Starving Mathias.

There was once a poor man who was so hungry everyone called him Starving Mathias. His sole possession was a measly length of rope, so he decided to go into the woods and hang himself with it. As he wandered between the trees looking for a suitable branch he came across the Devil coming the other way.

‘Hello Starving Mathias, what are you doing here?’

Now, Starving Mathias may have been depressed but that’s not to say he wasn’t scared or angry, ‘Why, I’ve come into these woods to find incense to smoke you out of Hell! he replied, giving the Devil his fiercest look. The Devil dropped to his knees and begged Starving Mathias to spare him, offering him whatever he might ask for if only he refrained from such a dire threat.

‘Well,’ said Starving Mathias after some thought, ‘two hundred pounds of gold should do it.’ The Devil instantly and gratefully produced two hundred pounds of gold in a large, hefty sack which Starving Mathias hoisted onto his back and carried home.

The Devil also went home, quaking with fear, and told all the other devils about his terrifying encounter with Starving Mathias who had threatened to smoke them all out of Hell. The other devils were deeply troubled by this, not to mention the huge sum of two hundred pounds of gold, which they all agreed was far too much. They resolved to get it back somehow and spent considerable time scratching their chins, wondering how to go about it.

Eventually one of them, a great barrel chested demon, had the bright idea that they could just ask for it to be returned. The others heartily agreed and so the barrel chested demon roared up to the world and found Starving Mathias in his garden at the picnic table just about to tuck into a feast of suckling pig smothered in dauphinoise potatoes with a dip of creme fraiche and spring onions.

‘See here Starving Mathias,’ he said, trying to sound as gruff as he could, ‘we, er, we think that two hundred pounds of gold is way too much.’ He placed hairy knuckled fists the size of badgers onto the table to look as tough as possible. ‘We, er, we’d like it back, the gold..if you would be so kind.’

‘No, said Starving Mathias between mouthfuls, ‘no, I’m not going to do that.’

‘Well!’ said the barrel chested demon, dropping his voice another octave, ‘well, in that case, er, in that case…. I challenge you… yes, that’s it, I challenge you to a fight!’ He did his best to draw himself up to his full height with some added flames and pink smoke for effect.

‘No, I’m not going to fight you,’ said Starving Mathias, gently dabbing his mouth with a napkin, ‘I would only throw you down and crush you,’ he yawned. ‘But if you really want a fight why not go pick on my hundred and eighty eight year old grandfather. He would be the right match for you..’ and so Starving Mathias showed the barrel chested demon a cave deep in the woods from which could be heard the sound of gentle snoring. In rushed the barrel chested demon only to find that his protagonist was rather unhappy about being woken from his hibernation so early in the Spring and promptly crushed the poor demon’s bones in a mighty bear hug before cutting him to pieces with steak knife claws.

The barrel chested demon, or what was left of him, fled back to Hell blubbing pitifully. The other Devils muttered amongst themselves, agreeing this should not stand. They had rights after all. More importantly, the two hundred pounds of gold was way too much. Eventually a sleek and athletic looking devil volunteered to take Starving Mathias on. He found him just polishing off some stuffed peacock drizzled with hawks head relish served with petite pois and steamed purple sprouting. ‘See here Starving Mathias, two hundred pounds of gold is way too much….. but to be fair I will challenge you to a race. The winner will get to keep the gold.’

‘No, I’m not going to race you, said Starving Mathias, ‘ I would only run so fast as to knock down the walls of Hell… Why don’t you take on my son, John, who would be a much better match for someone as slow as you’. So Starving Mathias took the athletic looking devil into the woods, knowing exactly where to find a sleeping rabbit having his midday nap. He kicked the bush under which the rabbit lay and it shot off down a steep gully. The devil tried to follow but the gully was full of terribly sharp stones washed down by recent rains which cut his poor feet to ribbons. ‘Who knew your son John could run so fast,’ he whimpered, or that stones could be so sharp..’ and so he limped all the way back to Hell, which is much further away than you might imagine.

