Winnicott – Andy White Blog

The Virgin and the Unicorn.

The perennial story of the Virgin and the Unicorn sprang into our popular imagination at a time when monotheism and the moral codes of kings supplanted the subtle distinctions to be made between spirit and soul with faith and being good. A living connection with the gods which had thus far kept people in charge of their own religious life was broken. Spirit and soul had to go underground, burying themselves in the universal symbolism of a collective dream.

There are few perennial stories. So when you find one, its worth psychological inquiry. The tale of the Virgin and the Unicorn can be found throughout European folk lore. The exception is in Greek mythology but only because the Greeks attributed it to the fauna of India. The Chinese have stories of Unicorns, as do the Persians. In fact the wee beastie features from Patagonia to Japan, from Scotland to Mongolia and spans a time period dating from Adam.

Apparently, Noah had to leave the Unicorns off the ark because they were so troublesome. Several thousand years later Emperor Fu Xia of China supposedly spotted one, as have other notables, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Confucius. The fact that no-one ever actually produced one doesn’t seem to have prevented people all over the world believing in them since time immemorial.

The unlikely Cosmas Indicopleustes, a 6th century merchant from Alexandria, made a voyage to India and subsequently wrote about things he had seen along the way. He tells of a brass unicorn he spotted in the palace of the Ethiopian King and recounts the story … “It is impossible to take this ferocious beast alive,’ He says, ‘all its strength lies in its horn. When it finds itself pursued and in danger of capture, it throws itself from a precipice, and turns so aptly in falling, that it receives all the shock upon the horn, and so escapes safe and sound.”

The Unicorn’s horn is the focus of it’s universal fascination. Despite the great differences in descriptions available everyone agrees on the horn and it’s qualities of purification and healing. According to legend the problem with obtaining such a medicine is that Unicorns are almost impossible to catch.

‘The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap.’ Leonardo da Vinci.

Then and only then, can the Unicorn be caught and killed, though even this is not the end of the creature for it is often depicted thereafter, alive and well, lain beneath a Pomegranate tree having broken the chains which had previously restrained it.

This motif of resurrection caught the Church’s attention and the story has been given ecclesiastical overtones ever since, though this seems inadequate for a myth which predates the birth of Christ by several millennia.

What then can we make of this story? What is it that’s common to human experience that it could be so universally represented by the motif of the Virgin and the Unicorn?

The Alchemical tradition might provide us with some clues. The various descriptions we have of the Unicorn, though they are widely divergent, do have something in common. It is depicted as a composite creature. Marco Polo describes it as having the body of a horse, head of a boar, feet of an elephant and the hair of a Buffalo. Some traditions throw in a lion’s tail. The Chinese afford it green scales, the tail of an ox and the body of a stag. In the Arabic tradition it has the wings of a vulture, the head of an elephant and the tail of a dragon.

Such descriptions are reminiscent of the monstrous personifications of the ‘prima materia’, the starting off place in the alchemical process, symbolized by a confused mass or complex of opposites all jumbled together, the unvarnished and contradictory personality of the alchemists themselves replete with illogical admixtures of vice and virtue, a ‘complexio oppositorium‘ whose hermaphroditic nature further befuddles efforts to apprehend it.

Such a contradictory melange of traits and attributes is very much like the human personality with all its strange foibles, conflicts and idiosyncrasies, it’s strange admixtures of light and shade out of which eventually grows, all being well, a one-pointed sense of centerdness, of ‘I’ which transcends the chaos of conflicting traits.

‘ I suffered for years on the horns of a dilemma before I discovered it was a unicorn.’ D. Winnicott.

This emerging sense of identity au dessus de la melee, transcending the chaos of conflicting drives and the tension of opposites is qualitatively different from the content of the personality, all the various soapbox oratarios being held by the vested interests of being a son, a brother, an artist or a biker. Its different from the hodge-podge of lion’s tail and dragon’s scales. It has assumed a singular identity, symbolized by the horn out of which cups for kings were supposedly carved to protect their majesties from the poisoning of life’s cruel vicissitudes. The horn is..

