DRAGON MOTHER

A New Look at the Female Psyche

by
Michael Tsarion

Copyright ©2019 Unslaved Media. All Rights
Reserved.

First Kindle Edition, September 2015

Revised Kindle Edition, January 2019

No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any mechanical,
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permission.

Dedications

This book is dedicated to the memory of
William Blake, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Weininger, Erich Neumann, Otto
Rank, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Ludwig Binswanger, Arthur
Janov, Nathaniel Branden, Alice Miller, Melanie Klien and Karen
Horney.

Cover Art

The Madonna and Child, by Marianne Stokes.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Man and His World

Where Problems Begin

The Six Types

Psychic Incest

The Making of Heaven and Hell

Acts of Psychic Tyranny

Logos and Sophia

The Origins of Violence and Destructiveness

Lunar and Solar

Who Made The Sun?

Time, Freedom, Nature

Many a False Path

Origin of the Death Instinct

APPENDIX ONE

APPENDIX TWO

APPENDIX THREE

APPENDIX FOUR

ABOUT AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

The psychological matriarchate is the period in which the
unconscious is dominant, in which consciousness has not yet gained
independence. In this phase a man, not yet centered in
ego-consciousness, lived like an infant in the unitary reality
– Erich Neumann

In my books Atlantis and Disciples of the Mysterium I
consider the effects and after-effects of the so-called Age of
Catastrophe. I show that what we experience today as ego-consciousness
is the outcome of ancient trauma, and that no understanding of our
modern world is possible until we seriously accept that every human
being, from infancy on, suffers not only deep-set trauma but historical
amnesia.

One of the effects of the trauma is dissociation. That is, we
have collectively blocked out the memory of the universal terrestrial
cataclysms that disaffected our ancestors about thirteen or so
thousand years ago. Nevertheless, as I show in my work, despite our
penchant for dissociation the trauma continues to cause subliminal
anxiety which in turn impairs not only our relationship with ourselves
but our relationships with nature and the society in which we find
ourselves. It leads to the cocktail of existential troubles that so
many people experience on a day to day basis. Consequently, we will
not be in a viable position to heal the surface anxiety or subsurface
trauma until we reinvestigate how modern ego-consciousness began and
what must be done in order to return to a psychically hygienic state.

In this book I again take up the all-important question of
ancestral trauma in order to show how it set off a chain of events
that undergirds, conditions and determines the mother-child
relationship.

The nature of this relationship is of course vitally important.
Every child grows to adulthood bearing the emotional complexion
determined by his or her mother in the days and weeks after
conception. Since she, like all humans, bears within herself on a
non-conscious level the disturbance of bygone days, it goes without
saying that her child will likewise inherit the traumatic condition.
What is more, if she – during her own infancy or in utero
– suffered emotional or physical abuse at the hands of her
parents, it is unlikely that her offspring will grow up to be
psychically whole beings. I believe that this is the situation that
persists throughout the modern world. This problem beset our forebears
who survived cataclysms but it persists and worsens as a problem
today.

This is the situation on a personal level and for society as a whole.
The inviolable fact to acknowledge in the pursuit of health in all
situations is that present trauma bioenergetically stirs and
even awakens the memory of previous experiences of trauma. Once this
fact sinks in, we'll be able to explain a great deal when it comes to
deviant and pathological behavior. We'll be able to expertly see what
so many sages professed about the intimate connections between psychic
and physical energy.

From what I've said it follows that healing cannot occur unless
women become aware of this problem enough to do something constructive
about it. This inevitably means an upgrading of Self-knowledge and
psychological insight. I speak of women's responsibility because the
average child does not come under the direct psychological influence
of their father until much later in its mental and emotional
development, after the damage has already been done. Moreover, the
father is himself a male whose consciousness is the outcome of his
prenatal and postnatal relationship with his own mother. Therefore
unless his mother was a composed Self-loving person, and unless he is
himself an exceptionally grounded insightful man, he will not be in a
position to significantly reconfigure the fundamental structure of his
child's consciousness. And let us not doubt that this is his duty as a
father. This is not to say that he has no effect at all. Of course he
has. But the seeds of his child's temperament were laid and
under-nourished long before his influence comes to bear. The child's
psychic orientation, character and perception of Self and world are
already established. Exposure to and modification by a father's
interpretation of the external world can certainly help acculturate to
a degree, but cannot hope to radically adjust a consciousness
misshapen in natal and prenatal years by a mother with a malignant
relationship toward herself and the world, a situation made worse by
the effects of ancestral trauma operating at the root of her psyche.