The other devils were mightly put out by all this. Something had to be done. Eventually the strongest of them got up, declaring he would return the gold. He was huge and strode up to the world, shaking the earth with every step. He found Starving Mathias in his garden just finishing off some medium rare venison steak cooked in white wine and dijon mustard. ‘See here Starving Mathias,’ growled the strongest devil, trying, but failing, not to step on the flower beds with his enormous mutton feet, ‘two hundred pounds of gold is way too much. ‘I challenge you to a contest of raw power. See that cart horse yonder? We’ll take turns to see who can carry it around the yard the most number of times. The winner will get to keep the gold.’

Starving Mathias flossed his teeth a bit and thought about the challenge. He was somewhat concerned because he hadn’t quite built up his strength yet… He pondered and reflected and pondered some more…. ‘all right, he said, ‘you first.’ So the strongest devil picked up the carthorse and strode around the yard, circling it seven times. Eventually, he dropped the horse, utterly exhausted, lying where he had fallen.

‘Well done!’ exclaimed starving Mathias, ‘but I will make the challenge for myself harder still by picking up the cart horse between my legs,’ and he leapt onto the horse and rode it round and round the yard carefully trampling the strongest devil every time he went around. ‘There! I went around eleven times carrying the horse between my legs! I win!’ And so the Devil, disoriented and crushed, returned to Hell utterly defeated.

The other devils were outraged. There was even some suggestion touted from the back that a committee should be formed to return the gold. Eventually, the meanest and nastiest devil stood up saying that he would succeed where the others had failed and slid up to the world where Starving Mathias had just finished a bowl of shiitake mushroom and asparagus soup seasoned with turmeric and coriander.’ ‘See here Starving Mathias,’ hissed the scariest devil, ‘two hundred pounds of gold is way too much. I challenge you to a wager, we’ll see who is the scariest. Winner takes all.’

‘Meh, okay,’ said Starving Mathias, ‘you first.’

‘Er, what if we make you drink poisoned ink?’

‘I’ll drink it if I have to…’

‘Er, what about if we strap you into a harness of stinging nettles and make you plough a field of burning coals?’

‘I’ll endure it if I must..’

‘What about, er, putting you in a vat and boiling you in molten lead…?’

‘Enough of this bullshit!’ cried Starving Mathias, ‘now I am going to scare you!’ and he called his wife to come out of the cottage. ‘Mildred!’

Midred emerged, rolling pin in hand, as fierce and determined as she was large and strong. She grabbed the scariest Devil with one meaty paw and began to beat him with the rolling pin, belabouring him meantime with the world’s sharpest tongue while she did so..

‘Why you greedy, degenerate, shiftless cockwomble of a devil!’ she yelled, beating his legs. ‘You good for nothing, woe begotten, harebrained oxygen thief!’ beating his rump. ‘ You hopeless, vagrant scrimshanker!’ beating his shoulders. ‘You worthless muckspouting mumble crusted loitersack!’ bashing his head. ‘Poltroon, saddle goose, ninny hammer.’

The scariest devil was so challenged in his preferred identity as a scurrilous and unsavoury degenerate, a putrid and reprehensible miscreant, that he shed not only his shirt but his skin as well and fled all the way back to hell. “Let starving Mathias keep the fucking gold! He is way more devil than all of us put together’. And so it was the Mathias and Mildred lived out their days feasting on whatever their hearts desired, taking it in turns to cook up delicious delicacies for one another and laughing their heads off at all the rude things to call devils.

Our story begins with Starving Mathias in despair. His poverty and his hunger are symbolic of what it might feel like to get ‘to the end of one’s rope’. It is the situation where the preferred identity of what Winnicott would call ‘the false self’ is no longer sustainable. The more alluring persona which you might like to present to the world just feels dry and hollow and no longer worth the candle. Starving Mathias has hit ‘rock bottom’. This is a state of mind often described as existential crisis. To live is not enough. There has to be meaning and purpose, whilst painfully acknowledging one cannot provide this for oneself. Moreover, Mathias keenly feels his inadequacies, his guilt, his failure and his helplessness.

