Symbiotic Omnipotence – Andy White Blog

AJA talk. The Two Old Friends and Snow White.

Here are two stories which illustrate narcissistic and borderline personality structures respectively. We’ll begin with the stories themselves, and how their similarity suggests a common developmental origin in childhood. Then we’ll look at how their divergence from one another shows up at the developmental threshold of symbol formation and finally how they differ with reference to feelings of guilt and shame.

The Two Old Friends.

There were once two old friends who lived on different sides of the mountain. One of the old friends was so hungry he decided to go out into the forest to see if he could find some nuts but all he found were oak apples. He thought he’d go down into the village and try to sell them anyway. Perhaps some idiot would buy them. Meantime, the other old friend was so hungry he had gone out in search of poppy seeds. He came home empty handed but filled up his sack with ashes, thinking to go and dupe some poor fool in the village below.

Half way there the two old friends bumped into each other. They clapped one another on the back and boasted a bit about how wonderful life was on their respective sides of the mountain. Finally, they came up with the brilliant idea that they would swop the sacks and save themselves a journey down into the village which, in any case, surely didn’t merit being graced by their presence. So each returned home chuckling about how they had outsmarted the other.

When the first old friend got home he opened up his sack of poppy seeds to discover nothing but ashes. He was furious and ran around the mountain armed with a rake to teach the other old friend a lesson. When the other old friend got home he opened his sack of nuts to find only oak apples. Enraged, he grabbed a hoe and rushed around the mountain to demand justice. When they met in the middle they beat one another black and blue before dissolving into laughter.

”I never could cheat you brother!’

‘No, and I never could cheat you….’

So they decided to go cheat someone else together, two heads being better than one, and hired themselves out to a rich man for a few days thinking that when they got paid they might see where he kept his money. Sure enough, when the time came, the rich man drew up some gold from his well and so that night the two old friends snuck into his garden to liberate the remainder.

One old friend lowered the other old friend down into the well where he filled up his sack with gold but not to the brim. He knew full well he would be left behind if he sent the gold up first so he left room for himself and climbed in after. Sure enough, once the gold was hoisted up, the old friend set off at speed, with no more thought for the other old friend until he popped his head out of the sack, thanking him for the ride. The old friend was so exhausted from all this effort of carrying both gold and man he set down to rest and soon fell asleep whereupon the other old friend shouldered the gold and slipped away.

When the old friend woke and found the gold missing he connived a cunning plan. He tied a thread to a stick and cracked it like a whip as though leading an ox and cart. He knew the other old friend was lazy and would wait for the prospect of a free ride. Sure enough, around the bend of the lane sat the other old friend with his thumb out. He was so tired from his exertions that he had fallen asleep with all the waiting. So the old friend now took back the gold and ran all the way home, telling his wife to hide it in her wooden chest and bury him in a shallow grave so that the other old friend would think him dead.

When the old friend arrived he was shocked to find the weeping wife, then suspicious, but also moved by the woman’s tears. Perhaps he was a bit upset himself now and so they wept together long and hard for the demise of the old friend. Then the old friend asked to see the other old friend’s grave to pay his respects. The clearly hasty arrangement of things aroused his suspicions once more and so he began to make sounds like an angry bull about the mound of earth until the other old friend cried out in fright and leapt up from his pit.

‘Don’t tread on me, my old friend will find me.!

‘I found you already old friend..’

The old friend shook the earth from his clothes and the other old friend dusted him down, meanwhile his wife dragged out the gold and divided it all evenly between them.

……………………………………………………

Snow White.

Our second story, Snow White, has a different kind of splitness and fragmentation.

A Queen dies giving birth to a princess, as white as snow, as red as blood and as black as ebony wood. The King soon married again, a proud and vain woman who hated Snow White and wanted her dead. The Queen had a magic mirror which she would consult, asking, ‘Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of us all?’ And each time the mirror would reply. ‘Thou, oh Queen, are fairest of all.’ One day she asked and it spoke differently..

”The queen was fairest yesterday,
But Snow-White is fairest now.”

The furious Queen ordered a huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and kill her, bringing back her lungs and liver as a token. But the huntsman let her go out of pity. He returned with the lungs and liver of a boar he’d killed instead which the Queen promptly had Cook prepare with parsley and a light balsamic glaze. Once she had cleansed her pallet she again went to the magic mirror and was astounded to hear it tell her..

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

The Queen disguised herself as an old peddler and went to the dwarves cottage, crying: “Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap.” Snow-White unbolted the door and let her in. “Child,” said the old woman, “what a fright you look; come, I will lace you properly for once.” But the old woman laced her so quickly and so tightly that Snow-White lost her breath and fell down as if dead. “Now I am the most beautiful,” cackled the Queen to herself, and ran away.

The seven dwarfs came home just in time to resuscitate her.

When the wicked witch went back to the mirror it answered as before…

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

So then she made a poisonous comb and went knocking once more. When Snow White let her in, she said: “Now I will comb you properly for once.” Hardly had she put the comb in her hair than the poison in it took effect, and the girl fell down senseless. The dwarfs again returned just in time to remove the comb and save her.

When the Queen got home she again consulted the mirror which answered as before;

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

When she heard this the wicked queen quivered with rage. “Snow-White shall die,” she cried, “even if it costs me my life!” Whereupon she went into a secret, lonely room and there she made a very poisonous apple. When it was ready she dressed herself like a peasant and called upon Snow White once more who hardly had more than a bite of it than she fell down dead. And when the Queen again asked of the looking-glass….

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who in this land is the fairest of all?”

it answered at last—

“Thou, O Queen, art the fairest of all.”

Then her envious heart had rest, in so far as an envious heart can have rest.

The grief stricken dwarfs made Snow White a transparent coffin of glass and they laid her in it. They wrote her name upon it in golden letters and took it in turns to watch over her. One day, a king’s son came into the forest and was amazed at the glass coffin with the beautiful Snow-White inside. He begged the dwarves to let him have her, so struck was he by her beauty and had it carried away by his servants on their shoulders. It then just so happened that one of them stumbled over the root of a tree and jolted the coffin. The shock dislodged the poisonous piece of apple caught in Snow White’s throat and before long she opened her eyes and was once more alive.

“Oh, heavens! where am I?” cried she. The King’s son, full of joy, replied, “You are with me.” And soon they came to be married with great show and splendour.

The Old Queen was invited to the wedding and when she arrived… they were waiting for her. Iron slippers had already been put upon a roaring fire. The red hot shoes were brought over with tongs, and set before her. Then she was made to put them on and dance until she dropped down dead.

Fairytales as psychological paradigms.

I bought these two stories as playful ways of thinking about Narcissistic and Borderline structures. In the story of the Old Friends we have all the rivalry, deception, manipulation and seduction of narcissism. In Snow White we have the denial, splitting and envious spoiling associated with a borderline adaptation.

Adhesive Anxiety.

