Tag: psychology

Giving the Devil his Due.

In the wildly phantasmagoric, ‘Essene Gospel of Peace’, an alchemical coagulatio of Gnostic wisdom and late neolithic enema rituals [great if you are handy with a calabash], there comes a bucolic moment when the Master berates his followers for going on at such great length about their suffering and how much they are tormented by Satan..

‘Satan torments you thus because you have already fasted many days and you do not pay to him his tribute. You do not feed him. You torment him with hunger.’

Psychologically,

‘You are over-identified with being good. You therefor deny, split off and project your shadow and pay for this with a good solid neurosis. The way out of this mess is by repairing the relationship with this disavowed self.’

Nietzsche echoes this a few centuries later, with added flowery bits, when he made the observation in ‘Birth of Tragedy’, that the brothers Apollo and Dionysus have become estranged from one another in our culture. We have come to worship at the altar of only one of them with our sunny dispositions and political correctness and have driven the invaluable other underground, causing a great rent in the collective psyche..

‘Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture, can save the Apollonian dream from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind.” F. Nietzsche

Any over-identification with a single story/storey, mono-anything, is going to have the effect of enervating the psyche, preventing development and generating schizoid, [indiscriminate rambling] characteristics in the personality. You begin to become unhinged and increasingly reliant on denial and projection to stay behind the picket fence of your preferred ism. Hence much of the paranoia of our age. Monochrome is a little threatened by red, yellow and blue, which it secretly wants to become.

Uncomplicated belief systems, produce split realities. If you won’t be complicated you will develop a complex instead, one that requires carefully choreographed conflicts in order to stay afloat. The cut and dried belief system in which all the questions are answered and there is no internal dissent is… well, cut and dried. It is severed from its roots with all the moisture sucked out of it. The cutting and the drying divides the self against itself, desiccates life, creating schizoid separation from self and world. In lieu of our daemonic guardians standing watch over us, they are suddenly co-opted into the kind of self care necessary to split realities. Preserving ‘our way of life’ becomes a divine mandate.

‘The transpersonal is placed in the service of defense’. D. Kalsched.

Instead of the transcendent function being used to create transitional space between self and other, the opposite happens. The psyche fractures to accommodate its denied multiplicity whilst the transcendent function is bused in to enforce social distancing and prevent the psyche from conferring with itself. I.e. reflecting. It becomes a sacred duty to hive oneself off from what is going on.

“The schizoid experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself ‘together with’ others or ‘at home in’ the world.” R.D. Laing.

We pay dearly for any belief in our own exclusive rightness, in ‘first and only’. Despite convictions of privilege, rectitude and self-congratulation, the price is internal division and disconnection from others which is why spending any time with a true believer will always leave your head spinning.

At the schizoid end of narcissism the problem is not simply lack of empathy for others, but more an actual denial of others. Others become statistics and collateral damage. Bad numbers. I’m put in mind of a patient who left, never to return, with the words, ‘I just can’t see you as a human being’.

”To feel potential and share with a beloved other is what the schizoid cannot do because their nascent longings were traumatically disappointed as children.’ Kalsched

Its a bit like saying that the way we collectively address when-Mother-is-missing, is to split off anxiety and bolster sudden fragility with life giving convictions and certitudes, whilst having to dumb down life’s complexities and infinite variety. This then drives the devil in us crazy… and vengeful, wanting his pound of flesh for the ongoing delusion that you are captain of your ship, and that there are no raptors aboard. Or at least if there are raptors, then its quite safe. And if its not safe then its not my responsibility. I wasn’t there. I don’t know nuffing about any raptors. I never met them.

The scary thing about Trump is that he really is a man of the people. Its not just that a hundred million people think this clearly ungodly man is blessed by Jesus. Its that he really does epitomize many of the values we all hold, including the right not to have to grow into long pants or go through life with any critical reflection.

‘‘Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his
beginnings, and something else believes it has long since got beyond all
that.” C G Jung CW9.

What else should we expect of a collective which has lost its mother?

The collective loss of the divine feminine produces a cultural response no different to that of an individual toddler who is suddenly forced by neglect or bereavement to adopt a position of absolute certainty in life in order to compensate for chaotic feelings of loss. All Mono’s are likewise full of full of passionate intensity and always know what’s going on. The widespread belief that we somehow cannot help but evolve seems to be undercut by the fact that whatever ism we belong to, it shares with all the others the same blinkered prejudice of an exclusive and ‘right’ way of looking at things consistent with schizoid defense structures.