A person’s independence is a stage on the path of individuation but is not its goal. Beyond independence lies inter-dependence, the realisation that we need not only one another but also ‘the spirit of the depths’ to quote Jung, a connection to the greater awareness embodied by whatever the divine is for you, in order to imbue ego-consciousness with real vitality. Giving up independence as an end in itself feels like a terrible blow, a kind of death, an humiliation, the renunciation of a once vaunted accomplishment. Nevertheless, this death of self-sufficiency has to be entered into if we are to make any spiritual progress.

‘A death blow is a life blow to some, who till they died did not alive become, who had they lived did most surely die… but when they died, vitality began.’ Emily Dickinson.

Another way of saying this is that transcendence happens via the inferior function, what is least developed in oneself, the stone that the builder refused. When we can accept and integrate what is most lowly in us then something wonderful happens. With the renunciation of a partial, jaundiced view which prefers only the syntonic propaganda of who-I-am, the ego as a warts-and-all experience then becomes sufficiently compendious to house a more fully fledged sense of self. Such a perspective is no longer afraid of its own devils and can therefore appropriate a goodly chunk of the spiritual gold which said devils keep to themselves for as long as we are at odds with them.

The Prince who wanted to live Forever.

Once there was a Prince who had lost his mother. He seemed rather unaffected and even sang at her funeral, though, thereafter, he developed a terrible fear of death. He went to his father the King and said, ‘Father, I do not want to die, I’m going to take refuge with the Queen of Forever, where no time passes.’ After much travail he reaches the Queen’s castle and finds the way barred by three massive gates, each guarded by a fierce monster. A servant bakes magical loaves of bread which tempt the monsters to quit their posts and so the Prince passes through, finds the Queen and lives happily for thousands of years.

One Saturday afternoon, or maybe it was Tuesday morning, the Prince decides he might go back to Reality for a visit. The Queen gives him a pair of special shoes saying, ‘when you get there you will be attacked by a very bad man. Put on the shoes to get away from him’. The Prince returns and is immediately accosted by the spectre of Death. ‘I’ve been looking for you…’ The Prince hurriedly puts on the magical shoes which speed him back to Foreverland as promised. At the gates they meet the Queen who halts Death saying, ‘Let’s throw the Prince into the air, we’ll see which side of the gate he lands’. The Prince lands within the gates and so is saved, apparently.

Our Prince has received a great fright he cannot process, the loss of his Mother. He has no-one to whom he can take his grief. It’s enough to terrify him into avoidant re-action. He cannot proceed in a world where such terrible fears exist, without anyone to validate or mediate them. He cannot go back to Mother, nor forward to Father. His autonomic nervous system shuts down and he flees to a psychic realm akin to Jung’s ‘Spirit of the Depths’ instead. In order to do this he has to collapse the process of ego/self separation and skip past the three Guardians whose job it is to keep these worlds apart.

The Guardians are bought off with bread, synonymous with the body, so that normally unavailable thresholds can be crossed and the terrors of the world left behind. But at what price? In Chinese medicine ‘the three gates’ are described as ‘obstacles in the body which prevent the full circulation of Qi’. The emotional terrors have had to become physical problems.

In his writings on hysteria, Freud’s associate Sandor Ferenczi describes three gates through which psychological trauma can create psychosomatic symptoms. First is the child not being loved; second is that excitation persists at the bodily site of trauma (1932, pp. 80, 123-124) or is displaced onto other body parts (1932, pp. 23, 80); the third is that psychosomatic symptoms are a reenactment within the body of dissociated traumatic experiences.