You will be familiar with Bowlby’s attachment styles, though this may well hamper any efforts to think about which particular attachment styles might give rise to either narcissistic or borderline phenomena. We are happily saved from this dilemma by the work of Esther Bick who introduced the concept of adhesive attachment in the 1960s as part of her work on early infant development, particularly in her paper “The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations” (1968). She used the term adhesive identification or adhesive attachment to describe an earlier primitive mode of relating in which the infant relies on physical contact prior to any differentiation between self and other.’

Bick proposes that the skin is the infant’s earliest symbol and experience of containment. It is not only a biological boundary but a sensory modality of cohesion, safety, and “being held together.” which keeps the infant’s experience organised.

If the time and quality of being in arms dips below a certain threshold, the infant’s parts are left feeling as though they have no binding force amongst themselves. The infant must then develop a compensatory ‘second skin’, a defensive structure which forms when it experiences:

unreliable holding
emotional unavailability alternating with
overstimulation
inadequate or ‘over’ containment of distress.

Adhesive attachment is thus a response to a certain kind of maternal holding, grandiose and encapsulated in the face of intrusive absence, fragile and enmeshed in the face of envious spoiling. It is a response to the severing of what Jean Liedloff would call the ‘continuum concept’, the essential containment of skin to skin contact which ensures confidence, coherence and going on being.

These two different ways in which the continuum is interrupted evoke distinct compensatory patterns of idealisation which shape future development. The ‘too loose hold mother’ idealises the child to bridge the gap, but, as Schwarz-Salant reminds us, it comes in the form of, ‘you’re wonderful but I hate you for it,’ giving rise to later splits in the nascent ego. The ‘too tight hold mother’, idealises herself with ‘though you’re an encumbrance I can heroically bear with it,’ giving later rise to a dread of autonomy and the terror of envious attack.

How does this pertain to the story of the Two Old Friends?

The two old friends are poor. They have nothing but the clothes on their backs and no food to eat. Their compulsive cheating is born of deprivation. The backdrop of this story is one of maternal neglect and subsequent impoverishment of inner resources. The internalised mother as nourishing object is nowhere to be seen. Developmentally, she is insubstantial and cannot provide sufficient cohesion for the infant’s interior world, giving rise to an experience of self which Bruno Bettelheim describes as ‘the empty fortress’, characterised by self-aggrandisement and defensive fortifications.

The mountain between the old friends suggests separation, but they remain psychically glued in endless rivalry, in place of I and Thou, compulsively repeating the same patterns of betrayal, anger, and identification. Their fused, symbiotic arrangement means the old friends cannot genuinely relate to one another. They cannot establish a stable boundary between self and other. Fraudulent interactions are structured to serve and maintain the self’s omnipotent position rather than to promote mutuality.

Jung saw narcissism as an inflated, defensive ego which resists deeper self-awareness, hindering true psychological growth and individuation. The theft of the rich man’s gold captures this sense of arrogating the numinosity of the Self to partial ego states. Otto Kernberg emphasises the ‘use of others as instruments….. as tools for the maintenance of self‐esteem or the grandiose self, rather than as partners in a genuine relationship of mutuality.” (p. 123) Ledermann advances Kernberg’s thinking, ‘lack of love for oneself and concomitant feelings of aloofness arise as an early defence against the terror of not being able to be related to and of non-existing’. “I am afraid’, says Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘they might someday find out that there’s nothing inside me, that I am only the skin of someone, and that inside, under my arm, perhaps, there’s nothing but emptiness.”

The old friends’ beatings and quarrels do not break their bond, they reinforce it,
acting like the “positive reinforcing function of negative attention” (Gallimore, Tharp & Kemp. 1969) When skin to skin needs are unmet by nurture they must be set in place by other means. Aldous Huxley makes the brilliant observation in ‘Chrome Orange’ that the nascent Central American Republics went to war with one another after gaining independence from Spain (15th Sept 1821), in order to know themselves as nations. Indigenous culture had been eroded by colonisers who, now too, were no longer. This crisis of cultural identity and the need for internal cohesion was resolved by going to war with one another, each waving their flag, freshly filled with the glue of patriotic fervour and sticking together.

Adhesive Attachment in Snow White.

The Queen does not relate to Snow White as an autonomous other but as a thing to which she is glued in psychic obligation and by whom her ontological status has been relegated. Snow White’s autonomy is intolerable because it undermines the sense of enmeshment which maintains cohesion. Snow White’s ‘fairness’ doesn’t just offend the Queen, it collapses the pre-eminent self-structure which gives the Queen meaning. She has no alternative source of worth beyond the impulse to eclipse, no purpose beyond domination.

Alchemically, Snow White’s red, white and black nature point to her psychic wholeness which the Queen can neither attain nor tolerate. The Queen’s wish to eclipse and erase Snow White is a desperate effort to destroy anything which might upset the hegemony upon which her identity has come to depend.

The Queen’s adhesive wish to devour Snow White’s lungs and liver seem especially significant. In antiquity the liver was the seat of feeling, hence Prometheus’ poetic punishment of having his liver repeatedly eaten for daring to have compassion for humanity expressed by his theft of fire. The lungs serve pneuma, the spirit, and so the Queen’s destructive incorporation constitutes an attack on the emotional and spiritual vitality of the child, an enactment of her desire to internalise qualities lacking in herself.

Erasing and incorporating is how the wicked witch preserves her sense of self. I came across an example in the street the other day. A mother is striding along at great speed. Her three year old is running to keep up. She asks angrily, ‘Why are you running?’ He replies, ‘because I am not.’ To remain congruent with mother’s denial of reality, that he’s having to run to keep up with her, he has to deny it himself, even if this gobbles up his embodied experience.

Fordham’s “symbol formation.”

Now let’s think about the emerging differences between the stories as they approach the threshold of symbol formation. For Fordham the Self is a primary, innate totality which de-integrates and re-integrates through-out development. Symbol formation is the psychic activity by which these de-integrations and re-integrations are managed, linking inner and outer worlds.

‘My interior,’ says Jung in the Red Book, ‘gives birth to the children of chaos of the primordial mother. He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, he melts. The formed in him dissolves and binds itself anew with the children of chaos.’ (p179)

Fordham’s ideas about de-integration and re-integration illustrate the psyche’s innate capacity for self-healing by describing a dynamic process through which the self continually disassembles and reorganises its structures in response to inner and outer experiences. Thus, symbol formation exercises the self’s developmental potential, its ability to transform raw experience into meaning and is predicated, to paraphrase Katerina Serafidou, on loss; a recognition that giving credence to the sovereignty of others is the price we pay for exercising our own.

Symbol Formation and the Two Old Friends.

The two old friends operate almost entirely on the level of the concrete and pre-symbolic. The exchange of sacks, nuts for oak apples, poppy seeds for ashes, is fraudulent, a distortion of symbolic exchange. That which purports to be nourishing is not. They cannot imagine meaning beyond the object itself. So they enact transactional trickery and theft in place of imaginative transformation. When my younger brother was about six or seven he took a ten pound note from my mother’s purse and encouraged his friend next door to do the same. They then swopped the notes so it wasn’t stealing any more. They were so sure of themselves that they proudly announced what they had done and were most upset when no one else thought them quite so clever.

