self-destructiveness – Andy White Blog

Beowulf and Self-Envy.

King Hrothgar of the Danes has built a magnificent new mead hall ‘Heorot’, unparalleled in size and beauty. This hall is the symbolic center of royal fellowship, gift-giving, and communal joy. Hrothgar throws a lavish party to celebrate the completion of the project. The high point of the evening is when his Queen, Wealhtheow, ceremonially carries the king’s prized possession, a lavish golden drinking cup first to Hrothgar and then to his warriors, reinforcing social bonds and allegiances.

Then, something terrible happens. The sounds of all this joyful merry-making has spilled out into the night and travelled up the mountain where it has awoken Grendel, a horrifying monster, embodying exile and resentment towards communal order. He is referred to in Norse literature as ‘border-walker’, a liminal being of immense strength and ferocity which now descends upon Heorot with primal destructive rage.

The revellers are slaughtered horribly, torn limb from limb; the hall is utterly trashed and the royal couple with a few warriors only just manage to escape with their lives. The next day a boat arrives bearing Beowulf, a great hero, with a handful of men. He has heard about Grendel and vows to defeat him. Hrothgar is overjoyed but warns everyone against displaying too much happiness lest it reach Grendel’s ear once more.

That night Beowulf and his warriors set up an ambush in Heorot. They deliberately sing bawdy songs and make out that a great time is being had in the mead hall. Grendel descends but the warriors are ready and waiting. Beowulf fights Grendel, naked and unarmed, managing to sever his arm. The monster retreats to his mountain stronghold shrieking…

That night Grendel’s mother, called ‘Brimwylf’, ‘she-wolf of the waters’, falls upon the hall to avenge her son, killing many of the remaining warriors. Hrothgar pleads with Beowulf to hunt her down in her watery lair and after a terrible battle he manages to defeat her….

well, back in the 6th century version of the story.

In the spirit of ‘midrash’, the amplification and embellishment of stories over the years, the 2007 film of Beowulf starring Anthony Hopkins adds some interesting plot twists. It turns out that Grendel is Hrothgar’s son. The golden drinking cup of which he is so proud is a symbolically charged fetishistic object which binds Hrothgar to Grendel’s mother via their illicit union. Eventually Hrothgar confesses the truth, passing the golden cup, his queen and his kingdom to Beowulf before throwing himself from the battlements of his castle in shame.

When Beowulf goes to fight Grendel’s mother he too is seduced by her. Their child becomes yet another monster, a great dragon which, like Grendel, attacks the kingdom and particularly Queen Wealhtheow, hellbent on destroying the bond between the new royal couple. Beowulf is killed and the crown is passed to Wiglaf, Beowulf’s kinsman. The movie ends with Wiglaf picking the golden drinking horn out of the sand by the shore where Beowulf’s funeral pyre ship slowly sinks. Grendel’s mother rises from the waves and studies Wiglaf with seductive intent…

This embellishment of the story feels relevant in the way amplifications do by flagging up the compulsive repetition often present in destructive enactment. Hrothgar’s betrayal of his queen comes back to haunt him, then Beowulf makes the same mistake and finally Wiglaf is caught up in the cycle of adultery and fathers killing their sons. On the eve of the Piscean age the collective psyche offered up a story about the consequences of banishing the divine feminine, and at the end of that age extrapolated some further plot twists detailing the specific fallout of such rash action.

We are used to thinking about envy as an interpersonal dynamic, A envies B because A has something B does not. The original story of Beowulf depicts Grendel as an independent envious spirit who attacks the joyful Heorot out of random spite for the other. The midrash reveals that Hrothgar is not a random other at all, but the closest of kin and that Grendel is in fact heir to the hall he has been excluded from. The story now depicts Hrothgar being attacked by a split off and denied part of himself, the product of concealed relations with the rejected goddess. The envious attack on Heorot is Hrothgar’s own doing.

Whilst the psychoanalytic process is replete with stories of abandonment and abuse by others, all of which need honouring and cathartic working through, so too is there the pernicious issue of the way in which we attack ourselves and shore up identity by sabotaging new self-constructs symbolised by the Heorot. What we could loosely call the integration of the shadow is not confined to acknowledgement of those ‘negative emotions’ we harbour towards others but also the way in which we actively limit our own possibilities and spoil our own joys.

