitute found to die in their place, for just the right kind of sacrifice might appease the gods… sacrifices in their ones and twos all decked out in costumed finery, but then… maybe it would cover all the angles if they were also made in their uniformed millions.

Parts 2, 3, and 4 to follow.

Anxiety and Depression.

What are anxiety and depression?

They are how life seems in response to trauma. We regress to where it’s safe, to Mother, even if it costs us our wings.

But what if the trauma itself is loss of Mother? And what if this loss has been eroding human contentment for millenia?

Loss of the Divine Feminine, stripping motherhood of sacred context, is going to damage baby and is bound to give rise to compensatory, narcissistic defences to bulwark raging inner emptiness.

Sincs we can’t (daren’t) blame God for this we blame the Enemy, the rival predatory suckling, the dark brother, a phantasy demon born of deprivation who holds, who must hold, the good stuff.

Our spiritual emptiness is then ameliorated by riteous hate of the rival whom we can then blame for all our ills.

But there is a problem with this. In order to cover over our anxiety and depression we have to be at war. With ourselves and one another.

We go to war so as to afford ourselves the means to smooth an eternal path of prejudice and depersonalisation over our neighbour, the hated rival, whom we must experience as inferior as well as unduly favoured.

This means that prejudice and paranoia are intrinsic to monotheistic culture. It begins with mockery and ends with napalm.

Reducing the divine feminine to a whore riding her beast in Revelations, paraded up and down like a condemned prisoner prior to execution, has resulted in the collective depletion of the Western psyche. It has had consequences that have washed down through the centuries, culminating in alienation, compulsive aggression, instant gratification and the analyst’s couch.

The narcissistic schism this creates in families is not simply that parents are preoccupied with themselves and the nagging sense of their own incompletness. The absence of the Principle of Relatedness means that they struggle to find value in their kids or pleasure in their company.

The ‘me, me, me,’ is a default position resulting from a de facto failure to attribute sufficient significance to one another or to derive real nurture from our relationships.

Without value inherently invested in the Other we become isolated and shut off, compelled to revisit the underlying and unacknowledged horror of Mother’s loss in any number of substitute situations whilst vainly keeping our heads above water by the power that riteous indignation and eternal sabre rattling has to keep the fragmenting psyche together.

Freud observed that people lose their neuroses during times of war. Why? Because, win or lose, they feel vindicated, can band together and have something other than the condition they were born into to feel anxious and depressed about.

I have been to war so I know about this stuff. We were always so upbeat about everything, even when we knew we were losing. Why? Because the issue of an outer victory was a secondary consideration next to the inner need to have others carry our inferior feelings….

even though they won….

yep, just goes to show how non-rational such things really are. The losers can still de-value the victors and collectively identify with one another in lieu of relatedness.

Or just go and start another war…

Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq.

And its not for oil, or political ideology. Its the need to aggressively ramp up the projection of the Dark Brother so that the fractured template of our spiritual paradigm can be knit back together just that little bit more than it might if peace broke out.

Our Collective Narcissism is caught in a trap. To get out we have to afford the other with value, or at least validity. All the feelings of deadness and loss then wing their way home across the nomansland that formerly separated us from those fragments of soul which give testament to our inner poverty.

What this means is that the resolution to narcissim is by way of anxiety and depression.

Our only health is the disease,

If we obey the dying nurse-

Whose constant care is not to please,

but to remind of our and Adam’s curse

That to be restored

Our sickness must grow worse. T.S. Eliot   East Coker.

Rather than fixing them or using behavioural techniques of suppression we are challenged to live with our affliction, find meaning in them, to acknowledge that there really is something going on to be anxious and depressed about.

‘We become enlightened, not by imagining beings of light, but by going down into the dark’. Carl Jung

Anxiety and Depression are dirty words for the most part. We spend billions annually combating them, little realising that it is our defensive attitude that exacerbates and causes the very condition we are wanting to diminish.

If we would heal our divided self it is by way of embracing the loss of relatedness and mutuality that our superior, holier-than-thou attitudes have bought us. Being ‘positive’ won’t cut it. We have to find a way of relieving what we consider to be ‘negative’ of the stigma we are so determined to attach to it. Only then will we find the humility and compassion to live peacefully with ourselves and with one another.

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