Power corrupts

Jesus washing the disciples feet, 16th century

(Image from Wikipedia)

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.

~ Lord Acton

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.

~ Henry Adams


So, lately I’ve been obsessed with podcasts about con artists, cult leaders, and serial killers. They all seem to share the same basic qualities – basically, psychopathy – and I keep seeing similarities in corporations and those who run them. I think I’m compelled to explore this side of humanity because I’m trying to work some shit out re: the negative animus and the dark side of the Self, or Evil.

One key that recently fell into my lap was the fact that power itself changes the brain, killing empathy. This explains a LOT. One thing I’ve noticed in many of the podcasts I’ve been listening to is that, even when the cult leader or whatever isn’t a psychopath or a narcissist in the beginning, and even though may have had the best of intentions, as soon as they get power everything changes.

Last year, I worked with a senior executive — let’s call him Steve — who had received feedback from his boss that he was wearing the power of his new title in an off-putting way. Steve’s boss told him that he had developed a subtle way of being right in meetings that sucked all the oxygen out of the room.  No one wanted to offer ideas once Steve had declared the right answer.  Since his promotion, Steve had become less of a team player and more of a superior who knew better than others.  In short, he had lost his empathy.”

“Why does this sort of shift in behavior happen to so many people when they’re promoted to the ranks of management?  Research shows that personal power actually interferes with our ability to empathize…. [P]eople who have power suffer deficits in empathy, the ability to read emotions, and the ability to adapt behaviors to other people. In fact, power can actually change how the brain functions…

- Lou Solomon, "Becoming Powerful Makes You Less Empathetic"

Power literally rewires the brain:

Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view… [W]hen he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

- Jerry Useem, "Power Causes Brain Damage"


I suspect what’s going on is possession of the ego by the archetype of the Self. The ego (the center of the conscious personality) is already a miniature version of the Self (the center the entire psyche, conscious and unconscious). The Self is the archetype of wholeness, completion, and the carrier of the sacred. Because of this the ego always tries to push itself and it’s agenda forward, at the expense of the rest of the personality, the way that a person with an inflated ego tries to push themselves and their agenda forward at the expense of everyone around them. The cure for inflation, for the possession of our ego by the Self, is service and humility, or humiliation, the deflation of the ego.

I've seen abuse of power happen, and experienced the lure of power myself despite my strong efforts to resist. Other people treated me as special and I began to believe it… One thing I notice in hindsight is that I stopped wanting to hear any criticism from people I perceived as not supporting me. Now I see that my very resistance to the criticism was an indication that there was a problem that deserved close examination. My emotions - anger, fear, pride - got in the way of my willingness to engage in self-examination, even through a 360! Today I remember what Spiderman says: "With great power comes great responsibility." I focus more now on how I can serve others, rather than what I can achieve [emphasis mine].

- Julie Erickson, commenter in "Becoming Powerful Makes You Less Empathetic"


The above bolded sentence is the cure for the mental disorder caused by power. I think it’s interesting that the shadow ego of the ENTJ, the type with the greatest tendency towards traits we think of as pychopathic (lack of empathy, drive to succeed regardless of their effect on others) is the service oriented ESFJ. I don’t think this coincidence. Here is a short description of ESFJs:

ESFJs who have had the benefit of being raised and surrounded by a strong value system that is ethical and centered around genuine goodness will most likely be the kindest, most generous souls who will gladly give you the shirt off of their back without a second thought. For these individuals, the selfless quality of their personality type is genuine and pure.

- Personality Page, ESFJ


ESFJs are powerful and love structure, just like ENTJs, but they are service oriented. This focus on how I can serve others, rather than what I can achieve is a key to not losing our damn minds when we get a little power. The other and related key is humility. By putting ourselves lower rather than above others – by stressing the service element of leadership – we not only rescue ourselves from possession, our power actually serves to make the world a better place.

Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end… He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded… Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.

- John 13:1



References

Corporation as Psychopath, Martin Brueckner
The Corporation (the full movie on YouTube)
21 percent of CEOs are psychopaths. Only 21 percent?, Gene Marks
Becoming Powerful Makes You Less Empathetic, Lou Solomon
Power Causes Brain Damage, Jerry Useem
Foot washing, Wikipedia

Reference: Power Causes Brain Damage

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake.

What was going through Stumpf’s head? New research suggests that the better question may be: What wasn’t going through it?

The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” But that’s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.

Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

That loss in capacity has been demonstrated in various creative ways. A 2006 study asked participants to draw the letter E on their forehead for others to view—a task that requires seeing yourself from an observer’s vantage point. Those feeling powerful were three times more likely to draw the E the right way to themselves—and backwards to everyone else (which calls to mind George W. Bush, who memorably held up the American flag backwards at the 2008 Olympics). Other experiments have shown that powerful people do worse at identifying what someone in a picture is feeling, or guessing how a colleague might interpret a remark.

The fact that people tend to mimic the expressions and body language of their superiors can aggravate this problem: Subordinates provide few reliable cues to the powerful. But more important, Keltner says, is the fact that the powerful stop mimicking others. Laughing when others laugh or tensing when others tense does more than ingratiate. It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from. Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” Keltner says, which leads to what he calls an “empathy deficit.”