‘an emblem of vigour and strength and has a masculine quality but at the same time it is a cup, which as a receptacle is feminine. So we are dealing with a uniting symbol.. C G Jung.

As such the Unicorn represents spirit, the still point, the hub of the wheel, what the Hindu tradition calls Atman. But even so the Unicorn is still wild and intractable. S/he lacks context and so peace. This can only be found in the Virgin’s lap.

At the time these tales were written, what it meant to be a Virgin had a broader meaning than it does today. It went further than chastity to the sense of belonging to oneself, which seems like a good way of describing the anima/us, the soul or psyche which represents the autonomy of the unconscious. Its something you can’t integrate like the repressed stuff of childhood because it was actually there first. It is not a part of you. It is a partner of you, with its own life, in whose lap peace may finally be found.

Humanistic psychology, as benevolent as it is by comparison with what preceded it, has much to answer for because it does insist in placing the ego at the center of the psyche. It still manages to view the unconscious as a rubbish tip of stuff repressed from and therefore originally belonging to consciousness. ‘Everything in your dream is part of you..’

All of which goes to show how centuries of repression can dry clean numinosity from experience, leading people to believe that the unconscious is ‘nothing but..’ the derivative, edited clippings of ego. There could not possibly be interior, a priori factors in the psyche; autonomous, archetypal complexes which have had to take to the woods like outlawed bandits. Despite and perhaps because of their disenfranchisement, they continue to raid and harass the now civilized citizens who have disavowed them.

Cultures relatively unscathed by monotheism have managed to preserve the felt sense that we humans are full of gods. Shamanic culture in particular recognizes, and uses, the fact of the inner other. It recognizes that if this connection is lost it can constitute a loss of soul which is why the Unicorn is so wild and ill tempered.

Its not enough to be ‘spiritual’. There has also to be a felt sense of the inner other.. the ‘not-me,’ in whose lap meaning can be found that the Unicorn cannot provide for itself.

In alchemy this figure, the Anima, is equated with Mercurius, the agency of transformation, who appears as ‘most chaste virgin’. {Jung Alchemical studies.} She is the representative of a depth of experience previously unknown to the Unicorn, peace and dream and belonging. The double edge of this homecoming is that it also involves a death, the end of a mind set seduced by notions of its own self-sufficiency, a de-integrating initiation into a new inter-relatedness which, though mortally wounding to ego-constructs, breaks the chains of its isolation and places it at the roots of the Pomegranate, the Tree of Life.

Too Much Stuff.

Part of the problem with the phenomena of hoarding, now deemed to affect one in five people, (the other four are collectors) is that we want to fix it before knowing what it is. Being righteousness about someone’s plastic Santa collection might seem like trying-to-help but it’s still like sinking in chocolate truffle, tasty and feeling good… but you’re not going anywhere.

“How often do we leap ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.” Thomas Moore.

Psychology Today recently ran an article on hoarding that identified some of the symptoms and causes. It was scary enough to send me scuttling off to check on my sweet wrapper collection because nowhere in the entire article was there any reference to meaning.

It’s certainly true that hoarding is an attempt to insulate oneself from stress, which leads to isolation and thence to even more stress. But such a vicious circle is not dissolved by willful efforts to de-clutter.

It is also true that…

‘trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body,’ George Carlin

Yet this ‘neurotic solution’ still manages to keep the sandwiches within arms reach until such a time when the anxiety of being fed might be addressed. You’ll get some funny looks, more of the same judgement which makes progress impossible, but its important to leave the sandwiches where they are and take the time to ponder them, as would a naturalist observing some curious trait in the animal kingdom.

All this sandwich taping is way more common than you think. It is even promoted as a social value. We are taught from an early age to acquire and display. Success itself is measured by how much more you have than you need.