In other words, if both parents are not aware of their innate trauma
and anxiety, and the subsequent psychic dissociation at work, they
will not be able to raise a psychosomatically healthy child.
Consequently they are bound to raise the unhealthy child who
goes on to have a malignant relationship with the world of people just
as emotionally arrested as himself. Since trauma exists at the root of
his being, boiling like lava, he is bound to regard nature as
something threatening. He does as his traumatized forebears did, and
build walls – both psychic and physical – to keep nature
out. Nature shook up the human race in the past, wiping out millions
of species and sinking continents. The umbilical cord was cut and
nature will not be trusted again. Men do not think this
consciously. No, their antipathy to nature is unconscious. But it is
deadly, since antipathy toward nature is ultimately antipathy toward oneself.
And it is this deficient Self-image that disturbs the fetus in the
womb. Crucially the symptoms of this attitudinal malignancy are to be
witnessed in the world around us. Each and every sociopolitical crisis
is rooted in it, as is each and every interpersonal psychosomatic
complex and syndrome. Essentially, the experience of pain and trauma
occurs right from the off, from the moment of conception. We shy away
from this fact and erroneously think pathology only occurs after
birth. If only this were the case.

In this book I deal directly with the trauma problem, emphasizing the
preconscious relationship between mother and child that so
crucially determines characterological development and moral
orientation. To assist in our investigation of the pre-Oedipal phase
of development, I introduce the reader to the work of the brilliant
Jungian psychoanalyst Erich Neumann. His text The Child, walks
us through the early stages of infant development, revealing just how
dependent an infant's consciousness is on that of its mother. This
remarkable book was not published in Neumann's own lifetime and is
barely known today either to Jungians or the general public. This is a
great shame, and it is therefore the secondary function of my book to
reacquaint the world with the outstanding work of Erich Neumann on the
fascinating process of child-development. This is not to say that I am
in complete agreement with every assessment Neumann makes about the
embryonic period or later stages of development. My text therefore
offers a penetrating critique of certain key ideas found throughout
Neumann's work, some of which were inherited from his mentor Carl
Gustav Jung.

In later chapters I address what Jung called the "Shadow
Archetype," and describe what I believe constitutes Shadow Work.
Although my ideas on this subject acknowledge aspects of what Jung
taught, I prefer to describe the Shadow Self in a manner more
consistent with the teachings of Wilhelm Reich. This is because Reich,
like Georg Groddeck before him, expertly deconstructed Freudian and
Jungian conceptions of the psyche and its divisions – id, ego
and superego. As far as Reich was concerned, the Shadow, as it is
called, is nothing more or less than the human body and its autonomic
processes. I ask you to be aware of the somewhat conflicting
descriptions about the Shadow, given that I address the subject from
both a hard Jungian and a Reichean perspective.