The Prince’s foray back to Reality is immediately met by the figure of Death, the end of identification with Timelessness, the painfully surfacing memories of intrusion and loss, the felt experience of his inner conflicts. Both Spielrein and Jung refer to the anxiety of the unknown fear which haunts hysteria. The body, sacrificed as a repository for traumatic memory, then becomes a new source of fear in the form of either unwanted impulses or somatic symptoms. The enemy is now within, ‘before which you may vainly attempt to flee to an uncertain future’. (Spielrein 1955)

Analyst Sabina Spielrein talks about the need for the destruction of old forms, distorted self-concepts, so that the new can emerge. Though, what if the destruction feels unsupported, when separation and loss do not lead to new growth but prove too momentous to undertake? What happens when the loss of oneness does not lead to twoness, when the child’s autonomy gets in the way of prohibitive harmony, when participation mystique has to give way to body odour and hairy legs?

If part of a family dynamic is that a withdrawn mother is briefly bought back to life by the new life with which she can then identify and upon whom hopes of lasting happiness are pinned, then the child attaining any kind of autonomy is a threat to such expectations. The child protects itself from this hijack by identifying with mother’s views more strongly than her own, the true self now subjugated and forced into hiding by what has had to be swallowed down as ‘love’.

I wonder if the malignant ‘secondary personality’ typical of hysteria referenced by Spielrein isn’t internalised maternal hate at the child’s nascent ego, what Marion Woodman would call ‘the Death Mother’. The child internalises a hard unresponsive emotional core, ‘an unconscious identification with the dead mother,’ (A. Green 2021 p150) its own suffering stuck in the timeless symptom of some poor afflicted organ, whose sovereignty must be renounced at the castle gates of the Queen of Forever.

Woodman adds, ‘If we are not wanted and intuit that we are a threat to our parents, our cells will have been imprinted with the fear of abandonment, the terror of annihilation.’ (Woodman 1980) Such a scenario gives rise to what Woodman calls, ‘possum mentality’ playing dead to survive but with the danger that possum ‘becomes a feature of the body/psyche which ultimately may turn against itself.’. ibid

The image of the Prince being thrown up into the air like a rag-doll to see which side of the gate he lands is just this possum mentality.. Jung puts it like this, ‘Whoever relinquishes experiencing a risky undertaking must stifle an erotic wish, committing a form of self murder.’ (Jung in Spielrein 1955)

In our story the Guardians are bought off with magical loaves, sops to Cerberus. Bread has long been associated with the body which is then given over to the Guardians to gnaw on as they will. ‘An unconscious contract of sorts is signed in which it is agreed that sexuality and the body debase the purer aims in life. A sacrifice takes place, as the rejection of the body is one’s own bodily being..’ (Bollas 1999) This rejection of the body also finds expression in rejection of the other.. ”Auto-erotic means not conscious of the presence of other people. They see only themselves and that is why they have panics.’ Jung. My Mother and I. p189

If there is an embargo on engaging with the other, or where, ‘mother’s libido is demonstrated on rather than with the infant, (Bollas ibid) then the body is objectified and relatedness tabooed. Individuation of the child is secretly construed by mother as a form of betrayal. Such mothering often paints the world as too scary to live in whilst failing to protect the child from real dangers. It is then safer for the child to be depleted, to stay fused with what is life denying and relegate suffering from psyche to soma, from the feelings to the body.

Bollas says hysteria is a defence against intimacy, finding the erotic through the internal object. Fairbairn emphasises it is a compensation for an absence of closeness. The symbol of the Prince escaping Death with his hermetic shoes in order to get back to the Queen seems to include both these interpretations, since it contains the flight from the other/body and thus the refusal of life as well as giving himself some small measure of peace in the arms of the Queen of Forever. He chooses the mortification of the flesh over the unbearable mortification of not knowing where to go, what to do, or how to live.

The Queen seems to know about this dilemma and prepared the magical shoes ahead of time. They help the Prince evade a transformative encounter. The magical shoes are like Hermes’ winged sandals. Like Hermes the Prince is also moving between worlds, between an ideal alter-ego, Spielrein’s ‘hypertrophied self’, and the much more difficult and death dealing realm where symptoms once again become feelings.