In the old days only the poor were mad. The wealthy were simply eccentric. Its still true. The little old lady with forty cats gets sneered at whilst the little old man with forty Bentleys is someone to emulate. You could say that the lower income hoarder is faithfully living out an ideal despite their lack of resources. They too are projecting their inner world onto matter which must then be painstakingly collected up and preserved.

When I was a kid I got sent to a boarding school in a war zone. There were grenade screens on the windows, terrorist drills and rifle practice after class, but the worst threat was from within, endemic sexual abuse, total loss of any privacy nor any scrap of protection from institutionalized bullying.

One day I found a lost cricket ball in some bushes. I grabbed it and ran around to the back of the house where I buried it in a sand bucket. I didn’t play cricket. I had no use for the cricket ball and never went back to dig it up. Yet somehow what I had done soothed me. When times were particularly tough I would comfort myself with the thought of the buried ball. Thinking about it could smooth a path to untroubled sleep.

It was only decades later that I understood the significance of these events. In ancient times warriors might ‘bury’ their hearts before battle as a way of both summoning courage and preserving themselves from impending onslaught. This ritual gesture meant some essential center was kept hidden and protected from the clang of conflict. Some crucial aspect of self got to transcend trauma and violence.

My own instincts for preservation had resorted to symbolic gesture and a form of magical thinking in order to manage an unmanageable situation. And it had worked, though making sense of it all afterwards involved fresh appreciation of just what I was going through at the time that made such dreamlike action necessary.

While we are shaking our heads at the bag lady piling up newspapers she does not need and will never read, most of aspire to the kind of wealth we likewise do not need and will never use, an ideal promoted by our government that has more bombs that it will ever need…. but may still use.

You may not have twenty five dinner sets, just in case, but still fantasize about having the wherewithal to do so, just in case.

The hoarder may not have the material resources to amass more wealth or power or property but still remains true to the ideals of consumerism pumped into them since childhood. You can pursue your used magazine collection with all the gusto of your fellow hungry ghosts on Wall st, back issues of Hello! working just as well to fill the bottomless pit as Stocks and Bonds i.e. not very well.

So, in order to avoid hypocrisy, it would be better to say that the spiritual emptiness and emotional hungering that prompt the hoarding reflex are the defining support struts of our consumer society. We find different ways to fill up emptiness depending on available resources and personal idiosyncrasy and these need exploring as you would a dream, so that the conflation of spirit and matter can be gently unpicked.

When the master says,’ Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’ he’s drawing our attention to how easy it is to confuse things you’d think were easy to tell apart. In fact the sacred and the profane are easily conflated, a process recognizable by the fascinations it produces. We get fixated upon stuff because it’s glowing with some value/worth in addition to what it is in-itself.

Sometimes what has to be projected is worthlessness. The strategy, however, remains the same; even if the focus has shifted to all the symbolic odds and ends no-one wants, or the yesterday’s news a person might secretly believe themselves to be.

The popular conception is that hoarders are just greedy and controlling. The common or garden expression of this is that they are tight arsed and obstinate. It’s expressed in Freud’s psychoanalytic literature as ‘anal fixation’. Either way the emphasis is on blaming the person concerned rather than the interactions in the family which might give rise to anxious loss of control.

Many post-Freudians follow this pattern of holding the child responsible for their difficulties. Some talk about primal fault or primal defects. Erikson shifts the emphasis a bit and talks about autonomy vs shame and doubt. He describes the controlling consequences of not-enough-interaction, but also winds up blaming the victim with the indirect yet additional shaming of their ‘failure to achieve play satiation.’

What gets forgotten is that the hoarding reflex originates at a time when discrepancies between disgust and praise are accompanied by the use of transitional objects to manage the growing gap between me and not-me. If there is excessive anxiety about being allowed to exist in one’s own right rather than as an extension of Mother then the need for transitional objects will assume some unusual contours.

This is bound to be further compounded by the collective consideration that we have no divine mother. If individuals respond to maternal uncertainty with frantic efforts to fill their emptiness with stuff, how shall an entire Culture respond to the utter loss of the Great Mother?