Failure to Internalise the Other.

Symbol formation requires internalising a loving object but the two old friends have none and so can only exist through physical confrontation or fraudulent exchange. Their encounter has the effect of confirming isolation rather than alleviating it because every transaction is an exercise in deceit. They “know” themselves through either competitive rivalry or identifying with one another rather than via intersubjective recognition. Every affect (shame, anger, greed) must be acted out as hitting, swapping, or stealing.

Symbol formation requires a capacity for inner space, the ability to tolerate separation between ego and Self, subject and object. Narcissistic structures tend to collapse this space. Symptomatic lack of empathy is more deeply rooted in a failure to experience the other as sufficiently their own person to have feelings about them in the first place.

Death and rebirth.

Symbol formation finally occurs with the dusting down of the old friend following his interment, a gesture which acknowledges and validates the subjective needs of the other. This can occur once the cycle of trickery is broken by the old friend handing over the gold to his wife for safe keeping. It’s a crucial moment in the story because it introduces the possibility of a mediating third who both takes the gold in and gives it back in a differentiated (shareable) form. This can happen once the old friend has experienced the de-integration and re-integration of death and rebirth sufficiently to enable sharing.

The motif of burial as a metaphor for the crossing of developmental thresholds is to be found in the initiation rituals of many indigenous cultures. Symbolic burial represents a creative regression into the womb of the Earth. In ‘Symbols of Transformation’ Jung repeatedly develops the idea that regression is not merely pathological but a necessary precondition for further psychological development. Throughout the “Hymn of Creation” and “Sacrifice” chapters Jung argues that regression toward the mother-symbol is teleological, not merely infantile. In his essay, ‘On Psychic Energy’, in vol 8 he says, “From [this] standpoint the libido regresses to the imago of the mother in order to find there the memory associations by means of which further development can take place…” Jung is wanting to contrast regression which becomes transformative because it can be symbolised and regression which remains trapped in repetitive enactment because it is not.

Developmentally, both the wooden chest and the earthen grave suggest Winnicott’s concept of “maternal reverie”, the process by which a mother takes in the infant’s raw emotional experience, processes it internally, and returns it in a more manageable form. Her wooden chest and the earthen grave are ”holding environments,” psychological spaces within which the infant’s unintegrated anxieties can be contained and transformed through her empathic responsiveness. The old friends are mostly stuck in their repetition compulsion until a containing third gets involved and their closed circuit can become transformed into a developmental arc.

The final division of the gold is thus not merely a moral ending. It is the symbolic fruit of a regression that has finally become developmental rather than merely repetitive. The circular economy of narcissistic trickery gives way to a new psychic organisation centred on participation rather than possession.

Snow White and symbol formation.

It seems the brothers Grimm were struggling with their own capacity for symbol formation in the early editions of their work. In the first 1812 edition the wicked witch is Snow White’s own biological mother. By 1819, in the second edition, the birth mother dies and a step mother is given the status of wicked witch. This alteration seems to reflect society’s increasing tendency to idealise motherhood by displacing destructive maternal impulses onto third parties. The 1812 text is arguably the more psychologically striking version, because the “Terrible Mother” and the “Good Mother” are united in a single figure rather than being split between mother and stepmother. In the second edition the murderous maternal impulses are denied, split off and projected.

The Queen, as destructive maternal introject, harries the child’s emerging autonomy, enviously attacking her in order to split off psychic pain which cannot be consciously represented or symbolised. Such denial both negates and depersonalises in the same breath. It is helped to do so by what Meltzer and Segal call concrete equation thinking, the confusion of symbol and thing, or of being and behaviour. The Queen doesn’t just envy Snow White’s beauty; she equates it with life itself. To destroy Snow White is to do more than rid herself of a rival, it is to ensure ontological security rooted in the wish to dominate and control.

The Queen cannot distinguish being admired from being alive; or being eclipsed from being annihilated. Hence her terrifying conviction, if Snow White lives, I die. She must succeed in her quest to kill Snow White, ‘even if it cost me my life’ because there is no symbolic space to separate self from other. This is managed instead by the systemic shaming that splitting entails and that suffuses their interaction, ‘what a fright you look, I will lace you properly for once.’ Her need to diminish and extinguish seem to be fundamental to her own inner peace. She achieves this by getting the child to believe that she is doing her a favour. ‘Being helped’ and feeling guilty begin to blend in deadly poison to eros and autonomy. The problem is not too much defensive closure as with the two Old Friends, but too much psychic permeability and fragmentation.

Shame and Guilt.

We could say that the two old friends lack empathy but I wonder if this misses the mark somewhat. The failure of empathy feels symptomatic of something more fundamental; the realm of I and thou has yet to be inhabited. It’s not that cheating feels either wrong or justified, it’s simply that cheating failed to work. The two old friends are pre-moral rather than amoral. The concept of being-with is reduced to, ‘you’re with me or against me’. The choice is between identification or enmity. This is manifest initially as the shared projection of inferiority onto the villagers they separately hope to fool, then, upon one another and finally upon the rich man whom they seem to feel deserves being robbed.

There is no guilt about any of this. In every instance guilt is warded off and converted into the active shaming of third parties. There is as yet not enough differentiation out of what Masud Khan would call ‘symbiotic omnipotence’ to exercise the distinction between subject and object upon which basis self reflection and moral consideration might be possible. Being and behaviour are still fused. This makes a mine field of personal accountability. Any criticism levelled at behaviour feels like a shaming attack levelled at the core of being. Persona, confused with the Self, cannot distinguish guilt from shame and so it has to be projected.

In Snow White, guilt and shame are treated very differently. Our heroine seems to have little capacity to defend herself from the envious shaming of the wicked queen. She even seems to invite attack, allowing her into the temenos of the dwarves cottage despite being expressly warned not to. She buys into the shaming condemnation of the wicked witch in line with Ferenczi’s ‘identification with the aggressor’. Ferenczi describes the child as becoming almost automatically attuned to what the aggressor wants, attempting to anticipate and gratify those wishes, effectively abandoning her own subjectivity in order to survive the relationship.

The borderline structure will thus assume guilt and blame, as a form of appeasing judgmental or destructive objects and warding off catastrophic expectations. The emotional dysregulation involved often has much to do with overwhelming feelings of responsibility, a form of plea bargaining to prevent abandonment. When Snow White is about to be killed by the huntsman there is no sense of her protest only of an appeal for mercy. When the WW comes calling at the cottage she feels she has to let her in despite her own experience which the Queen’s shaming of her further undermines.

Both Snow White and the two old friends demonstrate a curious ambiguity to the prospect of shame. Both parties are mobilised against it whilst subtly colluding with it. Whilst shame infuriates the two old friends they would rather be shamed than held accountable. Whilst shame tends to collapse Snow White she would rather be shamed than be abandoned.

