Tag: Victor Frankl

Hansel and Gretel.

How do Hansel and Gretel get the better of the Wicked Witch? They are in an absolutely desperate situation, yet still they manage to wriggle free.

Whilst Hansel languishes in his cage, the Witch compels Gretel to help her prepare the stove that will cook him. Gretel must be beside herself, almost paralyzed with shock and fear. The Witch tells Gretel to go get into the stove to check on the strength of the fire, thinking perhaps that she’d have an hors d’oeurve before the main course of roast boy. Anyway its fun to tell people what to do and push them around.

Gretel sees the slimmest chance and does the one thing sure to get the witch’s blind reaction. She plays dumb. ‘I, er, don’t know how to…” The witch can’t help herself exploding, ”Oh you helpless idiot! Must I do everything?  Get out of the way, let me show you how…” and in she goes head first.. Gretel shoves her from behind, slams the door….

and so the witch’s goose is cooked instead.

Gretel turns things around in three ways..

Firstly she refuses to give up hope…

‘If you have a why, you can endure almost any how.”  Victor Frankl

What keeps her going is love, even though she has been so terrorized that the Witch no longer considers her a threat and even gives her kitchen duties instead of sharing Hansel’s cage.  Throughout the story the abandoned waifs comfort and look out for one another.

Secondly, because she hasn’t given up hope, she can think on her feet which the WW never expects. Tyranny always thinks everyone else is stupid. It is often the downfall of tyranny to underestimate the calibre of it’s detractors. The tyrant’s use of others to project vulnerability onto, and insistence on their inferiority, means that the possibility of a intelligent and crafty response is completely overlooked. Feelings of superiority can only be maintained by the perennial assumption that folk are dumb, so Tyranny gets over confident and takes it’s eye off the ball.

The third thing she does is to overcome her own susceptibility to authority. We are hard wired to do as we are told, way more than we realise. Add the policy of divide and rule and the Witch is liable to come out on top. Making one child a meal and elevating the other to a kind of kitchen co-conspiritor might well have estranged the children from each other.

A series of psychological tests called ‘the Millgram Experiments’ demonstrated how easily a figure of authority in a white coat can persuade a seemingly ordinary person (randomly picked but told they are specially selected) to administer electric shocks as punishment to a person supposedly wired up next door. Many were quite happy to deliver potentially lethal shocks to the invisible actors. Some continued even after the actors fell silent…..

Similarly the ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’, which attempted to investigate the power struggles between prisoners and their guards yielded some unexpected findings.. Professor Phillip Zimbardo of Stanford University used college students randomly assigned to either role and sat back to see what happened. The experiment had to be abandoned after six days when two ‘prisoners’ escaped..

The results showed that the students quickly embraced their assigned roles, with some guards enforcing authoritarian measures and ultimately subjecting prisoners to psychological torture, while many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, by the officers’ request, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it.

Our instincts for survival impel us to follow the direction of authority because we assume with the weight of millenial learning that it is within our best interests to do so and yet to concede to authority at the expense of one’s own destiny is at the root of much human misery.

The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis. Erich Fromm

Eventually the child must rebel and take action. In the process she must face her own shadow, her own capacity for aggression and murderous intent. She has to realise her own capacity for destruction and the responsibility this entails. She has to have the courage of her convictions, she has to understand that some decisions don’t have do-overs and that any security gained from tying oneself to powerful others has to be relinquished.

This means letting yourself be scared and not rushing in to make it better with platitudes or ‘positive thinking’, not sheltering beneath the wing of someone who seems to have the mantle of Protector, Mentor or Supposedly-in-Charge.

I recall being furious with my neighbour for calling in the Planners about a shed I’d built at the bottom of my garden. Weeks went by and I was still mad. Then I realised that her petty behaviour meant I could no longer project ‘Wise Old Woman’ onto her, which meant I was saddled with myself and the difficulty of finding such a wise figure in my own inner landscape rather than conveniently next door.

“The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the Self.” Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
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This dynamic is behind so called Stockholm Syndrome, where bank staff taken hostage in a robbery soon began to identify with their captors, to the point of petitioning the President of Sweden on their behalf.
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In the West we think of ourselves as great champions of the underdog, of the weak and helpless, yet nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the protections afforded to the vulnerable have been eroded. We see people being arrested for feeding the poor. Law abiding DACA recipients face deportation despite high levels of education and significant contributions to the economy. Adults with guns seem to have more rights than kids being shot by them.
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UNODC calculate that child slavery in the USA is a $32 billion a year industry with 300,000 under eighteen year olds lured into the sex trade anually. Globally there are an estimated nine million child slaves…   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/this_world/6458377.stm
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How is this possible?
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In tribal societies with decentralised power children mean life, support and care in old age.  As the model shifts from chiefs to kings this changes dramatically. The heirs to the crown get it into their heads to hurry the business of inheritance along. Suddenly children are the enemy and the more power and position you have the more the threat seems to exist.
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Even the poor woodcutter in our story abandons his children because he fears they will be the death of him.
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‘Everything is eaten, we have but one half loaf left and that is the end. The children must go…there is no other means of saving ourselves.’ Grimm’s
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The annals of kingship, highly centralised power, are full of stories of kings meeting their end at the hands of their children and doing their best to prevent it. In the Norse sagas king Aum of Scandinavia kills off nine of his sons to prolong his reign. King Laius from Greek mythology hears from the oracle that his son Oedipus will be the death of him, so he abandons him on Mt Cithaeron to die. In Greek and Roman traditions Saturn eats his children one by one because he fears they will overthrow him. This may seem irrelevant to modern life except for the fact that Saturn is the ancient corollary of Yahweh whose biblical paranoia inveigles every pulpit and whose ancient books advocate the slavery of women and children.
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Of course you find similar passages in the Koran, another system equally centralised on male power with rules of inheritance that make bumping off the old man an attractive proposition.
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So what is the solution? Where do you go if the party of family values uses quotes from the Old Testament to justify ripping babies from their mother’s breast and caging them? There doesn’t seem to be a clear cut answer, so Gretel’s response to her own nightmare will have to do. Let love keep hope alive. Realise your betrayal. Think on your feet. Dare to embody the power of direct action.
 