The Swedes have a saying, ‘he who buys what he does not need, steals from himself,’ which begs the question of how anyone might learn something so artful. The answer is, by example. They have already been robbed; of their connection to Nature, the sacred Temenos of the Great Mother’s lap, the shame free prospect of Unconditional Being.

I once saw a wounded baboon trying to pack his gaping belly with sticks and grass. Anything he could find was stuffed into the open laceration. When the goddess is cast out we all behave like wounded animals, stuffing our evisceration with dirt and leaves. You might shake your head at the futility of it all, but the instinctive efforts to stem terminal bleeding-out dies harder than logic and rational argument.

Freedom’s Chains.

I was once sat alone in an open air restaurant on a Greek island, looking out to sea whilst I waited for the menu. There was a family sat on the next table with two boys of about eight and ten. Something about them struck some deep chord in me. I began to pay attention. The boys were sat opposite one another, not speaking but using a torrent of nonverbal gestures and silent expressions packed in with meaning. It wasn’t quite sign language but it seemed just as rich.

The parent’s conversation stumbled overhead. The man seemed to constantly take up more space than his seat permitted. He was loud. He’d put on a tone of insistance where it wasn’t required. He responded to his wife as though ticking some kind of inter-marital box in a contract he now regrets signing. Everything was too much effort. He speaks to the waiter with barely restrained annoyance that this Greek man, working in a Greek restaurant, in Greece, couldn’t perfectly understand his mumbled English that had a twange in it that I knew…

Meantime the woman is palcating the situation, lots of patting gestures and smoothing over her husband’s laval tantrum in a way that had the stamp of long practice, apologising for him to the world in a way that also suggested he was really quite right and justified in his contempt for it. And while she tutted she also offered him every opportunity to misbehave. I could almost smell my mother’s eau de Cologne.

I had an extreme childhood. Para-military boarding school in a post -imperial war zone. It was the kind of place you felt proud, not to have attended, but to have survived. It bred a very particular kind of person.

Eventually I turned to him and said, ‘excuse me, but did you attend Plumtree school, and were you in Milner house?’ He dropped his fork and turned white as a sheet, momentarily uncontained by the seat he’d spent the evening trying in vain to bust out of.

‘How do you know ?’ he gasped.

I shrugged, ‘they got me too.’

The fact was that I recognised his madness, all the compensatory gestures that go with being abandoned in the name of specialness, the aching emptiness that needs to big itself up all the time at others’ expense, the racial intolerance despite the fact that he had presumably been the author of his own holiday destination.

Then there was his accent and the mannerisms you begin to share after six years cooped up in a cage together, but the clincher was in his boys and the shock of realising that their interaction was precisely that of juniors in the prep-room, forbidden from speaking and having to resort to other means of communication.

Is racism a mental health issue? Of course it is. You could go further and say quite specifically that when it is systemic, it is the collective expression of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

If you look at the checklist in the DSM-5 diagnostic manual for NPD, Racism ticks every box because it has to do with a..

‘significant impairment of inter-personal functioning’. DSM-5

It is an enduring, inflexible, pervasive pattern over a broad range of social situations in which self esteem is derived from having power over others.

‘goal-setting based on personal gratification..’ibid

‘Failure to conform to normative (constitutional) ethics.’ibid

This impairment in its collective form can also be described both in terms of lack of empathy for the suffering of others and in the lowered capacity for intimacy which is severely restricted by a predominantly exploitative stance.

”including deceipt, coersion; use of dominance or intimidation to control others” ibid

Being in the same room as someone who has all this going on is hard enough even when you’re the same colour. When you’re not its hell,..

and then he gets into government.

”fabrication, lack of guilt or remorse about the harmful effect of one’s actions on others… vengeful behaviour.”ibid

You might wonder if there is something broken in such persons, or the traits of it within yourself, but Racism, like NPD, has its origins in something that was never formed in the first place. Its the defensive angry crust formed around an empty space where something should have happened but didn’t.