The tendency of these two adaptations to share internal organisation around shame and the prospect of abandonment or humiliation respectively makes their interaction with one another somewhat complicated. Though both fall into denial they tend to do so in somewhat opposing ways. These differing defensive structures can then fit together in a mutually reinforcing dynamic. The borderline tends to carry guilt and shame internally, disowning aggression, competence and self sufficiency with which the narcissistic structure happily identifies to shore up fragile esteem whilst projecting shame, vulnerability, and dependency which the borderline individual, whose identity is already organised around expectations of defectiveness and abandonment, is especially susceptible. Such mutual projection, could be called a complementary system of projective identification, each person’s defensive organisation temporarily stabilises the other’s in a psychological version of the nursery rhyme about Jack Spratt and his wife;

‘Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean, and so between the two of them, they licked the platter clean.’

Conclusion.

As useful as these stories are they do both seem incomplete. Even though the two old friends have learned to share there is still the sense that their theft of the gold remains unaddressed and that there is yet some reparation to be made with the rich man. The story seems to achieve further resolution in a later Grimm’s fairytale ‘The Stolen Farthings’, where a young ghost can only find peace and cease its haunting once the guilt of theft can be bought to light and deflating reparations made.

Similarly, whilst Snow White is liberated from the tyranny of the wicked queen her glass entombment has a different quality than the earthen grave of the old friend, suggesting preservation rather than transformation. Her situation is still unresolved insofar as she remains ideal which is perhaps why the further story of Snow White and Rose Red becomes necessary. In that story clearly differentiated sisters co-operate to deal with an ungrateful dwarf who seems to represent the unintegrated envious aspects of the wicked queen left hanging over from the previous fairytale. The sisters befriend a bear with whom they are able to play aggressively without destroying the relationship. It is the bear who ultimately deals with the dwarf though the girls create the relational conditions within which the dwarf’s power can be overcome. The feminine is no longer represented by a single idealised protagonist. It has become two legitimate forms of femininity. The dwarf, unlike the Queen, leaves behind a treasure, so some value is derived from the difficult encounter above and beyond the relief of a happy ending.

The Glass Coffin.

A poor tailor becomes lost in the forest. As night falls, he sees a light shining and follows it to a lone hut. An old man lives there and after the tailor begs for shelter, allows him to stay for the night. In the morning, the tailor awakes to a mighty commotion. Outside a terrible fight is going on between a great stag and an even larger bull. Eventually, with the greatest effort and despite his wounds, the stag wins. Quite unexpectedly, it then bounds up to our hero and carries him off in its antlers to arrive, finally, at a Wall of Stone.

The Stag pushes him against a door in the Wall of Stone, which grinds open. Inside the tailor is told to stand on a large round rock. He does so and it sinks down into a Great Hall, where a voice directs him to look into a glass chest. Inside is a beautiful maiden, deeply sleep. She wakes and asks him to open the chest.

So he did.

The maiden then tells him her story: She was the daughter of a rich Count. After the death of her parents she had been raised in the forest by her brother. One day, a traveler stayed over and used magic to get to her in the night, asking her to marry him. She was outraged at his intrusion and rejected his proposal. In revenge the magician then turned her brother into the stag and imprisoned her in a glass coffin, enchanting all the lands around them.

When the tailor and the maiden emerge from the enchanted hall they find that the stag had been transformed back into her brother. The bull/magician is dead and the curse entirely lifted.

Hooray.

The tailor is successful not out of heroic daring-do or manly slaughtering of dragons, but by three simple things, letting himself be lost, being able to ask for help and doing as he is told by the Stag.

Getting lost is not much fun. People generally pride themselves on knowing their own heading. Questioning stuff that used to be set in stone seems at best like foolishness and at worst like madness. Yet many a story begins with the confusion of not knowing how to proceed, with the loss of a value system that no longer serves, a sense of self that no longer fits, tedium with the known yet un-nourishing. Sometimes getting lost can be in the tangible form of an addiction, or a relationship that is more rut than track. Perhaps some blow of fate that deprives us of what we know. Sometimes getting lost is the loss of youth, initiation into the second half of life.

“Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Dante.

Being lost has a humbling effect on the personality. It strips you of arrogant presumption, makes you ask for help, feels gratitude in the place of entitlement, feels comforted by the meanest favour. When you are lost you let yourself be little. You proceed with caution, excruciatingly aware of vulnerability, dependence on others and the limits of your own abilities.

The tailor does not confront the Bull himself. It is defeated on his behalf, as part of a larger plan, with events then unfolding around him in a blur. He stumbles to his salvation in a manner that is decidedly unheroic. In fact he’s entirely bewildered. All he wanted was a quiet night’s kip and suddenly Great Beasts are tearing the garden up. Then one of them whisks you off in antlers set to steak knife, and buries you in stone with a set of instructions. Its all a bit much.

Without realizing it the tailor has set up the preconditions for a redeeming of himself that he scarcely knows he needs. It seems that he is just being swept along but he has evoked these events by his attitude. The person convinced by their own sufficiency would never allow themselves to be lost or admit it even if they were. The tailor has just the right mix of humility in knowing that he’s basically an ordinary bloke and just the right amount of courage to go sufficiently off the beaten path and lose his way.

Quests involve getting lost. Its not just a distinct possibility or even a rum chance. Its a requirement, like papers you’d hand over at a border check point to certify that you had no idea which land you were exiting, where you are headed or the name of the place. Or what you’ve done with your passport.

The reason is that the inner world is way bigger than anyone ever imagines. You think you’re just going to have a look around in the basement and find that, first off, it has no walls and then, that far from being a place of relics, it is full of life. You’re bound to wander off. And may not be back for tea.

Begging to be looked after by the Old-Man-of-the-Forest, suggests a propitious attitude that’s well advised. Those that live in the forest are generally also part of its dangers. In fact, does it not turn out that this is the very cottage once visited by an evil traveler who did away with the previous occupants?

The evil traveler is that regressive streak in us all which clings to omnipotence and magically getting whatever you want or think you deserve. He reckons he has the right to invade the Countess’ privacy and can’t contain his own petty feelings of vengeance when she asserts her own destiny. He is consumed with envy at her autonomy and narcissistically attacks that which he cannot control or dominate.

Children take in a great deal that doesn’t belong to them. We internalize the parent who seduces and uses the child to meet their own needs as well as the parent who wants us to grow. Kids already have a tendency to take on board responsibility for parental ills and failings let alone the pressure to fulfill expectations that have nothing to do with them.

This is especially true when either parent is unfulfilled in their own ambition and needs the child to sing their song for them rather than finding their own voice, imprisoning the child with expectations that stifle autonomy and so despite being special cannot grow.