Mirroring is a subtler kind of mimicry that goes on entirely within our heads, and without our awareness. When we watch someone perform an action, the part of the brain we would use to do that same thing lights up in sympathetic response. It might be best understood as vicarious experience. It’s what Obhi and his team were trying to activate when they had their subjects watch a video of someone’s hand squeezing a rubber ball.

For nonpowerful participants, mirroring worked fine: The neural pathways they would use to squeeze the ball themselves fired strongly. But the powerful group’s? Less so.

Was the mirroring response broken? More like anesthetized. None of the participants possessed permanent power. They were college students who had been “primed” to feel potent by recounting an experience in which they had been in charge. The anesthetic would presumably wear off when the feeling did—their brains weren’t structurally damaged after an afternoon in the lab. But if the effect had been long-lasting—say, by dint of having Wall Street analysts whispering their greatness quarter after quarter, board members offering them extra helpings of pay, and Forbes praising them for “doing well while doing good”—they may have what in medicine is known as “functional” changes to the brain.

I wondered whether the powerful might simply stop trying to put themselves in others’ shoes, without losing the ability to do so. As it happened, Obhi ran a subsequent study that may help answer that question. This time, subjects were told what mirroring was and asked to make a conscious effort to increase or decrease their response. “Our results,” he and his co-author, Katherine Naish, wrote, “showed no difference.” Effort didn’t help.

This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?

The sunniest possible spin, it seems, is that these changes are only sometimes harmful. Power, the research says, primes our brain to screen out peripheral information. In most situations, this provides a helpful efficiency boost. In social ones, it has the unfortunate side effect of making us more obtuse. Even that is not necessarily bad for the prospects of the powerful, or the groups they lead. As Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychology professor, has persuasively argued, power lessens the need for a nuanced read of people, since it gives us command of resources we once had to cajole from others. But of course, in a modern organization, the maintenance of that command relies on some level of organizational support. And the sheer number of examples of executive hubris that bristle from the headlines suggests that many leaders cross the line into counterproductive folly.

Less able to make out people’s individuating traits, they rely more heavily on stereotype. And the less they’re able to see, other research suggests, the more they rely on a personal “vision” for navigation. John Stumpf saw a Wells Fargo where every customer had eight separate accounts. (As he’d often noted to employees, eight rhymes with great.) “Cross-selling,” he told Congress, “is shorthand for deepening relationships.”

Is there nothing to be done?

No and yes. It’s difficult to stop power’s tendency to affect your brain. What’s easier—from time to time, at least—is to stop feeling powerful.

Insofar as it affects the way we think, power, Keltner reminded me, is not a post or a position but a mental state. Recount a time you did not feel powerful, his experiments suggest, and your brain can commune with reality.

Recalling an early experience of powerlessness seems to work for some people—and experiences that were searing enough may provide a sort of permanent protection. An incredible study published in The Journal of Finance last February found that CEOs who as children had lived through a natural disaster that produced significant fatalities were much less risk-seeking than CEOs who hadn’t. (The one problem, says Raghavendra Rau, a co-author of the study and a Cambridge University professor, is that CEOs who had lived through disasters without significant fatalities were more risk-seeking.)

But tornadoes, volcanoes, and tsunamis aren’t the only hubris-restraining forces out there. PepsiCo CEO and Chairman Indra Nooyi sometimes tells the story of the day she got the news of her appointment to the company’s board, in 2001. She arrived home percolating in her own sense of importance and vitality, when her mother asked whether, before she delivered her “great news,” she would go out and get some milk. Fuming, Nooyi went out and got it. “Leave that damn crown in the garage” was her mother’s advice when she returned.

The point of the story, really, is that Nooyi tells it. It serves as a useful reminder about ordinary obligation and the need to stay grounded. Nooyi’s mother, in the story, serves as a “toe holder,” a term once used by the political adviser Louis Howe to describe his relationship with the four-term President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Howe never stopped calling Franklin.

For Winston Churchill, the person who filled that role was his wife, Clementine, who had the courage to write, “My Darling Winston. I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be.” Written on the day Hitler entered Paris, torn up, then sent anyway, the letter was not a complaint but an alert: Someone had confided to her, she wrote, that Churchill had been acting “so contemptuous” toward subordinates in meetings that “no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming”—with the attendant danger that “you won’t get the best results.”

Lord David Owen—a British neurologist turned parliamentarian who served as the foreign secretary before becoming a baron—recounts both Howe’s story and Clementine Churchill’s in his 2008 book, In Sickness and in Power, an inquiry into the various maladies that had affected the performance of British prime ministers and American presidents since 1900. While some suffered from strokes (Woodrow Wilson), substance abuse (Anthony Eden), or possibly bipolar disorder (Lyndon B. Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt), at least four others acquired a disorder that the medical literature doesn’t recognize but, Owen argues, should.

“Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.

I asked Owen, who admits to a healthy predisposition to hubris himself, whether anything helps keep him tethered to reality, something that other truly powerful figures might emulate. He shared a few strategies: thinking back on hubris-dispelling episodes from his past; watching documentaries about ordinary people; making a habit of reading constituents’ letters.

But I surmised that the greatest check on Owen’s hubris today might stem from his recent research endeavors. Businesses, he complained to me, had shown next to no appetite for research on hubris. Business schools were not much better. The undercurrent of frustration in his voice attested to a certain powerlessness. Whatever the salutary effect on Owen, it suggests that a malady seen too commonly in boardrooms and executive suites is unlikely to soon find a cure.