As far as Freudian paradigms are concerned, you will find several
revisions to Freud's central ideas herein. This is partly because of
my preference for the perspectives on child-development of Erich
Neumann and Otto Rank. It is also because I do not wholeheartedly
accept the Freudian explanation of how the image of the mother splits
into opposing imagos or halves. How she becomes both a good mother and
a bad mother at the same time, in the eyes of her child, is more
involved than most Freudians and Jungians acknowledge, and is a
process which occurs for deeper reasons than her competence as a
breast feeder or toilet trainer after birth. I present a more
controversial theory to account for the cause of the dichotomy between
the loving and terrible mother images that shape the consciousness of
every infant. I also prefer Neumann's theory about the origins of the
superego or center of morality. The classic Freudian belief is that
our moral sensibility is primarily shaped by the introjection of and
identification with the father's sense of what is right and wrong.
However, Freud underestimated the role of the mother in the formation
of the moral center. Neumann does not make the same mistake. His work
shows how both morality and immorality have their roots in pre-Oedipal
situations which commence, in most cases, before the role of the
father comes to bear. I also revise Freud's ideas about the supposed
father-son rivalry and on the emotionally incestuous relations that
occur between mothers and sons. Although Freud was the first thinker
to address the question of childhood trauma, my alternative reading of
his central ideas helps us better explain the reasons for a child's
attachment to a particular parent, as well as for "penis envy,"
autism, tantrums, sibling rivalry, hyperactivity, learning disorders,
delinquency and homosexuality, etc. I devote Appendix Three to a more
detailed assessment of Freud's classic ideas.

In this book I have deliberately kept things simple and non-technical.
It is important that every reader easily digests the subjects raised
here so that radical change can occur in their lives. As we know there
have been so many attempts at coming up with solutions to the world's
problems, but none deal with the legacy of ancestral trauma and
its psychological ramifications. It was the great Immanuel Velikovsky
who, in Mankind in Amnesia, had perceptive things to previously
say on the subject. Since his time the subject has barely been
mentioned in regards consciousness, and never in a meaningful context.
If we do not understand the past we are doomed to repeat all the error
made in the past. In fact that is what we appear to be supremely good
at. Little of the wisdom gleaned in humankind's past is found being
applied by the present generation. No, but we are neck-deep in
humankind's historical error and folly. It follows us like a perpetual
shadow, with no amount of light banishing it. This book explains why
this is and what can be done about it.

As said in previous works, we are in the early stages of healing
from ancestral trauma. Historically speaking the Age of Catastrophe
occurred a short time ago, so it is not surprising that we are still
so emotionally immature. We have taken refuge behind the high thick
walls of science and technology, and erected psychic barriers to boot.
Indeed as psychologists admit, the ego is a mass of defenses.

Fundamentally, when it comes to the genesis of trauma, one's sex
is largely immaterial. Sex is also relatively unimportant when we deal
with pre-Oedipal phases of development. What is important is that both
sexes suffer the effects of trauma in the deepest layers of their
unconscious. If the foundations of the ego are shaky and weak, as they
certainly are for most people, something must be done. Despite the
work of many great philosophers and psychologists, the human situation
in existential terms is getting steadily worse. The average person not
only victimizes themselves by way of regression and dissociation, but
by immersing themselves in the Crowd, and the manifold distractions
provided by a gadget-fixated world fast losing its humanity. By
refusing to look within and examine ourselves, perceptively and
dispassionately, we condemn ourselves to perpetual psychophobia or
self-hate and self-sadism. We fail to renew our communion with nature
in a holistic manner, treating nature instead as some kind of
decoration to our urban incarceration or recreational theme park. We
thereby lose the chance to bring ancient trauma to the present and
deal with it proactively in deliberately chosen natural settings.
Unlike initiated shaman, we do not open communion with nature, or
realize that in doing so we open a deeper communion with the Imperial
Self.

If it turns out to be true, as I know it to be in most cases,
that our relationship with our mothers was not sufficient to introduce
us holistically to the archetypal wisdom of nature, and our innate
Will to Meaning, then it is up to each person to do the work for
themselves, despite the lateness of the hour.