A threshold of development was never crossed, the threshold of separation from mother which allows baby to perceive others as beings in their own right, when Mom also has a destiny, when we relinquish the omnipotence of being at the centre of things in exchange for the richness of a many faceted inner world that can be excited and stimulated by difference rather than threatened and paranoid about it..

Without crossing this threshold, feelings of infantlike entitlement are harnessed to shining ideals divested of conscience. This is done via the projection of one’s personal limitations onto now shadowy others in order to consolidate the failing bulwarks of internal cohesion. The secret fledgling charges itself with talons of riteous indignation…

”If the Jews did not exist we would have to invent them.’ H Goerring.

The individual Narcissist has been subjected to what Masud Kahn calls ‘Symbiotic Omnipotence’, an early bond with mother that is characterised by shared specialness. The child is billed as a kind of saviour and is loaded down with all kinds of archetypal expectations by a mother who has been deprived of the freedom to reach her own potential.

One of the features of this scenario is that everyone outside their bubble is regarded with contempt, as though they were second class citizens, denial…

”that others could be potentially valuable or nourishing.” M. Kahn

Unfortunately, Western Civilisation is imbued with this toxic dynamic. Like the folie a deux of mother and child locked in Symbiotic Omnipotence we have the insistent collusion of Mother Church refusing the validity of other people’s Gods and beliefs. Even the benign end of the spectrum has a secret chuckle reserved for the ignorant foolishness of anyone who comes from further away then the next block in their city.

The way a child responds to a mother who has a destiny already written out for him/her, even if it is a glittery and shiny thing, is to create inner walls to seal off the feeling of inner deadness this actually gives rise to. Carrying a host of sparkly expectations gets in the way of being together as ordinary people where ordinary feelings and ordinary interactions give rise to the sense of being real..

‘If the mother’s face is unreflecting, damage is done to the child who becomes walled off from his own emotional self..’ P. Wright.

The problem for the special child is that he is not seen for who he actually is and no matter how glorious the vision of him might be in his mother’s eyes its still not real or alive. His inner walls are necessary to defend himself from the reality of being unloved. Unfortunatly, he’s liable to deal with this by thrusting his inner reality onto the external world and build walls between people in order not to suffer further cognitive dissonance of being a walled off person in an open world.

The saviour child who has been charged with bringing meaning and fruition to mother’s unlived dreams must fail. Even if he could magically wave the wand that would save her, he is still a self-as-object rather than self-as-subject which gives rise to a sense of dislocation from oneself.

What Mother looks like is the source of the child’s emerging self concept. If what baby sees is impassive or dead, that’s what he takes himself for.

‘Her look freezes the subjective feeling of life.” D. Winnicott.

This breeds not only terrible emptiness but also terrible shame which the child is then left eternally trying to shake off by means of either shaming others or by claiming that this is somehow their intention.

Shame, being a self-as-object in another’s world..

”is the feeling of an original fall, not because of the fact that I may have commited this or that particular fault, but because I [still] need the mediation of the other in order to be what I am.” J. P. Sartre.

Racism ameliorates this shame and the isolation of narcissistic encapsulation. It gives the damaged person Others, clan, with whom to entirely identify and still further Others to entirely hate, a neurotic solution to the endemic damage engendered in cultural patterns of mother/infant relations characterised by Mother’s loss of value and freedom.

Healing the Anxious Heart.

We live in what W.H. Auden calls, ‘the Age of Anxiety.’

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.” W.H. Auden.

Like no other, our era is suffused with a nameless trepidation that trawls our inner landscapes…

”like droves of cattle, like soldiers marching, or big flakes of foam on a flooded river pushing on through the brain.” P. Kennedy.

It is also true that never has so much time and effort been spared to counteract anxiety. We spend billions on therapy and medication to little avail. In fact our efforts seem so fruitless that one cannot help but ponder at the possibility that our remedies are part of the problem.