Jerry Useem, Power Causes Brain Damage (The Atlantic, August 2017)

Maintaining a relationship with the animal body

Reference for an upcoming post on shame:

Here is a question by Dr. Harding: “Can you take up in further detail the section in the chapter on the Compassionate Ones where Nietzsche speaks of man as the animal with red cheeks? The interpretation given at the last seminar that he was ashamed on account of the unconsciousness of his fellow man does not seem adequate to me. Is there not an analogy with the story of Eden where we are told that when Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree of knowledge they were ashamed before God of their nakedness, which had never bothered them before? And perhaps – who knows? – they may have been ashamed of their clothes before the other animals? In fact, does not consciousness itself carry its own burden of guilt because the discerning one can no longer act with the complete rightness of unconscious instinct?”

Well, you have answered your question yourself, practically. That shame is of course a very typical reaction; it is a primitive reaction which clearly shows the distance that exists between the ego consciousness and the original unconsciousness of mere instinct. As long as man is in a merely instinctive animal condition, there is absolutely no ground for shame, no possibility of shame even, but with the coming of ego consciousness, he feels apart from the animal kingdom and the original paradise of unconsciousness, and then naturally he is inclined to have feelings of inferiority. The beginning of consciousness is characterized by feelings of inferiority, and also by megalomania. The old prophets and philosophers say nothing is greater than man, but on the other side nothing is more miserable than man, for the ego consciousness is only a little spark of light in an immense darkness. Yet it is the light, and if you pile up a thousand darknesses you don’t get a spark of light, you don’t make consciousness. Consciousness is the sun in the great darkness of the world. Man is just a little lantern in the world of darkness, and as soon as you have a certain amount of ego consciousness naturally you are isolated and become self-conscious – you can’t help it – and naturally you no longer possess the absolute simplicity of nature: you are no longer naïve. It is a great art and a great difficulty to become like unto a child again – or better still, like unto an animal; to become like an animal is then the supreme ideal.

When you have built up your consciousness to a decent degree, you become so separated from nature that you feel it to be a disadvantage; you feel that you have fallen from grace. This is of course the expulsion from paradise. Then life becomes ego misery and lawlessness and you must create artificial laws in order to develop a feeling of obedience. Having ego consciousness means that you have a certain amount of disposable willpower, which of course means arbitrary feelings and decisions, disobedience of natural laws and so on; and that gives you a terrible feeling of being lost, cursed, isolated, and wrong altogether. And of course this causes feelings of shame. Compare your state of innocence with the innocence of a little child and you have ground for shame; and compared with an animal you are nowhere. So the dawn of consciousness was naturally a tremendous problem to man; he had to invent a new law-abiding world of obedience, the careful observance of rules; instead of the herd or the natural animal state, he had to invent an artificial state. He has now succeeded in making of the state a tremendous monster, such as nature probably never would have tolerated, but he had to do it in order to compensate that sentiment d’incompletude, d’insuffisance. For we should not live instinctively any longer. We had to invent machines and law books and morals in order to give mankind a feeling of being in order, of being in a decent condition – something similar to paradise where the animals knew how to behave with each other. You see, the great world seems to be a self-regulating orderliness, an organism that moves and lives in a more or less decent way. The catastrophes are not too great or too many. There are not too many diseases – only a decent amount to kill off enough animals. But we know that we can break out at any time and destroy as no volcano and no epidemic ever destroyed, and we chiefly injure our own species; we would not dream of making an international war against flies or microbes or against whales or elephants – it isn’t worthwhile – but it is worthwhile when it is against man. That is so much against nature that on the other side, man seeks to protect himself by complicated machines, states, and contracts which he cannot observe. So this first reaction of shame symbolizes the moment when man felt his tragic difference from paradise, his original condition.

Yet that original condition was also not a very happy one. The primitive man did not feel his unconscious to be very satisfactory. He tried to get away from it. Of course, we have the idea that the original condition was a wonderful paradise, but as a matter of actual fact man has always tried to move away from that unconsciousness. All his many ceremonies were attempts to create a more conscious condition, and any new positive acquisition in the field of consciousness was praised as a great asset, a great accomplishment. Prometheus stealing the fire from the immortal gods has become a savior of mankind, and man’s greatest triumph was that God himself incarnated in man in order to illumine the world; that was a tremendous increase of consciousness. But every increase of consciousness means a further separation from the original animal-like condition, and I don’t know where it will end: it is really a tragic problem. We have to discover more consciousness, to extend consciousness, and the more it is extended the more we get away from the original condition.

The body is the original animal condition; we are all animals in the body, and so we should have animal psychology in order to be able to live in it. Yes, if we had no body then we could live with contracts and marvelous laws which everybody could observe and a marvelous morality which everybody could easily fulfil. But since we have a body it is indispensable that we exist also as an animal, and each time we invent a new increase of consciousness we have to put a new link in the chain that binds us to the animal, till finally it will become so long that complications will surely ensure. For when the chain between man and animal has grown so long that we lose sight of the animal, anything can happen in between, and the chain will snarl up somewhere. That has happened already and therefore we doctors have to find in a conscious individual the place where the chain begins; we have to go back and find out where it has been caught or what has happened to the animal at the other end of the line. Then we have to shorten it perhaps, or disentangle it, in order to improve the relationship between the consciousness that went too far ahead and the animal left behind.

