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?’
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