The fact is that…

”nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.” Pema Chodron.

Do we have something to learn from anxiety?

Could it be there for a reason?

Our age is also one, as never before, that is rooted in material values and aspirations. We pursue comfort and security as if it were the Holy Grail. Our collective goals are not betterment or growth or being part of something, but relaxation, having the kind of life that has as the index of its success being able to lie by the pool.

We work, not to contribute or to rise to a challenge, but so that we can be protected from tomorrow. Our hopes and dreams are circumscribed by palm trees, white sand and secure investments.

We veiw pain and suffering as a malevolent force to be defended against at all costs, almost as if it were a sacred duty.

This polarisation of life restricts us…

”Consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain. The more we struggle for pleasure (only) the more we are actually killing what we love.” A. Watts.

Because we can’t or won’t find meaning in anxiety, opting rather for the search and destroy scenario, so to are we compelled to eradicate the pleasures of life and fail to be replenished by them.

Wanting only half the pie we get none of it.

The Western cult of consciousness leads us to believe that we really can have one without the other. We then suppress and project our anxiety onto unfortunate others, raising razor wire between our successful selves and those who seem to have lost their protective amulets. Like any projection, this exerts a fascination over us and so we sit compulsively glued to the endless newscasts depicting their misery.

But anxiety is part of life. Material ruin, environmental disaster and the machinations of evil regimes are but a few of Anxiety’s playing fields.

One of Nobel Prize winner A. Solzhenitsyn’s great insights is that blows of fate are not to be avoided or eschewed as meaningless. He refers to his own imprisonment as ‘concentrated living.’

”It is extremely important to recognise that the uncontrollable caprice of fate await everyone. Illness, catastrophe, accidents and death are only another form of arrest, trial, prison and punishment camp.” A. Weatherall.

The more we try to avoid it the worse it gets.

”The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.” A.Watts.

Despite our antipathies Anxiety’s roots are given considerable room to spread from the very start of life in Western culture. The suppression of the Divine Feminine does more than undermine the inner life of women. It undermines us all.

”In emotional development, the precursor of the mirror is the Mother’s face. What a child sees (there) is…. themselves. What she looks like is what baby takes itself for.” Whitmont

Regardless of mother’s devotion to her baby, the deprivation of access to the sacred mysteries of her sex, the lived experience of the Great Mother, is bound to leave her inner life anxiously uprooted. These cracks in life’s mirror..

”interrupt (baby’s) going-on-being and give rise to threats of annihilation.” D Winnicott.

So we have more than our fair share of anxiety from the start. Yet even this is an Ariadne’s thread to return us to the truth of Christendom’s inner impoverishment and longing that is the legacy of the lost Goddess.

Moreover, life really is short, nasty and brutish. Our fragility, impermanence and mortality is something to be anxious about. Those who are not anxious in the face of such ontological givens are either sages or psychopaths. The former are liberated only by the paradox of accepting anxiety for what it is and the latter are hardly role models.

Our issue is not simply that we are suffused with anxiety and continuously at war with it but that..

”we have forgotten how to be anxious about the right thing.” S Kierkegaard.

After all, there is a sense in which the unconscious holds us in the palm of its hand.

”Something unknown is doing I don’t know what.” E. Ramirez.

The cult of consciousness dismisses these archetypal stratae of the psyche at its anxious peril. Rather we ought…

”to experience these forces anew and not wait for our moods, nervous states and delusions to make it clear in the most painful way that we are not masters of our own houses.” C.G. Jung

Our situation is not unlike the protagonist in ‘the life of Pi’, who finds himself on a small boat with a tiger, except that in our case we never quite get around to really acknowledging the fact and only ever concede to catching the swish of its tail out of the corner of our eye, giving rise to nameless apprehension rather than awe and cautious wonder.

”Heart, alone in the night, beat.

Beat for all you are worth.

Be the night’s pulse,

Be the blackbird about to sing.

Somewhere under the earth the waters break.” J. Moat