- CG Jung, from Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra

Reference: The vulgarity of eating

Because wolves are the personification of hunger – one is hungry as a wolf. So when he protects the corpse from the wolves, he [Nietzsche] is protecting it from being eaten by the appetite in himself which he tries to forget. You will remember he says of his hunger before, “And all day it hath failed to come: where hath it been?” This means that he did not realize his hunger for his body; he forgot his body altogether. Therefore, the body died; he overcame it. But the hunger ought to convince him that he should eat his body; then he would return to his humanity and become an ordinary human being. If you want to be an extraordinary human being, don’t eat: people who eat become vulgar. Therefore, many people make a point of not eating before others.

----------

Sipphas [followers of a religious sect] believe that it is indecent to feed before each other, so they turn their backs when they eat, or find a place where nobody sees them. To them it is just as indecent as the opposite functions of the body. Eating before others is understood by many people as a sort of taboo; there is mana in it which can easily turn into its own opposite. And here Zarathustra protects his body against the wolves because he tries to make sure that his sanctity or his superiority shall not become injured through the vulgarity of eating, which would put him down to the level of common humanity. To fill himself with physical matter would make him heavy and he could not dance any longer. He could not fly, he would be fettered to the earth. Therefore, in ascetic forms of religion people refrain from eating in order to attain spirituality; in a certain season of the year, or on certain day of the week, they make themselves light by not filling the stomach. They assume that in eating they consume all the dirt of the earth and are fettered by the earth by the heaviness of the belly. So eating is a sort of symbolism…

- C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra



Symbols:
Food/eating
Body
Earth
Flying
Wolf

See also:
Anorexia Mirabilis

Our "underdeveloped countries"

Our conscious realm is like a room with four doors, and it will be the fourth door by which the shadow, the animus, and the anima and the personification of the Self will come in. They will not enter as often through the other doors, which in a way is self-evident, because the inferior function is so close to the unconscious and remains so barbaric and inferior and undeveloped that it is naturally the weak spot in consciousness through which the figures of the unconscious can break in. In consciousness it is experienced as a weak spot, as that disagreeable thing which will never leave you in peace but always causes trouble, for every time you feel you have acquired a certain balance or inner standpoint, something happens from within or without to throw you off again, and it is always through that fourth door, which you cannot shut. You can keep the three doors of your inner room closed, but on the fourth door the lock does not work, and there, when you do not expect it, the unexpected will come in again. Thank God, you can say, for otherwise the whole life process would petrify and stagnate in a wrong kind of consciousness. It is the ever-bleeding wound of the conscious personality, but through it the unconscious can always come in and so enlarge consciousness and bring forth new experience.

As long as you have not developed your other functions, your auxiliary functions, they too will be open doors, so in a person who has only developed one superior function, the two auxiliary functions will operate in the same way and will appear in personifications of the shadow, animus, and anima. It is only when you have succeeded in developed three functions, in locking three of your inner doors, that the problem of the fourth door still remains, for that is the one which is apparently not meant to be locked. There one has to succumb, one has to suffer defeat, in order to develop further. So if you attend to your own dreams, you will see that these inner figures, if they appear personified as real persons, tend to choose such personifications. Another kind of personification, which naturally has to do with the shadow, is that the fourth function is contaminated with personifications from the lower levels of the social strata of the population or by the underdeveloped countries. That is a beautiful expression – the “underdeveloped” countries. It is just marvelous how we Westerners in our superior arrogance look down on the underdeveloped countries and project our inferior functions upon them! The underdeveloped countries are within ourselves, and therefore, naturally, because this is such an obvious symbolism, the inferior function for a white person often appears as a wild Negro or a wild Indian. Frequently also the inferior function is expressed by exotic people of some kind: Chinese, Russian, or whoever may give that quality. The unconscious tries in this way to convey the quality of something unknown to the conscious realm, as if it would say: it is as unknown to you as the Chinese are unknown in your culture. The shadow, animus, and anima appear very often projected onto Asian or African or “primitive” people.

- Marie Louise von Franz, “Psychotherapy”

This is why it's so important to come to terms with the people (and creatures) that live within our unconscious; the "primitive" is within us... the criminal, the underdeveloped, all of it is us. Until more of us start to realize that our prejudices are actually the fear and hatred we have of our own shadow, we will continue marching down the road of violence.

Mood of destruction and renewal

A mood of universal destruction and renewal… has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos – the right moment – for a “metamorphosis of the gods”, of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science… So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern man.

- Jung, CG, (1970) Civilization in Transition



See also:
Apocalypse

"The Fate of Depth Psychology in the New Millenium"

Analytical psychology is a celebration of becoming. I believe that the image for becoming is the child, and I propose that in this image is to be found our future, and the hope of our work. I’ve been thinking about the child as reality, as image, and as archetype for some time now. This is because I am working on connections I have with my own childhood home, a house on the Connecticut shore where my mother still lives, and where she and her parents spent each summer after her 12th birthday. Where my father courted her. Where my grandmother and my parents and I and my children made four generations together year after year. A house in which I have spent at least a part of every one of the 64 summers since the year after my birth. And this returning and returning and returning of mine has as well a parallel in our work, in the ongoing and returning pattern of analysis.