It is the purpose of this book to delineate the manner in which this
is to be accomplished. The return to nature is a return to the core of
one's being. But it is for the most part a deconstructive
process, which means it is unfamiliar to most people in the world. We
are not taught apophatically, and have no idea how to transcend the
subject versus object opposition. Unlike our pre-traumatized forebears
we do not know what it means to be phenomenologically present. Indeed
we normally act obliviously to the mediocrity of our daily lives. And
although we are predisposed to think that psychological work is
arduous and indistinct, we have immersed ourselves in a welter of
Self-Help books and teachers, allowing other people to sell us
superficial techniques to quickly lead to authenticity. The plethora
of works on Self-development, mindfulness, yoga and exotic meditation
indicate that dissatisfaction exists with what is normally experienced
in life. Something more real is being sought by an increasing
demographic. But again, none of these books and teachers, adept as
they may be in certain areas, deal with the all-important question of
ancestral trauma. Even the great works of philosophy and psychology do
no justice to the subject. This is a critical oversight, since as I
show in this book, personal trauma derives from parents who probably
experienced trauma from their parents who were also traumatized by
theirs. This vicious cycle of pain, grief, anger and defilement has a
very long etiology. This is why the problem of present personal trauma
cannot be considered independently of ancient collective trauma.

Patterns of mothering are passed down from mother to daughter
through the specific amount of care given and received. When the
daughter of a monkey becomes a mother herself, the amount of contact
she had with her mother precisely predicts the amount that she
bestows on her own daughter – Oliver James

In general, the earlier a negative pattern of experience occurs
in our childhood, be it sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, lack
of adequate nutrition...parental divorce or separation, parental
mental illness or parental financial misfortune, the greater the
likelihood of it still affecting us in adulthood – ibid

In my opinion the cycle of hand-me-down trauma and anxiety must
be broken if any kind of progress is to occur existentially and
socially. By addressing the question of trauma we deal with the roots
and fortitude of the Imperial Self. Therefore shortcuts that merely
remove the dust from the lens of the ego will not suffice to enhance
our experience of life or set our offspring on the right course toward
individuation. Nor will the comforting words of great minds ultimately
get to the roots of the psychosomatic maladies that attended us as we
are catapulted into the chaotic world made by others before us. The
problems found throughout our world got there by way of psychically
deranged people who avoided Self-work before we were born. A good many
of these people persecuted and marginalized sane hygienic souls who
knew what was wrong with the psyche and the world. They then passed on
leaving wayward descendants to clean up their messes. So much for our
parents.

Okay, since this is our lot, let's get on with the cleanup job.
To do so we must start from scratch. We must investigate the roots of
consciousness and understand that terrestrial trauma had the most
devastating effect upon it. Unless we are able to bring that trauma
into the light and deal with it holistically, we will never succeed in
setting things aright. It is this rot that must be uncovered and
healed.

The starting place is not Earth's history, but our own, beginning with
our relationship with our mothers. If she was a Self-aware,
Self-loving individual, we have nothing to worry about. If she was,
however, a terrible mother – lost to herself and infected
with self-hate, father-hate, mother-hate, world-hate and/or
nature-hate, we have everything to worry about. Deciding to radically
change this situation is a virtuous act. However, the process of
healing begins not with others or with the world. It begins with
ourselves and the children we raise and teach. This is the manner in
which ancient and modern – mythic and stereotypical –
worlds interrelate. We are each eternal mothers and fathers bearing
scars of the past but also the means of healing them. We are free to
make bad situations better or good situations worse. It is not a
cliché to say, therefore, that the future of humanity lies in our
hands.

CHAPTER ONE

Man and His World

C. G. Jung attributes many of the disorders of the child psyche
to psychic disorders of the parents. This means that, up to puberty,
there is normally a partially unconscious union between child and
parents, especially the mother – Erich Neumann

Imagine a single fragile plant growing in your garden. It hasn't
yet borne a flower but there are a few leaves moving slightly in the
gentle breeze. Now imagine the breeze which invisibly envelopes the
plant, trees, grass and bushes in your garden. Imagine the types of
weather experienced by the little plant as it grows. It goes without
saying that the plant does not grow in a silent vacuum, and that it is
entirely dependent on the world in which it stands. Now imagine the
soil in which it took root. Without that nurturing dark bed it cannot
hope to grow and thrive. If its roots are not deep how can it resist
the winds and gales that threaten to crush or topple it to the ground?
If its roots are in a poor soil, and not properly fed, what chance
does it have to rise high above the ground and bear flowers and fruit?
Surely the plant has its own interior life and movement, but it is
nothing without the preformed, preordered world in which it exists.
Its early moments of life, its dependency on the complex
pre-structured world around it, is not dissimilar to that of a human
child.