I recall being given a guitar out of the blue by my mother. It was expensive, a fine gift, only, I had never expressed any interest in learning to play whatsoever. I dutifully tried but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for it because my interests lay elsewhere. None of which stopped me having to shamefully confess that I had failed in my efforts. She traded the guitar in for an accordion which I also failed to play. I was clearly a disappointment and felt myself to be so for some time after. My more humble harmonica, which I did love and did want to play, became a source of embarrassment, a symbol of failure, soon to be left lying around and lost.

Parental co-dependence with their kids, what analyst Masud Kahn calls ‘symbiotic omnipotence,’ sometimes looks like a really special bond, sometimes distant and uninvolved or strangely switching between the two. The child is not so much a person as they are ambiguous receptacles for expectation and as such, more like museum exhibits or specimens in glass jars rather than sentient beings with destinies of their own. Yet, still special enough to want to pickle, a garnish to parental ‘magic’.

Archetypally, the wandering traveler is the dark aspect of Odin who, a thousand years earlier, demonstrated his tendency for using children to his own ends by allowing his son Sigmund to die for a crime he committed unknowingly and then by punishing his daughter, Brunhilde and putting her into a similar deep sleep for defying him and wanting to help her brother. If this were a Greek myth rather than a Norse one, he would be Saturn, devourer of his children.

The stag represents that aspect of the child’s soul that needs to sharpen its antlers on adversity, waiting for an auspicious moment to confront the two horned dilemma of being so special on the one hand but like a specimen in a jar on the other. Cervus fugitivus, the fugitive stag, is soul as spirit animal or guide, evoked by the sudden shock at the strange vastness of the forest. He represents..

”the bush soul, a ‘doctor’ animal, like the Celtic Kerrunos who presides over death, rebirth and the urge to individuate”. M L von Franz.

It’s in the nature of the fugitive stag to burst from the bushes, to protect its own from the entropy of being caught on the bulls horns, to be forever in dilemma, a life style of procrastination and the provisional life. We resist it because it’s noisy, disruptive and a bit scary. You may know from experience what happens if you try and ignore it, but perhaps also what can happen if you allow the white knuckle ride of being scooped up in its antlers.

My analyst Chuck Schwarz once said that 90% of therapeutic work is done by heeding the Stag, picking up the phone and making that first appointment, whether its because a person is lost in the forest, awoken by the commotion in the garden, or being carried pellmell to the Wall of Stone. After that phone call is made, he told me, the soul has gotten involved. When people arrive for their first session they already feel much better.

How you think about the Stag and his Sister will depend on your attitude to the unconscious. One way of looking at them is as though they were parts of you and so its all about you which eventually gets boring. Another way is that the Stag shares the forest of the Psyche with you and comes to aid when, like the tailor, we are made ready by getting lost, asking for help and doing as prompted by the inner voice.

The story takes the alchemical perspective that we are both redeemer and redeemed, which got them into quiet some trouble with the church who thought such a belief was tantamount to playing God, yet we can see that nothing could be further from the truth. The tailor’s part is a humble one. He frees the sister/soul from her imprisonment in matter but only at the behest and careful instructions of the stag. He is crucial to her deliverance but only by agreeing to be party to events rather than central to them.

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 Lure of Automatic Pilot.

Pizza Hut have bought out a trainer. Embossed on the tongue of the shoe is a button that you can press to order pizza. It sends out a GPS location to your nearest convenient franchise and..

boom..

pepperoni at your fingertips.

In Greek mythology the magical shoes were Hermes department. He had a pair of winged sandals that allowed him to pass between Olympus and the Mortal Plane. The magical shoes mediated between worlds just as they did for Dorothy in her travels between Kansas and Oz.

Very handy.

The capacity to mediate between worlds with enchanted footwear is the nub of a developmental stage in childhood characterized by symbol formation which magically uses transitional objects to manage the gap between Self and Other. It is the essential condition for passing from “first-and-only”, wherein hell is other people, to “being-amongst-others”, where we not only learn to tolerate otherness but are redeemed by it.

“You are therefor I am.” Satish Kumar.

This shift of perspective, is from what the Gnostics called “hylic consciousness”, It comes from the Greek “hyle”, meaning husk, the unnourishing and winnowed part of an ear of wheat and is characterized by the person who simply lets themselves live without reflection or enquiry…

” He takes life as it comes and does not worry about the problem of meaning, its worth or its purpose. He devotes his time to the satisfaction of personal desires, enjoyment of the senses, riches, ambition.” R. Assagioli.

Transition from ego as landlord to the experience of no longer being master in ones own house is expressed in the Alchemical tradition as “the problem of three and four”.

..as taxing as divvying up a pizza between an odd number of people..

because three into four wont go. The conscious mind and the denizens of the deep Psyche are like oil and water. Making it across a threshold that demands acknowledgement and valuing of the Other without being swallowed up by them..

and with Pizza trainers instead of Hermes sandals for help…

is a way more tricky business than you might imagine..

“Not a few have perished in our work.” Alchemical saying.

A modern fairytale that expresses this sense of crisis and shows how it is resolved comes from an unexpected source, Robocop.

The hero Murphy has his humanity stripped from him and is largely reduced to robotic functioning, a fate suffered by many who adopt the first-and-only stance because it…

” contains the archetypal, omnipotent, defensive and mechanical, as well as the manipulative and destructive nature of Robot.” Lederman

The robot adaptation of the narcissistic character is, however, not entirely negative. Robocop can be redeemed by a combination of two factors. One is that his partner, Lewis, continuously reflects his humanity back to him. Her unflagging faith that he is in there somewhere gives him the courage to explore his obscure situation. Second, he finds his own dramatic solution to the problem of three and four.

Robocop has three protocols, 1) Uphold the law. 2) Serve the public trust. 3) Protect the innocent. As you might expect in any fairystory there is a hidden fourth directive which is entirely incommensurable with the first three..

Do not rise up against your masters.

Becoming conscious of this contradiction throws Murphy into turmoil. The law must be upheld… depending on who is involved. Serve the public trust, for as long as it serves the masters to do so. Protect the innocent, if its expedient…

Murphy realises hes been forced into a catch 22 situation that he cant win. Unless.. he plunges his hands into a massive electric generator that wipes out his programming but also nearly kills him.

Wright speaks of,

“the traumatic birth of self-consciousness, erupting into the still intact (and mechanical) symbiosis with mother.”

Realising that you harbour hidden and contradictory injunctions is shocking. Rewriting the inner script means first realising that you are being run from within by something so old, so habitual, so not-self that you can lose sight of its operation.

Folk simply clank through the day on automatic pilot fulfilling ancient expectations which may once have ensured survival but now serve the demoted purpose of simply keeping oneself on an even keel, maintaining the comfort zone, making sure reality does not intrude or question the preferred construct.

People will go to extraordinary lengths to keep the automatic pilot going because what they are up against is not a mere addition of information, another nut for the store house, but a shift of paradigm that threatens to bring the storehouse down.

Be careful what you wish for…

A good example of this is the story of Hiroo Onoda a Japanese soldier who continued to fight WW11 untill 1972 in the Phillipine jungles. He did this because he absolutely refused to believe that Japan could have surrendered. It was inconceivable. Surrender was more ignoble than suicide, something he had been expressly ordered against. Could his superiors be any the less accountable?