I go through the front door of my mother’s house and I am surrounded by a slightly sweet, slightly musty atmosphere that has never changed. I walk into my analyst’s office and sit down and begin to enter a timeless realm, sealed off from ordinariness, from the press of things and obligations. Or, a person in my practice finds my office inhabited by her past, the same constant atmosphere, the same air laden with projection, and memory, and image. I walk into the summer house and, if the door to the terrace is open, I can feel the salt breeze from the sound and I can hear small waves breaking and dissolving into foam among the tangles of seaweed and rocks that line the shore just below the house. In the space of analysis the sea, the tides, the wind, the sun rising and setting are the rhythms underneath the work, we go out and we return from dark to light to dark. A child such as I was returning each summer to the same place becomes lost in sameness. I made my own time as an only child will because my parents had their own life more fun and more rewarding for them than a small boy was. So I created a world for myself and then lived in it quite happily. What I was missing went into the dark in the ways you all know so well. Time stopped and the moment of the house stretched out the past of school and schedules was gone and the future became unnecessary or irrelevant all summer long. As in analysis a dream is constellated from a timeless place, it hangs timelessly in the air between two people. It may excite or frighten or seem crazily useless, it may open a deep space. We fall into a shock the surprise of the utterly new.

In the house a storm, in fact a hurricane in 1938, shook the walls wind and rain stripped the leaves from the trees and plastered the south side of the house with them. A gigantic willow tree fell. Gales peeled shingles off the roof and water streamed into the attic and then the bedroom and living room ceilings. Waves and the high tide bent the terrace doors and sea water washed through the hall. We could not hear ourselves over the voices in the wind. The storm passed, the repairs were made. The house like psyche itself is both unchanging and vulnerable, safe and threatened, moving and unmoved. I the child and the timeless realm of summer dropped into the timeless archetypal ground, but that same child growing and exploring this unvarying space found himself caught up in the inexorable flow of time represented by learning to swim, learning to ride a two wheeler, learning to drive, to kiss. One summer an aunt sleeping peacefully died. A few summers later my grandfather, surrounded by medicines and IVs, died in another upstairs room. Years later when my father, a lover of landscapes and gardens, lay dying in that same room he could see outside his window a maple tree I’d just had planted for him. It flourishes now, shading the terrace. Oh, as I was young and easy under the apple boughs time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea. So in our work we go in and out of time, and thus in every session the child in us experiences both inexorable change and eternal presence. Each year I grew older but each year the tide pools among the rocks filled and emptied, each year the sun sets into the sound beyond Griswold Island or Hatchett's Point. And each year in the gathering darkness the herring gulls and the black crowned night herons squawked their nightly choruses from distant rocks and from a rookery on a nearby hill, shrieking and innocent, and then quieting mysteriously only to start again. Each year lying in the dark with the bedroom window open to the air I listened and wondered. In our work we descend into such dark, timeless realms and we return to the mundane daylight. We provide a place where this is safe and, indeed, honored work. We provide the safety of return together with the threat and the reality of moving toward something as yet unknown to us and to the people with whom we work. We are trained to find these things out for ourselves with necessary help. Tennyson’s Ulysses speaks to us:

“Something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

And here is TS Elliot describing a world both inner and other, a world to be forever explored:

“The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
    The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
    Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
    Its hints of earlier and other creation:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated, the dead and the living. Here and there does not matter; we must be still and still moving into another intensity, for further union and deeper communion, through the dark cold and the empty desolation.

"We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time."

We know these things. This is what we honor in our work. We provide a space both safe and hazardous, known and unknown, all at once; a space charged with all the contradiction and opposites but nevertheless humane and sympathetic, a space in which the gestures and images of the inner life are honored and sustained, the whole informed by an idea of order. It is the space we deserved as children but seldom, if ever, had. Such a space has unmeasurable value. We provide it; this is why we have a future.

- Dan Lindley, PhD, LCSW (Jungianthology Podcast, 1/1/18)


See also:
House
Child
Ocean
Journey


Links:
Dan Lindley, PhD, LCSW (CG Jung Institute of Chicago)
"Ulysses," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Four Quartets," by T.S. Eliot
"Little Gidding," T.S. Eliot

The Archimedian point

Do things happen accidentally, or do we call them to us? An easy, and true answer, is yes to both; to only believe that one is true is to become one-sided, the great sin of the psyche.

Another good, and true, answer is to say yes... but it’s not in a blaming way. If we call negative experiences to us then it’s not our conscious, not our ego (“ourselves”) that’s doing it but another part of us, one which is as alien and other as another person entirely.

The other thing, and probably most important thing, is that these opposites - “It’s all your fault if bad things happen to you!” And “How dare you say it’s someone’s fault! Are you saying an innocent child asks for bad things to happen to them?????” - these opposites are secretly united. This is why, for example, Erykah Badu’s response that even Hitler has something good about him both irritated but also failed to arouse the truly strong, almost violent, reactions that others got. The sinner and the righteous warrior of goodness and purity are two halves of the same whole. The light, by it’s very existence, calls darkness into existence. One half can never defeat its other half... or if it does it risks self-annihilation. This why we must find a dialectical solution, one which gets beyond the pair of opposites. An Archimedean point outside the battle. It’s only when you get beyond sinner and saint that a true peace can be attained.