 

Healing Phobic Anxiety.

The knee jerk response to Phobia is to try and overcome it. You want to wrestle it to the floor, all helped along with how irrational and stupid it seems to be, adding the weight of shame to the burden of anxiety.

Phobias are like waking dreams, things that don’t make apparent sense and yet are full of rich symbolism, brimming with meaning for anyone brave enough to refrain from instantly running it through with a pointy stick.

People have very particular phobias about all kinds of things, each of which has a specific set of associations, memories, and life events connected to it that provide context, significance and even the psychological necessity for what appears to be nonsense to the dismissive eye.

Phobos was the Greek God of Fear, and as with all ancient tales and myths we can find out a great deal about ourselves and our afflictions by taking his circumstances to heart. Phobos, twined with Deimos (terror) was the son of Ares, God of War and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Procreation. Phobos personified the fear bought about by war (Ares), and conflict of any kind. Aphrodite was his mother, the dark side of whom is not-being-there. Thirteen kids, countless lovers, a jealous husband whose thing is weaponry…  So fearful Phobos and terrified Deimos were also the boy-Gods of loss.

Phobias are connected to the prospect of conflict and the subsequent loss that is wedded to it. And not just about who gets the window seat, but about whether you get to ride at all.

”Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.” CG Jung.

Much of what we fear is on account of its capacity to change us, to upset identity, to alter the status quo. Its not just that it’s ugly or full of teeth but that the encounter is game changing and you may need to check your name tag for a while thereafter.

Add to this the early encounter with Aphrodite, quietly resentful of being a brood mare, secretly loading the child with unfulfilled ambition, unsatisfied longing, the need to be redeemed by heroic action, already at odds with the child’s own destiny before s/he can crawl….

Fear of conflict is rooted in our survival instincts, which is not about the superficial tussle of who said what to whom, but about whether you exist as a person in your own right or as a part-object in someone else’s world. If asserting your own path through the jungle entails damage to parental love, if you are not the child your parents wanted, the child that would fulfill their hopes and dreams, then the desire to be recognized and the wish to be approved of are going to be in terrible, unbearable, collision with one another.

Our instinct to live up to expectation, even the absurd and ridiculous ones, is hardwired into the psyche because it’s connected to the basic assumption that parental expectations are there to promote survival. I am what I see in mother’s face. So that I must become. People pursue even destructive myths about themselves as if they were the holy grail, in order to maintain the conditions in which they first learned to feel at home.

Author Jean Liedloff  describes how the Chicago Fire dept was snow bound one winter and put out an emergency radio broadcast warning people not to set fire to their homes. House fires dropped to zero. Then the snows melted, the fire trucks got back in service, vigilance was called off and house fires resumed.

When the instinct to individuate collides with the instinct to live up to expectation, it can all be too great to bear, like your home going up in smoke. So it condenses, a super saturated solution of tension suddenly crystalizing around a symbol which now contains all the conflict and angst, and which you can keep at arms length for some of the time.

Phobos’ uniform presence in the myths is that his face was painted onto the shields of great heroes, like Hercules and Agamemnon.

”Staring backwards with eyes that glowed with fire. His mouth was full of teeth in a white row, fearful and daunting”… Hesiod.

Phobia is a shield, protecting heroic vulnerability. Legitimate but unacknowledged suffering retreats behind it, occluding the puzzle of how to be with other people, inherited from both Love and War.

The Psyche’s phobic solution, to parcel these fears down into objects that can be outside is really useful, provided you can stay away from its homing instinct .  Aspects of self taken flight invariably return to roost.

It’s important that Phobos is one of twins. Jung was of the opinion that twins indicated a quickening of consciousness, a doubling of the energies. Many traditions depict twins increasing consciousness or generating life.

The Xingu people of Brazil have stories about the twin brothers Kuat and Iae, who compelled the vulture king Urubutsin to give light to the dark world. Kuat occupied the sun, Iae the moon. Their wakefulness keeps light in the world except for a brief time each month when they both sleep.

According to a myth told in central Australia, twin lizards created trees, plants, and animals to fill the land. Motherless Romulus and Remus created Rome.

This creative aspect of Phobos and Deimos is not all that obvious, but if an affliction is also the means to heal ourselves, if the clue to wholeness is buried somewhere in the symptom, wanting only our patience to emerge, we are then witness to the remarkable ability of the Psyche to both shield itself and leave a paper trail to follow.

This capacity to experience Self-hood beyond our skins is testimony to the fact that the psyche contains the body rather than the usual contrary view.

”Some think the fish contains the sea, I say the sea contains the fish.” CG Jung

This sea contains all kinds of experiences, both the scary variety replete with teeth and palpitations but also those which are sublime and uplifting.

Victor Frankl tells the following story;

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.’”

When you accept that phobias are meaningful, dreamlike scenarios the unraveling of which can actually help deepen self knowledge and compassion, then, in a wider sense and having faced the terror of being but a speck in a grinder, you also make yourself available to the prospect of being redeemed by Nature, the self that exists outside.