For a plant to make use of the many factors crucial to its
existence, supplied by the external environment, it must be equipped
with a synthesizing capacity. It must have an inbuilt ability to grasp
and absorb what is needed, as well as an ability to reject and avoid
what is hazardous and not required. Of course it is vital that this
faculty of synthesis or "centroversion" is not in some way impaired.
Should it be impaired the plant cannot hope to effectively integrate
with the external world on which its existence depends. Additionally,
life is threatened for our plant should the soil not only lack
nutrients but deliberately cease giving them up. If the wind ceases
blowing, and if the rain refuses to fall, life for the plant ceases
before long.

In a human infant the synthetic function will develop into, or
include, a value system. What is important to the child on a
biological level becomes what it values psychologically. This
development is not restricted to a single child. It has gone on from
the beginning. This is why a child's value system, as well as its
biological needs, are the outcome of evolution. It is phylogenetic as
well as ontogenetic. The content of a child's mind is as much an
inheritance as it is an expression of individual cognition.

This ancestral component – the collective factors – shape
the world around the child. They constitute the wind, rain and soil
that our little plant depends upon for its sustenance and survival.
However, it is true to say that the elements that give life, and the
life-form itself, evolve side-by-side. Evolution and development
occurs within and to both systems regardless of their inner capacities
and idiosyncratic tendencies. In other words, the forces that make
life possible are obviously primary. They are the basis of the lives
of infant and mother. However, the child does not have direct access
to the life-giving forces shaping its consciousness. Its connection to
them is by proxy. He or she is introduced to the life-giving
essence by the primary and dominant parent – the mother. She
functions as a medium for the archetypal principles not experienced
directly. The child's initial encounter with the archetypal matrix
upon which its entire being depends is a derivative rather than a
direct or pure encounter, and it can suffer from interference. Even
more contentiously, the infant's introduction to the archetypal matrix
is by way of another human being whose relationship with that same
matrix may be seriously disturbed and impoverished. Since nothing can
change this state of affairs – since we all have mothers
standing between us and the life-essence – we are bound to see
how the consciousness of our mother is likely to negatively affect our
own.

We are bound to see that it is by way of the body and
consciousness of a toxic mother that the weeds of pathology take root.
Her toxicity is the result of her repressed racial-memory of ancient
trauma, and the repressed memory of her personal troubled and
dysfunctional relationship as a child with her own parents, given that
they were as malignant as she.

We see then that pathology has a long ancestry. Nevertheless it is in
the present that it is healed and ended. Regardless of what
dysfunction existed in the past, and what kind of schizogenic
environment our parents created and create around us, we are as we
grow to adulthood free to put the situation aright in the present. To
do so we must become profoundly psychological beings. That is,
we must educate ourselves as to how our personal interior lives are
articulated to the apparently external impersonal life of the world in
which we find ourselves. We must become lucidly aware of how history
is ultimately psychohistory. The world is shaped by human
consciousness. It is, as Jung said, also shaped by the content of the
unconscious or Shadow Self.

Jung's Shadow Self comes into being by way of parental and societal
prohibition. It is a metaphor for the despised aspects of our own
nature, aspects given names such as anger, hate, envy, vengeance,
violence, and so on. These relatively disowned, dissociated emotions
and moods rarely see the light of day. They are rarely openly
acknowledged and expressed. Because of domestic and cultural
programming they are despised and feared. They are however legitimate
constituents of the psyche, as legitimate as those which are socially
approved of. By repressing these aspects we impair ourselves and
become less individuated and authentic. But that's okay, we say. As
long as I am able to fit in and win the approval on which I depend, I
don't mind existing as a half self. From this stance we make
our world what it is. We are all half-beings walking about taking
guidance from the misguided. Each of us is obsessed with winning that
approval and being part of the crowd. Even if it means sacrificing the
little independence of thought we possess, and living with the inner
pang of unfulfillment, we do it.