Self-envy is the internal process by which one part of the personality attacks and undermines another, more creative and healthy part of the self. Addictions, self-sabotage, compulsive acting out, and blocked creativity can be understood as the result of an unconscious ‘civil war’ within. Rather than envying another person, the individual envies their own potential for growth, vitality, and emotional integration.

The contribution of object relations theorists such as Melanie Klien and Wilfred Bion is that they identify how early developmental experiences lead to the formation of split-off ‘child part self-objects.’ These are primitive internal structures whose feelings of rage, deprivation, and envy are preserved precisely because they are banished, like Grendel, beyond the perimeter of the warm and cozy where they cannot be humanised nor the effects of which be ameliorated.. When a person begins to experience creative or loving states, these split-off parts perceive such experiences as threatening and attacks them.

The prejudice we have towards ‘negative emotions’, even to the point of identifying them with irredeemable evil, is precisely what keeps them in place and destructively turned against what we otherwise consider ‘the good’. These dynamics manifest clinically as sabotaging success, relapsing into addiction, destroying relationships, rejecting help, feeling guilty about creativity or happiness, and unconsciously attacking what is most desired.

The 2.0 version of Beowulf is so valuable because it points to the centrality of Grendel’s mother to the story and the way in which she holds sway over first Hrothgar, then Beowulf and finally Wiglaf via their totemic fascination with the golden mead cup which she makes sure keeps the men in the story enthralled. The rejected goddess as ‘Mater’ is unwittingly symbolised in a more concrete, mater-ial form as the cornucopic golden drinking cup with which the fascinated kings are then caught like rabbits in the headlights. The lure of money and status, the bottomless bucket list, the end justifying the means, the next exciting lover, the diminution of relatedness, all serve to keep us small so as not to bring Grendel down upon the joyful hall of Heorot, and keep the gyre of self destructive acting out forever turning.

Had Hrothgar maintained a more conscious and reverential relationship with the Brimwylf and acknowledged her as the source from which the golden cup had come, he might have avoided the illicit alternative and been spared the divisive consequences.

Of Cockerels and Presidents.

My ex’s response to my request for a divorce was to buy a large white cockerel which announced every coming dawn at 4am and attacked anyone who came into the yard. ‘Pat’ was thirty pounds of malevolent fury. Our four year old got gashed across his shoulder in short order and any venturing out of the backdoor now required the vigilance of counter-insurgency training to remain unbloodied.

I asked her to get rid of her pet for the sake of our son. Despite the fact that a boy in the next village had just lost an eye in a similar situation she refused, so I had to take matters into my own hands.

Pat was afraid of nothing. He had two inch spurs and the momentum of a pro footballer. Get within forty feet of him and he would come straight at you, narrowing all options to fight or flight. But the day I made a firm decision to reclaim the yard and came out the backdoor with my air rifle, he took one look and fled. He knew his time was up.

How?

Chickens are smarter than you think but there was no way this particular specimen could have known what a rifle was or that he was my intended target. What I had slung casually over a shoulder could just as easily have been a rake or a plank of wood. Yet as soon as he saw me that day, his last, he fled to the bottom of the garden faster than he’d ever run, neck craned forward and wings a flapping.

He knew.

Cause and effect are not so neatly squared away as we might like to think. What you know is invariably more than you have ever been exposed to or taught in school.

Such events cannot be explained scientifically. They seem to occur without reference to time and space, and though we cannot grasp the dynamics involved anymore than you can truly understand the concept of quantum super-positions, they happen anyway and compel us to consider that there is more in the mix than we’d like to admit.

When you see someone engaged in profoundly self destructive acts it looks just crazy from the outside, but that is because you are not in possession of all the facts and haven’t considered the possibility of an x in the equation without which events just don’t seem to make sense.

A man goes for a job interview. He really wants the position, needs the money and feels excited about his new prospects but inexplicably gets high right before the meeting and fluffs the whole thing. It doesn’t make sense, until you take up the context and consider the mischief that can be made by an autonomous complex split off from consciousness, demanding he remain infantile and dependent.