The end of the world doesn't scare me, but it does make me sad

I've been thinking about the end of the world a lot (unsurprisingly). Scientists keep moving the date of ecological devastation from climate change closer and closer. The possibility that all the beautiful life on this planet could be destroyed is such a tragedy. Every once in a while it just hits you, how close to the edge we are.

This is one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands. It really captures this feeling. The video destroys me every time I watch it, without fail.

Sai, by Acidman


We're Now Even Closer to the Point of No Return (Esquire)
Indulge Your Existential Dread 24/7 With This Real-Time Global Warming Clock (Earther)

The missing half

I’ve been ruminating for months and months about what psychology really is. It’s treated like a science - most psychologists (including Jung!) want it to be a science. The reason Freud is still discussed in psychology classes, even though he was clearly full of shit, is because Freud shared this desire. Even Jung had some tendencies in this direction but, as a thoroughgoing empiricist, he knew when to give up this lifesaver and actually swim in the water. In fact, I think this was his whole point: his theory is based on reality... however, that reality includes spirituality! By refusing a priori to even look at the possibility that psychology has a spiritual aspect, these people are denying what is actually true, which is why they can never find out how to create deep, fundamental change in people.

What I’ve been struggling with is: how much of psychology is spiritual? This morning, as I was waking up, I realized that of course psychology is spiritual, because everything is spiritual! Psychology, even Jungian psychology, isn’t spirituality, but when you go deep enough it is. But this isn’t something unique to psychology alone. For example, go far enough into physics and again, you come to spirituality.

The thing is... everything is spiritual at its deepest place. Art, ecology, politics, farming, wood-working, cooking, everything. This is, in fact, our disease, the fact that we’ve forgotten this. Jung wrote about the “infrared” and “ultraviolet” ends of the archetypes; that is, our instincts and the spiritual archetypes that both live within us. The thing is, the entire world, all of reality and every part of it, has an infrared and an ultraviolet end. It’s just more obvious in psychology.

Until recently religion served to regulate the psyche. When religion lost its place of importance, we needed psychology to fill that gap. And the reason that modern psychology fails us over and over is that spirituality is a uniquely large and fundamental part, at every level, of the process of psychological healing, which is really actually spiritual healing. Instead, it’s techniques fail to create fundamental change in us but rather merely clean up the most shallow parts of our wounds (stick bandaids on them one might say). But what's not unique about psychology is the fact that it has a fundamental spiritual component. And how can that not be the case, since reality itself is spiritual, or ultraviolet, as well as infrared.

The illnesses of our time are caused by the lack of awareness of this spiritual side of reality. In fact, the illness of our time is at root this lack; everything else - the wars, the social and racial unrest, the looming nuclear destruction and actual ecological devastation - are just symptoms of this fundamental disease. The fact that we have forgotten this whole half of reality is the cause of everything wrong, not only in our individual lives but in the world at large. Just as our lives would fall apart if we failed to grasp the physical side, so it is falling apart because we have forgotten the spiritual side. Our world is reflecting this illness back on us. And as nothing in our individual lives will truly improve until we grasp this, so too will nothing fundamentally improve in the world until we come to understand both its halves.

Article: Ursula K. Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards; "Books aren't just commodities"

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

- Ursula K. Le Guin


Commodification is a symptom of the disease the world is suffering. Commodification is, at its root, Ego run amock, completely unmoored from the ground of the Unconscious, and the Self. This is why the spiritual is so denigrated in the world today. Or, what is considered “spiritual” is often just another attempt by Ego to “get it’s use” out of the world.

Ego is necessary. It is what allows us to survive in the world. It is also what allows us grow spiritually; without a solid ego, we wouldn’t have a boat large enough and strong enough to go out on the deep, turbulent waters of the unconscious and bring back the fish we caught. Ego is one leg, but we need both legs to walk.


Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards: 'Books aren't just commodities' (The Guardian)

Anorexia Mirabilis

The head of St. Catherine of Siena

We’ve been taught so effectively to loathe fat people, and especially women who refuse to make themselves small and convenient, that not even the endless drive for profit can convince some of the world’s most enthusiastic capitalists to consider them a priority.

- Amanda Mull, "Why Aren’t Fashion ‘Disruptors’ Serving Plus-Size Customers?"



First, blog news: It’s been pretty quiet here at 2Biat, and that is because I’ve been studying for my final exam. And there's also all the holiday madness that happens every year at this time, so there’s a short hiatus happening. However, I had a little brainwave today that I wanted to share to this blog.

One of the things I’m studying about is eating disorders. This is something I have a very personal relationship with. It’s been a long time but for years I hated myself, and hated my body in particular. It took a long time to heal all those wounds. And this is, sadly, a very common problem.

We have a history of starving the body, everything from sages in the desert to the tradition of girls fasting to show how close to God they are. Modern anorexia is basically the same thing as this religious anorexia. Both are hateful towards the body, carnality, desire, and anything perceived of as “weakness,” especially moral weakness. Both are attempts to destroy the feminine within the body.

To love a large, curving, ample female body is to love the flesh. To hate the flesh is to hate the feminine Goddess that lives within the flesh, in our body. This is sharpest in anorexia but the societal obsession with small, spare, hungry bodies – bodies from which all the soft, warm animal comfort has been carved away – is in itself hatred toward the feminine because the body, the animal, is the feminine principle.