Hermes is patron of thieves. Hysteria robs bodily aliveness; words get stolen, feelings get fleeced, memories are pocketed; organs stripped of proper function. Over solicitousness and eternal understanding of others is robbery of one’s own point of view. “Understanding is eo ipso identification” (Ferenczi 1932, p. 183). and so actually a part of the psychopathology rather than the empathy it’s dressed up to be.

In Freud’s ‘Studies in Hysteria’ (1895 p4) we find this opening remark, ‘In the determination of the pathology of hysteria the accidental factor evokes the syndrome.’ What this means is that hysteria is a response to something terrible, the accidental factor, happening to the child, experiences which cannot be integrated and wear away at the body/psyche of the child concerned. In his case history of Emmy von M, Freud is quite clear she has been overwhelmed by a number of fearful shocks, though he is careful not to suggest any of these might have been sexual even where the narrative might suggest it. Why does Emmy scream repeatedly, ‘don’t touch me?’

Further to these shocks or fears of violation, Ferenczi adds the introjection of guilt. The child makes itself a party to events by feeling responsible, an idea taken further by Fairbairn who frames the need to take in the perpetrator’s guilt as a form of counterintuitive protection from feelings of unbearable impotence in the face of overwhelming situations. If I am guilty I am at least in control. Bollas then reminds us of the power of the Mother to negate sexuality specifically and the body in general. For Bollas it is not so much the seduction of the Father which is problematic but Mother’s failure to do so, a failure rooted in distaste for the embodied Otherness of the child, all the more reason to make a sacrifice of the body to the Guardians seem like a good idea.

The Queen of Forever seems to be a kind of Anima Mundi figure, an archetype of Mercy at whose feet the Prince throws himself. But since the Prince has forcibly gained access to Her with his sacrifice to the Guardians, having Her ‘at-hand’ like this is an act of inflation and so she cannot serve in her usual life affirming capacity. His flight from reality results in a stasis of specialness, which has its own deadly effect on aliveness.

Spielrein describes Hysteria as a ‘hypertrophy of the ego,’ the overblown-ness of which reflects this inflation. The Prince’s identification with Transcendence at the expense of ego differentiation can often produce revulsion of the body, a pronounced tendency towards an identity with with ascetic practices, stringent regimes to take the place of embodied autonomy, now sacrificed to the Guardians. Bollas seems to feel that the entirety of organised religion is a collective form of hysteria rooted in hatred of the body. ”It was not only Jesus who left the earthly world to join his Holy family; he paved the road walked by all hysterics, who renounce (the bread of) carnal interests to testify to their nobler existence.” (Bollas 2000)

The end of our story is not a happy one. The Prince gets to stay with the Queen of Forever, forever. But…, by definition, nothing new ever happens there. So it feels safe but also dull and un-nourishing. I wonder if Freud’s own frustrated and somewhat varying perspectives on hysteria never quite gel because he could not find a way of describing this flight into transcendent reality. His lexicon had no entry for the Queen of Forever .

For Freud, in 1895, ‘symptoms disappear if memories of the causal process are awakened with its accompanying affect… and given expression.’ Jung concurs, ‘the blocking of affect is transmuted into physical symptoms.’ (CW4 206) Jung takes Freud’s ideas that hysteria could be thought of as a foreign body further by describing it like this,. ‘In hysteria the complex has become autonomous and leads to an active separate existence which progressively degrades and destroys the constellating power of the ego complex.” 1906.

You could think of this as a rogue super-ego, or as an internalised devouring mother, gobbling up the child, or as Thanima (P Goss), the death dealing aspect of the psyche, Kali-like, which feeds upon the child’s vitality. The gradual return to life of feelings, the grounding re-establishment of the child’s subjective reality, changes the relationship, and the face, of the unconscious, which then serves to revalue the hated body, the dirt to which Earth has been relegated. There it can find meaning in dark embodiment and invest in ordinary life. Practically speaking, in therapy, this entails having ‘disturbed self esteem as the focus’, (C Asper). This exposes the shaming which has led to hatred of the body and makes it possible to turn the old question, ‘why do I have such little value?’ into a new question, ‘why have I been so devalued’?