Sometimes what trips us up in our intentions is not just the regressive pathology of childhood resurfacing to keep us on an even keel, the devil that you know being safer than the angel you do not, but precisely what is best and most noble about us.

Jung comments that ”the experience of the Self is always a blow to the ego.” The reason for this is that the ego is deposed from its place of primacy in the psyche in the process of realizing its context. It had formerly assumed itself to be at the centre of things with the feeling that the totality of the psyche is a ‘nothing but’ derived from consciousness but then finds itself a mere satellite of something superordinate that will not be reduced to inconvenient material that has simply been repressed.

The Self was there first and it was out of this primordial sea that the land mass of ego emerges. This greater, sentient, encompassing awareness, wants to be realized, wants incarnation, expression, daylight. And if it doesn’t get it… it will make trouble for you.

While the ego continues in its struggles to establish agenda and hegemony, the Self thwarts its intentions past a certain point. Ego satisfaction is not the goal of life. The caterpillar has yet to fulfill itself and must give up its delicious leaves for something that looks like death if meaningful life is to continue. In the process it might well feel as though the Universe is working against you and not a little paranoia can be generated along the way. After all, something unknown is doing I don’t know what.

‘We had thought it was the outer event that had happened to us but now, watching this director’s movement, we see that it is we who happened to our selves.” Frances Wickes. p134 The Inner World of Choice.

This ‘happening to ourselves” is the process of individuation, which the ego might well experience as an attack insofar as it is compelled to acknowledge its source and get off its high horse yet without it, without submitting to the will of the Self, no amount of fulfilling ego’s ambition ever feeds us for more than a moment. Indeed, it can send us spiraling into despair.

Transformation is achieved not by incremental additions to an ever expanding ego but by a humble acknowledgment of its limited powers in respect of an inner principle which affords life meaning in direct proportion to our reliance upon it.

”With this transformation, humiliation becomes humility, guilt is replaced by a responsible attitude towards one’s own ignorance [and] the certainty of one’s own rightness gives way to vulnerability.” ibid

And so, whilst we might wonder at the strange, self-destructive antics of the world’s most powerful man and puzzle over behavior that seems to invite catastrophic sanction, impeachment, or worse..his enactments have significance above and beyond the apparent stupidity of appointing incompetent lawyers which incriminate him at every turn, beyond the foolishness of policies that inflame public opinion, beyond ill advised appointments whose corruption must splash back on his own shoes and even beyond the childlike wish to be brought to book by any adults left in the room. His own soul wants him to fail so that he can grow and to that end compels him to make all kinds of counter-intuitive gestures unconsciously designed to invite reflection and perspective., the kind that might even need a long quiet jail term to integrate.

In our own, much smaller, humdrum lives, we do the same and inadvertently invite consciousness expanding catastrophe upon ourselves with poor matches in marriage, ill considered vocations and unrealistic intentions because all these things ultimately serve to wake us up by the fall from thwarted ambition that follows.

He who persists in his folly will become wise.” W. Blake.

preferably without also becoming someone else’s dinner.

Going Mad to Stay Sane. Reprint.

Self destructiveness can be a spring board for a soulful life like no other if we can realize the meaning in the message, if we refrain from putting a lid on it with medication or inveterate ‘fixing’.

The book tells the story of King Midas from Greek mythology who wished that everything he touched be turned to gold. He only realizes what a curse he’s bought on himself when he embraces his daughter…..

It also tells the backstory, what kind of parents he had and what the family dynamics were that could foster such a terrible desire. How does he live? How does Midas resolve his issues? How does he now approach Dionysus who granted him his hideous wish.

The story uses allegory to reveal how we grow through adversity and foolishness. It looks at the deeper significance of self-destructiveness, as a symbol of something meaningful that can be transformative.

The book has a new preface by Dr Dale Mathers who is a Jungian analyst with his own new book on the shelf, ‘Alchemy and Psychotherapy’.

Enjoy the book and find new ways to make sense of old patterns.

Books are signed and cost £21 plus £4 p+p (UK), £8 (non-UK).

For UK delivery:

For non-UK delivery:

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.