The way out of the pit of self-hatred is self-love. When we can finally acknowledge the tremendous work our bodies do, keeping us alive and bearing the burden of our abuse and contempt, then we can finally become friends with ourselves. And more, we can finally literally start to embody the missing sacred feminine back into the world, through our soft, fragile, but amazing and resilient bodies.

… And now you see more what the jewels behind the meat are. Our hero wanted the flesh and instead he fell into the jewels, the eternal or the divine. He has to realize that divine aspect of the flesh. It is not enough for instance, for a Christian who has up until now despised the flesh, to say, “now I’m going to throw my prudish prejudices overboard. I’m going to have juicy sex and enjoy it.” That would be eating the flesh. That’s nothing. If he does that he doesn’t move one inch out of the old kingdom, he’s still caught in it. He only adds the dimension of so-called sin to it. But nothing has happened. He has to realize that the flesh is a form of the divine, a divine revelation, and that sexuality is divine.

That’s what Jung fought with Freud about. He agreed completely with Freud that sex should be liberated and should be lived, not treated with prudish repression, but he wanted to say that sex is a religious experience as in Tantra. And if you live it, therefore, only with the idea, “That’s very healthy for my hormones and makes me physically better,” then you have missed the whole point. Then you have eaten dead meat, rotten meat. The redemption of the feminine means not the redemption of the flesh; it means the redemption of the divinity of the flesh, of the divine, archetypal, godlike aspect of the flesh…

- The Cat: The Virgin's shadow



Further reading:

Anorexia Mirabilis and the Fasting Girls (Megan, cvltnation.com)
The Cat: Redeeming the feminine


[Image from Anorexia Mirabilis and the Fasting Girls]

Symbolism: Apocalypse

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

False promise of a Golden Age
Life Without the Sacred
"What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital"
"What Would C.G. Jung Say about Donald Trump"

Achieving peace

Yoko Ono's action for peace, like all other such actions, is beautiful but ineffective. The call for peace is the agonizing beauty of a lovely dream hovering over ugly reality. The dream of peace is real, but it's a mirage. It's not the enemy but the pointer towards the path to reach the goal. Peace is not now, but it may exist in our future if we do what is necessary for it. Political revolution is necessary, yes, but equally so is individuation.

Individuation sounds so abstract, a purely intellectual construct with nothing in reality. But it's the world of star and stone; the eternal, in comparison to the transitory world. The more people get free from possession, the more ability they have to achieve things of worth and meaning. The thing of worth and meaning for you may be simply becoming a little bit more yourself... or it may be world shaking. We each have our own task to accomplish, the failure of which is our great tragedy, the success of which adds it's incremental weight to the side of peace.


Article:
Yoko Ono Calls for Peace on the Anniversary of John Lennon's Death (Time Magazine)

Article: "A Psychic Profile on President Donald J. Trump"

Just posting something that got my attention - I've been thinking a lot about the concentrated need for bringing balance to our culture. We've gone so far to the extreme of practicality, so far from our spiritual roots. The need is urgent for all of us to, as much as possible, get our spiritual act together.

We are in a quickened ascension process right now, which, in plain terms means we’re having to deal with a whole bunch of garbage at once, emotionally, sociologically, spiritually, and psychologically. Standard western society has taught us to compartmentalize every aspect of ourselves and our lives. Yet we are now face-to-face with the reality that mind, body, and spirit are indivisible.

Why must this lesson be driven so intensely? Because nature wastes nothing and prepares for everything, and the climate will be experiencing further changes coming up quickly where everyone’s" participation is mandatory for survival.
It is in our best interest as a species to give away the idea of one ideology, one savior, one President, fixing everything. Together we are the body of positive change, the collective mind of evolution. There is no us-vs-them.
We ARE them.

View the larger whole of President Trump for who and what he is. And view yourself for who and what you are. We are all part of the solution to avarice and world destruction.

Thanks to lessons President Trump is bringing us, publicly submitting himself for perhaps the greatest example of spiritual, emotional and social disconnection we’ve seen in decades — we grow faster, in observance. There is great gratitude to be had for his service in this regard.

Be okay to learn, and don’t always take the lessons personally that are intended for the world. That gets rough. Invoke the Law of Love — lead your own life with grace, respect, and of course, love, the greatest element on the spiritual periodic table.

All of that, met with a little good ol’ fashioned elbow grease, integrity, humility and hard work —

— and the rest falls into place, healing the world.

Because nothing is wasted.

- Danielle Egnew, "Insider Look: A Psychic Profile on President Donald J. Trump"

The Dog

As usual, whenever I'm working on an issue I end up synchronistically running across a bunch of related topics at around the same time. Since working on the The Cat series I found some interesting dog quotes. I will also be posting a meditation I had a while back about "cats" and "dogs." This is all particularly applicable to what we've been going through recently here in the U.S., I think.

Also, a random observation: I think it's really interesting how people who like dogs tend to very dog-like, i.e. more conservative, fall more in line with the old Emperor; while "cat people" seem to generally be more progressive, feminist, and to value independent thinking more. Symbolism in action!