And so he fought on.

Many people have an inner Hiroo, an old soldier still fighting yesterdays battles, disrupting the present with archaic material, fused to the Motherland, crushing the possibility of change or anything unscripted.

Over the years great efforts were made to persuade him that the war was over. Leaflets were dropped, photos and newspaper articles, all regarded by Hiroo as propaganda, fake news.

He was finally persuded only by hearing of Japans surrender from the lips of his own commanding officer, Major Taniguishi.

“Suddenly everything went black. A storm raged inside me. What had I been doing for all these years?” Hiroo Onoda.

Hiroo got a big shock, but he also went on to become a philanthropist and even donated some of his considerable back pay to local Phillipine projects as well as setting up a school Japan.

Many folk never get out of the Jungle. They remain omnipotently fused with the mother/land, content with the replacment of their autonomy by rows of endless choice, something to keep you occupied, hey, how about these new shoes you can get. They order pizza.

On Wanting to be Great Again.

When you think about inspiring words of leadership, great speeches that stir the heart, they all have something in common. They evoke values which connect people to themselves and to their neighbour.

Their words touch on some universal recognition that the quality of life is more important than its width. There is a sense of lyrical poetry or a sudden cadence of imagination that invites the listener into some greater awareness of themselves and their purpose.

And sometimes its just the opposite…

The invitation to regress, to have permission to suspend the hard work and moral demands of critical thinking, to indulge Poor Me, can be mightily seductive.

”Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment!” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 344, Para 652.

Judging ahead of time, pre-judice, is an attractive ticket because it invites us to sit back and bask in our own glory… provided of course that we can then find a scapegoat to carry the group shadow. None of which should be too difficult since judging ahead of time is precisely that we know what is going to happen next, a big plus in an age of anxiety.

So speeches reduced to sound bites and slogans appeal to a far older part of the hind brain than the lofty ideals of the neo-cortex.

” We ask little except that ye abstain from red meat and fornication”. Acts 15;29

Mr Trump has taken considerable criticism for both the content and the style of his speeches. Some say that his incoherence indicates the onset of senilty. They cite and compare a variety of speeches from his earlier years in which he seems to manage grammar and syntax perfectly well.

Of course this would be no great surprise for a man of 71, but there is a further consideration that has ramifications greater than the precise nature of his medical diagnosis….

…people speaking in tongues has been part of Bible Belt culture for some time. When folk get inflated they regress. This impacts coherence, but scarier than diminished diplomatic finesse, is the mind set that goes with it, which is that if you want to understand me you will just have to keep pace and figure it out. Listen better. Follow me as I flit from flower to flower.

The concept of Symbiotic Omnipotence, coined by psycho-analyst Masud Kahn, is useful for understanding the significance of incoherent narcissistic rhetoric. One of the key features of Symbiotic Omnipotence is that it is a double act, a folie a deux, a between, in which the psyche of both parties, starting with mother and child, stay in a partly fused state built on mutual superiority. In adult life this dynamic often plays itself out in co-dependent relationships where the glue is delusional shared specialness.

“Isn’t it wonderful that we both hate the same things.” Seymour Skinner from the Simpsons.

The contribution of third parties is denigrated as insignificant or fake, eroding….

”…the perception of others as valuable or nourishing, through subtle collusion and indulgences”. M. Khan (Journal of Analytical Psychology vol 19, 1974)

There is no real point in making oneself understood in any case since the world is reduced to Them and Us, fools who cannot comprehend and allies who already get it.

Under such circumstances correct grammar and lofty syntax come a poor second to the attitude which says ” I don’t have to make sense and nor do you.”

People love this. You can get to be a very particular kind of baby all over again. Its an invitation to act out all the petty grievances and violent tendencies that had to be repressed the first time around, all of which then led to the sorry pass whereby identity has to be shored up with knowing what happens next and forging the kind of relationship with the world that….

”enables a person to both perceive and deny [reality]”. M. Kahn ibid

useful, say, if you had some command codes and a red telephone.

Wanting to be great again is the secret wish to be the omnipotent baby in the room, without any constraint, seeped in specialness, but one which urgently needs the Symbiotic Other to define it, to manifest its hopes and dreams.

A classic instance of symbiotic omnipotence in the news concerns one Kevin Gugliotta, a Pennsylvanian priest who has recently been sentenced for peddling child pornography. He says he did this to punish God for not letting him win at poker.

“According to pre-trial records, Gugliotta told probation officers that he was an avid poker player, and he felt God was attacking him when he lost games.” RT Question More.

https://www.rt.com/usa/400904-priest-child-pornography-poker/

What is so scary about this is not just that friend Gugliotta assumes Gods involvement in his loss, but that his own response to such divine wickedness doesn’t have to make sense in the process, unless he perhaps had some personal wish to be the nasty thing that happens to nice people.

Permission to be above the law, both those of the land and those of linguistic coherence, is a dicey prospect for anyone, especially a leader. To succeed, he needs Others who will bite, in their millions, at the tempting invitation to be similarly unconstrained, having been seduced into the conviction of their own specialness, but still needing the Opioid Epidemic from Hell to manage the gap between the American Dream and the Nightmare of Hate.

Narcissism and the Bottomless Pit.

In thirty years of practice as a psychotherapist I never came across an indigenous person with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The reason is that native people generally have a way of raising their kids that is radically different to parents in the ‘civilised’ West.

This does not mean that Western women are bad mothers, but that they have to contend with a split reality endemic in our culture that makes it difficult for baby to cross certain developmental thresholds.

On the one hand the child, as depicted in the majority of psychoanalytic literature, is a voracious power hungry little monster who battles mother for dominance and has to be brought to heel at all costs.

”Babies have become a sort of enemy to be vanquished by mother…on the premise that every effort should be made to force baby to conform when it ’causes’ work and ‘wastes’ time.’ J. Liedloff

On the other hand, and by way of compensation, we have the effusive and liberal face of Dr Spock, whose sales of his book ‘Baby and Childcare’, come second only to the Bible on the best seller list. Spock advocated ‘childcentric’ households which effectively have children ruling the roost. Detractors claim he cultivated Narcissism in millions as the most trusted name in childcare and parenting since 1940 and even hold him personally responsible for the moral decline of western culture.

”When a society becomes out of control, it is because its members elevate self-indulgence and lack self-control…and [have] come to see gratification as a right.” R. Bradley.

These radically polarised veiws of parenting presented by Freud and Spock, often operating without reference to one another under the same roof, have something strangely in common. Both the liberal, anti-authoritarian mandate of currying entitlement in children and the cold hearted philosophy of ‘you did it to yourself’ inherent in Freudian theory, marginalised the fact that women have been having babies for seven million years without the input of opinionated men in lab coats.