Mr Trump’s recent assertion that intravenous bleach, a known suicide method, might be the miracle cure for Coronavirus, seems to demonstrate the addling effect, the split realities and the psychic enervation which results from first and only, from failing to give the Devil his due.

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.

 

We’re Sending You Away…

When I was first sent to boarding school I was so excited. Soooo excited. Excited. Excited. Excited. After all it would be a full thirty years before some kind soul laid their hand on my shoulder and reminded me that the closest comparisons in the literature were the Nazi’s concentration camps with which I would become fascinated without quite knowing why….

We’re sending you away…

I was being honoured. Honoured, it was a great priviledge. One that would make me a man. ‘Its the best school in the country,’ my father told me proudly, the specks of spittle dancing in the corners of his mouth. Oh, my God, how fantastic. My manhood! A noble and proud and superior manhood was now my sure inheritance.

In my final year of incarceration one of my few friends in that place asked me, ‘Andy, do you  remember the first thing you ever said to me?’                                                                  ‘No.’                                                                                                                                                  ‘Fuck off’.

Start as you mean to go on. How else does the entirely unprotected field the daily maelstrom of feral teenage boys, entirely deprived of feminine contact, fed on inflated visions of their moral ascendency over the entire world whilst desperatly hiving off the underlying shame, humiliation and rejection of being sent away by torturing one another on a more or less continuous basis.

We’re sending you away…..

to play a game, one where you get to be the lords of the universe who will know themselves by being treated as scum and treating one another as scum, where kudos and pride are measured in caprice and malice and you get to know just how much we love you by having nothing to do with your growing up.

By the time I was fourteen I had been beaten with sticks, whips, cricket bats; sexually molested, felt up, and forced to publically have sex with my own bundled bedding. Is that rape? Yes it is.

But then something really weird happened.

I was in afternoon prep. I got called out by the housemaster and motioned to follow him to his house down the hall. I went. He invited me in and closed the door. We went through to the dinning room. He motioned me to sit. I sat. He went away, then came back with a slice of cake on a plate and a glass of coke. ‘It’s your birthday,’ he said, giving me this information as you might assert that Mogadishu is the capital of Yemen.

He put the things down and went away. I ate the cake in silence. Then I drank the coke. Then I waited. Then I got up and left.

I couldn’t think straight for days and that cake repeated on me endlessly until I realised that the reason I was choking so much on my gift was that  it meant  the very best I could hope for in this marvellous world of priviledge was a moment to be envied by everyone else in a room so empty I could hear the echo of my own heartbeat.

Why is this important?

Because the best people going to the best schools of the best religion generally turned out rather badly. And then they run the country.

I just heard ————  ——–  killed himself.

”Last seen in his car…..”

I trawled through his face book page trying to make sense of it. But it already made perfect sense. A narcissistic bully, fed all his life on the myth of his unbounded superiority, entirely invested in power to compensate the desperate and terrible insecurities engendered in being sent away, the worthlessness, the shame, the horror of a world where rape was normal, suddenly got to the point where his denial and compensations ran out of their batteries and as ever with the narcissist if he could not have his quota of being better than, tough at 50, then what else was there but to blow his brains out?

His brother was a terrible bastard. He would walk up and down the line of us little fags in his study, stripped to the waist, up and down, up and down, eventually lashing out violently at …  who knows, someone, maybe you, maybe..no-one. Up and down. Whose turn today? If not in the morning then maybe in the evening. I wound up in the sanatorium, not with bruises but, as I discovered much later, hysterical blindness bought about by acute, ongoing terror.

We’re sending you away….

This blog is a forum to explore the reality of the grown up children who, one way or another, were sent away, rejected or violated. It is also about how we are taught to send away, reject and violate –  the underbelly of  Western Civilisation.

My book,’Going Mad to Stay Sane’, about to have its third edition published, explores the legacy of parents who either invade or abandon their children and what those children can do to re-member themselves.

See the post of the same title below to preorder.

Coming out for the first time later in the summer is ‘Abundant Delicious, the secret and the mystery’, which shows how we can use our woundedness to discover who we are and celebrates the capacity and responsibility of the human spirit to triumph in the face of  the greatest adversity, the split reality of a divided world.