The dog has lost his independence and become dependent on human beings. Both Saint Barnard and Saint Dominic were also servants of a master: Christ. This is the motif of the katoche. They are the prisoners of a special fate; every impulse to live their own life is controlled; they are really the dogs of Christ, serving him in this world and as dogs leading to hope of the other world. They are also responsible for keeping the flock together, since heretics are the wolves or "the little foxes, that spoil the vines."

These particular "dogs," however, have a negative aspect as well, for they served only one point of view; they did not deal with the problem of their time. Bernard was incapable of engaging in discussion with Abelard, he only "barked" at him! And Dominic "barked" at the Albigenses. We must not overlook the fact that this was the beginning of the Inquisition, which attempted to eliminate, through sheer power, every heretical movement. As a result, however, the religious confrontation became increasingly fanatic. Such a solution of the conflict is no solution; but at that time man was not yet capable of dealing with the problem in an individual, human manner.

- Marie Louise von Franz, Dreams, p. 101

The thin thread

As I was watching a video about Jung this particular section hit me hard. Trump is America's screaming Id in human form. Now more than ever we need to do everything in our power to prevent catastrophe in our own time.

When you observe the world you see people, you see houses, you see the sky, you see tangible objects. But when you observe yourself within you see moving images, a world of images, generally known as fantasies. Yet these fantasies are fact. It is a fact that a man has such and such fantasy, and it is such a tangible fact that when a man has a certain fantasy another man may lose his life. Or a bridge is built. These houses were all fantasies. Everything you do here, all of it was fantasy to begin with, and fantasy has a proper reality that is not to be forgotten. Fantasy is not nothing! It is of course not a tangible object but it is a fact nevertheless. It is, say, a form of energy, despite the fact we can’t measure it. It is a manifestation of something. And that is a reality that is just a reality as, for instance, the peace treaty of Versailles or something like that. It is no more… you can’t show it, but it has been a fact! And so psychical events are facts, are realities, and when you observe the stream of images within you observe an aspect of the world, the world within.

… The man who is going by the external world, by the influences of the external world - say, society or sense perceptions - thinks that he is more valid because this is valid, this is real, and the man who goes by the subjective factor is is not valid because the subjective factor is “nothing.” No, that man is just as well based because he bases himself upon the world from within, and so he is quite right even if he says “Oh, it’s nothing but my fantasy.” Of course that is the introvert, the introvert is always afraid of the external world. He will tell you when you ask him… he will be apologetic about it. “Of course, yes I know, it’s only my fantasy.” And he has always a resentment, against the world in general. Particularly America is extroverted like hell. The introvert has no place. Because he doesn’t know that he beholds the world from within. And that gives him dignity, and that gives him certainty because (nowadays particularly) the world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man. Assume that certain fellows in Moscow lose their nerve, or their common sense, and the whole world is in fire and flames!

Nowadays we are not threatened by elemental catastrophes. There’s no such thing as an H-bomb [in nature]. That is all man’s doing. We are the great danger, psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche? So you see it is demonstrated to us in our days, what power the psyche is, how important it is to know something about it, but we know nothing about it.

From: "The World Within: C.G. Jung In His Own Words" (go to 10:00)

Response: Can women have an anima?

[The original article by Karen Hodges, “Reflections on Women, Depression, and Soul-image,” is available on the internet as a download (I can't get a link to include in this post - you're going to have to search Google for it. And you should, it's a great essay.)]


I don't know what this woman experienced, whether she does in fact have an anima or she's mistaken. Maybe what she's experiencing is actually the anima. Or maybe it's the Self/the Wise Woman. The powerful, Goddess-like woman with a scythe is the Goddess of Death, the most mysterious part of our lives (along with rebirth - we come from Mystery and return to Mystery, this Goddess is both the usherer of the mystery as well as the Mystery itself.)

The more I think about it, the more her description of her experience feels like she encountered the Wise Woman, or possibly an inner Goddess figure (i.e. the Self). We women need contact with the deep, powerful, numinous feminine in our lives; it's such a desert out there. This may be why so many feminists dislike the Jungian concept of the animus and anima. The most obvious reason is because they (and others - I've actually found men's rights activist Jungians!!!) confuse archetypal attributes with blanket statements about all members of a specific gender ("Jung says the anima is nurturing, and the animus is good at thinking! That means he thinks women can't think!!!") Clearly, I don't think this is what he was saying but I'll save that for another post.

The truth is, there's not enough of the feminine out there, whether it's the nurturing side, or the Goddess as the devourer. The nurturing Great Mother and the sexy Aphrodite Goddess of attraction may be more sought after, but even they're not really given respect. The Great Mother is demeaned as "merely" a stay-at-home-mom, while Aphrodite is called a slut and a whore. The only Goddess who gets any respect is the meek, inoffensive Maiden. But even the Great Mother and Aphrodite are treated better in this society than the Reaper Goddess; a woman may be denigrated for being a mother or a sexual being but society will try to obliterate her if she manifests Kali. I believe that what offends the author, and other women, is the lack of space for, and respect for, all the different parts of us; the ugly, the terrible, the horrifying, as well as the pretty and nice parts.

Then again, the point isn't to prove what's "right" and tell people what they "should" believe. It's not a goddam religion. From my perspective it looks like this and not that. That's what's important; if anyone else gets a little shock of recognition that shocks them into understanding their truth, then that's great. But the important thing is for us to discover our own truth, as much as possible. Then we can see if maybe it has value for others.