Both men’ knew better’ than the feminine soul. To the extent that these theories were imposed upon women’s natural instincts, their innate knowing, their connection to their own mothers and to the Divine Feminine that presided over childbirth and motherhood, so too was their role undermined, ancient wisdom eroded and intrinsic understanding of what was right and proper, subverted and injured.

So whilst it may be true that excessive permissiveness fosters narcissistic tendencies and a sense of entitlement, it is also the case that narcissistic wounds are inevitable when the bond between mother and child is intruded upon by someone who thinks they know better than Nature herself, irrespective of the received ‘wisdom’ under consideration.

You’re probably familiar with the educational maxim ‘would you teach a fish to climb a tree?’ but we forget that its even more undermining to teach a fish to swim.

A centiped was happy, quite!

Until a toad in fun

Said, ‘pray which leg follows which?

This raised her doubts to such a pitch

She fell exhausted in a ditch,

Not knowing how to run.

“If we have learnt certain [things] so that they have sunk below the level of conscious control, then if we try to follow them consciously we very often interfere with them so badly that we stop them”. Carl Popper.

It follows that if mother has it instilled in her that she doesn’t know her job without instruction from a clipboard wielding MD then baby will be similarly confused and struggle with developmental tasks, understandably preferring the relative safety of remaining partly fused with mother in a state of ‘symbiotic omnipotence’. (M. Kahn).

This interupts the process of separation and healthy growth, preventing the child from crossing the threshold associated with ‘symbol formation’. This is significant because it is symbol formation that is responsible for the experience of others as persons in their own right, and for the development of values associated with feelings about others having their own purpose and destiny. The child can get eternally caught in the concrete thinking of symbolic equations where, for instance, worth is measured in terms of money, loveability in terms of sexual conquest, power in terms of domination of others, all the things we recognise as symptoms of NPD.

‘No-one loves me, because you don’t wipe my chin.’ Liedloff.

The figurative representation of ideas, conflicts or wishes cannot be experienced and so metaphorical notions of honour, faithfullness, duty, empathy and so on remain conceptual ideas rather than lived and experienced realities…

”from which intellectualism is only to ready to emancipate itself.” C.G. Jung

This is most obvious in our relationships because Narcissism does not really experience the Other as such. Their humanity remains conceptual. The notion that others have equal rights is an abstract idea to be rationally concluded without actually being lived.

Racism and sexism are the most common outcome of such a mind set, but the irony is that the Narcissist has equal trouble conceiving of ‘his own’ in fully human terms unless they remain entirely joined at the hip. Humanity is not experienced, it is deduced, much as Socrates ‘worked out’ that one day he would die.

‘Socrates is a man. Men are mortal. Therefor Socrates will die.’

On the basis of such abstract deduction ordinary instinctual care for one another is occluded. One’s own self barely exists in its own right, how shall another fare any better?

The developmental threshold of symbol formation affords not only the recognition of the otherness of the Other, it also affords value and significance to the otherness of oneself, in other words to the fantasies, intuitions and aspirations emerging from the archetypal layers of the psyche that take over the job of feeding the child, as it were, from within.

This leads to a lack of faith, not only in others but towards life itself which cannot be trusted to provide. The child becomes a consumer…

‘clinging to objects and people, investing them with magical powers, ferocious in [the] demand to possess and control.” Liedloff

Asking Narcissism to share is thus experienced as an attack on all that is holy because money and resources have been imbued with a kind of spiritual manna. Losing hegemony over it is tantamount to desecration. The paranoid tendency of the Narcissist is not simply that someone is out to get him, but that all he holds sacred is under attack.

And so the predominant experience of life is one of being a victim, no matter how much one has, nor how much there is available. It is like being a planet without a sun, or worse, having a black hole to revolve around which threatens to drain and crush at every turn. Without the inner ‘other’, there is nothing to mediate the dark forces of the cosmos.

”Our connection with a sacred centre [gives] a sense of real existence that counters the terror of chaos and nothingness, helps [a person] find their bearings and makes order of the Universe’. Bizint

Since what we cannot integrate is invariably projected it will seem to those who stub their toe on at the threshold of symbol formation that some illegitimate other has stolen the key to happiness. He lives, not only in a state of lack but as if his divine inheritance is being withheld. And because he’s in the bind of having to deny what he needs, his lack and being witheld from is acted out in the world, which perhaps explains the conundrum of how it is possible for the richest and greatest nation in the world to sweep one of its most powerful men to high office on the shirt tails of the slogan, ‘make America great again’, as though it were a mere dispossesed guttersnipe on the fringes of the stage.

The Crane Wife.

There was a poor weaver who finally had so little that he could not even afford to buy thread for the loom. In despair he goes out into the woods to look for food where he finds an injured crane. He takes it home and nurses it back to health with what little he has left.

After he releases the crane, a woman appears at his doorstep with whom he falls in love and marries. His new wife offers to weave silk that they can sell at the market, but only if he agrees never to watch her at the loom.

The cloth is wonderous.

So they sell the mysterious silk at a great price and live a comfortable life. But he soon makes her weave more and more. The house rattles and shakes with the shuttling of the loom. He fails to notice his wife’s declining health. His greed increases. His curiosity and wanting…

to know..

get the better of him.

Eventually he peeks in to see what she is doing to make the amazing silk. He is shocked to find the crane plucking feathers from her own body and weaving them into the loom.

The crane, seeing him, flies away and never returns.

oops…

Like the western version of this story, ‘the Elves and the Shoemaker’, where the cobbler is likewise down to his last, at the end of his teather, but receives magical help from elves who make the finest shoes…

but make off when the people involved want to know to much.

Curiosity does not kill the cat.

Greed and narcissistic entitlement do that.

The weaver is not simply satisfying a whim, he’s betrayed a trust…

but why should the rule apply to him?

Narcissism is not at all the popularly construed puffing up of the ego, like some grandiose bag of wind though it can look like that..

Nature abhors a vacuum and what takes residence is not always home grown. We naturally take in the psychic undercurrents of family life along which pathways through the under-brush can run forced traffic.

This is why the term ‘Symbiotic Omnipotence’ (M. Kahn) is so useful in understanding narcissistic entitlement. The narcissist is one end of an invisible double act with an intrusive parent who trades off rental space in the child for the greater challenge of living their own life.

This smudgy ‘bond’ creates..

”an imbalance in the articulation of the total ego-capacities. Mother’s selective sponsoring leads to (ego) retardation.” M. Kahn.

I an’ me not talking.

Jung gives the example of a girl from his village who became a prostitute. He knew the family scenario and helped her to see that she was living out the unconscious life of her profoundly prudish parents. She was being used as a vessel for the sexual shame in the family.

The girl got a a more ordinary job.

The internalised collusive parent lets us off the hook in respect of ordinary standards of behaviour. So the narcissist is really a kind of Gollem. Originally the Gollem were fashioned out of clay and made to do their master’s secret bidding. For all the cold clay of Narcissism the life being lived is not their own.

And so the peeking weaver is both above the law and a slave to the unmediated passions and restless spirits of a destiny not quite his own and out to spoil his experience.

He gets off lightly.

When Acteon intrudes on Diana’s bath in Greek mythology she turns him into a stag and has his hounds tear him apart.

When Hippomenes ‘knows’ Atalanta in the sacred crypt the furious goddess Cybele..

”considered plunging both as they copulated into Styx, the tar pit of bubbling hell.

But that seemed insufficient to her.

Instead she dropped maned hides over their sweating backs. Hardened and hooked their clutching fingers into talons…

..their loathsome fangs obedient only to the bridle-bits of Cybele.” T Hughes.

Psyche fares slightly better when she intrudes upon the secret of Eros’ face whom she’s been forbidden to see.

Eros wakes from a wounding drop of hot oil from Psyche’s lamp and immediately leaves foreover…

a lover’s tiff that leads to much questing….

strangely rooted in the mud of betrayal and fear.

M L von Franz makes the brilliant observation that there is something lurking in all this, ‘wanting to know’.

”The real motive in this rational depreciation is fear.” M L von Franz.

And given all the gods and giant snakes and tentacled nightmares lurking in the swamplands of Psyche its hardly surprising..

In fact what do you expect…?

”Civilised man reacts to new ideas by errecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new.” CG Jung.

and the stab of fear is the challenge, not just to your pride but to your ontological security. The new thing does not just add to your house..

it can tear it down.

And so the weaver sabotages his own good fortune in order to be rid of the uncanny running through his life, the mysterious and unknowable Other.

Out of fear and inner poverty of spirit he resorts to action designed to depersonalise and diminish, rather than be humbled by gratitude. The peeking is a defensive means to an end.

”Enlightenment is a destructive process. It is a crumbling away of untruth, seeing through the facade of pretense, the eradication of everything we imagine to be true.” Adyashanti

To be attended by your creative muse is to be riddled with perplexity, chaos and unknowing.

It’ll be ok.

The house can be rebuilt.

The Golden Child.

Stanford University professor David Rosenhan and some of his students decided to see what would happen if they feigned hearing voices to gain admission to hospital, but then behaved completely normally once they were inside.

http://www.bonkersinstitute.org/rosenhan.html

Their ordinary behaviour was interpreted as schizophrenic in all but one case. Note taking was described by staff as, ‘engaging in writing behaviour.’

”Given that the patient is in the hospital, he must be psychologically disturbed. And given that he is disturbed, continuous writing must be behavioral manifestation of that disturbance, perhaps a subset of the compulsive behaviors that are sometimes correlated with schizophrenia.” D. Rosenhan.

All the students were compelled to admit that they had mental illnesses and take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release.

Once the cat was out of the bag, one peeved hospital administration challenged Rosenhan to send them more pseudopatients which they would then detect and unmask, so to speak.

Rosenhan agreed.

Over the next weeks the hospital identified 20% of their admissions as Rosenhan ‘fakes’…..

but Rosenhan had sent no-one there…..

booyakasha….!

Our ‘guilty until proven innocent’, model of sanity, is rooted in Freud’s Drive Conflict theory, the jewel in the crown of Western Civilisation’s war of attrition against the Principle of Relatedness.

Drive Conflict theory eroded the significance of Mother, and common sense, to such a point that the quality of interaction with baby now became a factor that was secondary to the child’s inherent constitution.

cut to the chase, mon.

People no longer affect one another. You hurt yourself because you are weak and stupid. As for Mother…

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME…

We will no longer speak Her name. In fact we will refer only to her ‘object-relations’.

Mother doesn’t get front billing in early life… just a part of her, nor will she play much part,

or have any responsibility for how screwed up you are.

and that is the official theory, mon.

”..it was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person’s real experiences.” J Bowlby.

What this means for’ mad’ and ‘sane’ alike is that there is no legitimate suffering in life. Psychoanalysis’ central theory places itself outside the vales of sympathy and compassion required to heal grief, trauma and tragedy. To heal, the wound must first be given legitimacy, and second, meaning.

”My argument with psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering.” Arthur Miller.

There is a line in Sophocles’, ‘Oedipus Rex’, sung by the chorus and therefore almost certainly the philosopher’s own personal perspective on life..

”Life becomes death longing, if all longing else be vain”. Sophocles.

It means that life is not worth living for its own sake. Freud said that the purpose of his method was to return people to ordinary misery. Ordinary misery is not enough. There has to be involvement in life beyond individual gain and measure for it to be meaningful. There has to be connectedness with one another and meaning afforded to legitimate suffering.

Not to have this is worse than death.

The Divine Feminine is the keeper of such truths.

Without sufficient representation of Her in our lives we need a host of back up theories about the inevitablity of our isolation and how it is somehow intrinsic to experience. In fact it is a collective mallaise caused by the devaluation of the Goddess.

..and produces what Masud Khan calls ‘symbiotic omnipotence,” a mood of inertia, helpless dependence, and emotional manipulation in people….

”whose outward lives looked okay but who were empty inside.” Dale Mathers.

Here’s how it works…

The depleted mother tries to compensate for the absence of a sacred vessel for motherhood by idolising the child.

actively discouraging..

”the perception of others as valuable or nourishing, through subtle collusion and indulgences”. M. Khan

and keeping it from the real world.

She hides her sacred heart in her child. The child gets to be ‘special’, but carry’s this great burden of archetypal expectation, almost as a redeemer….. expected to do miracles… but denigrated like a demon when it all goes wrong…

”such a maternal relationship leads to dissociations…” M. Kahn.

The child can’t integrate his own personality. He’s been inappropriatley seduced into propping up something that is not his task to shoulder. His specialness is in exchange for mother’s use of him as a repository for all the archetypal material she’s been schooled to disown from her own soul. In the process he gets turned into a kind of golden idol..

”that we can then worship and adore so we have the illusion that everything is wonderful but actually have no real contact at all..” D. Mathers.

it’s a horribly split reality that leads to all kinds of superior, narcissistic behaviour and feelings of pathological entitlement on the one hand and worthlessness on the other.

The scary thing is that Yahweh’s Covenant with his people ticks all the boxes for Symbiotic Omnipotence.

Exclusive attachment,

THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BUT ME..

active discouragement of other influences,

THOU SHALT NOT MAKE IDOLS

shared specialness,

THOU SHALT BE AS A BRIDE UNTO ME

poor communication,

BURN THEM ALL,

”failure to integrate aggression,” M. Kahn

BURN THEM ALL.

and prohibitive harmony…

BURN THEM ALL.

Kahn’s prognosis is poor…

”with maturity they became even more isolated, suffering a pervasive mood of diffuse anxiousness and apprehension.” Kahn

being special is a con.

”Always remember that you are absolutely unique, just like everyone else.” Margaret Mead.

The healing here is not particularly in any moral outrage that one might have in what being special pans out to be but in the longing and incompleteness at back of it all…

because that longing and incompleteness is another way of talking about love.

which is why longing has such great power in it.