In my estimation, the mother plays a dominant role in the
creation of the so-called Shadow Self. That is not to say that the
father's role is not also significant. But the father's
character-affecting role in the life of an infant usually starts very
late in the day, so to speak, when the damage has already been done
and the trend of inauthenticity well and truly set. Indeed this was
also the case throughout history. From prehistoric times, until quite
recently, mothers were the dominant caregivers while men played a
negligible role.

In this book my interest is primarily in the conditioning of
consciousness during the earliest stages of life, in utero and during
the periods leading to the famous Oedipal phase as delineated by
Sigmund Freud. As we will see, by the time the average infant is three
years of age the configuration of its consciousness and personality
have already been well and truly set. What Freud took for the basis of
consciousness, is really a concluding stage of natal development, a
symptom rather than an underlying cause.

To investigate the pre- and post-natal periods, and the neurotic
tendencies which arise during these periods, we must rely on the work
of Erich Neumann, Otto Rank, Arthur Janov, John Bowlby, Melanie Klein,
Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and a few other specialists who had
perceptive things to say about the origin and development of
consciousness, as well as the manner in which the hemispheres of
consciousness interact. It is through a close reading and correct
interpretation of Neumann's unique work that we come upon the true
origins of pathology, the abnormal manner in which an
ego-consciousness may be formed. Although it did not occur to Neumann,
it is from his work that we best uncover the role of the mother as a
potentially corrupting influence on her child's consciousness.

As I show, it is this form of psychic corruption that ultimately
deforms the world, which as we said is bound to take on the shape of
the minds existing within it. The good, decent features of our world
are the result of the good, decent minds operating in it, whereas the
ugly, immoral and unjust features are the result of the corrupted,
malignant minds of people who have not seen fit to honestly confront
themselves and change their ways for the better. This book delineates
the manner in which neurotic and immoral people can radically change
and thereby make themselves and the world healthier. It does so by
uncovering the actual roots of pathology.

Erich Neumann (1905-1960)

CHAPTER TWO

Where Problems Begin

...the human child, after the nine months it spends in the
womb, requires another year to attain the degree of maturity that
characterizes the young of most other mammals at birth...This phase,
which Portmann has termed the social uterine period, is characterized
by the dominance of the primal relationship with the mother, who is
at first the child's entire world and environment but, little by
little, opens up new aspects of the world to the child's experience
– Erich Neumann

The consciousness of a mother communicates with that of a child
telepathically by way of images. Images precede communication by words
and numbers. Indeed the stuff of the external world also reaches our
minds by way of images. As Jung and Neumann stressed, this
image-receiving, image-making capacity is an inherent or innate
characteristic of human consciousness. Whatever content arises from
the deep layers of the psyche, or enters from the world without, does
so by way of images that are received, sorted and organized by the
ego. In preconscious periods the same process occurs without the ego
being the receiver and processor. At this earlier time it is the body
as an intelligent whole that processes the images it receives from the
world in which it reposes – that world being the body of its
mother.

In prenatal and pre-egoic periods our values assist in this process of
image organization and memorization, values which are themselves
determined in utero or thereafter not only by physical health but the
consciousness and intent of our mothers. A mother's self-conversation
reverberates throughout her body to be registered by the fetus. It is
not surprising, since to a great degree the intent behind her thoughts
and words is directed toward the fetus as it is to the infant after
birth. Indeed the very word mind was originally a verb not a
noun. Thought is therefore always an act and intention. In other
words, the fetus is in perpetual active conversation with its mother
even before it develops into a conscious entity. A mother might deny
this to herself, but the fact is that her self-conversation is not a
soliloquy heard by herself alone. Before she conceives, yes, her
thoughts are truly her own. However, after conception every thought
she thinks – every mental image she makes – is received
and embodied by the one inside her womb.

We have recognized "symbol formation" as the essentially human
primal phenomenon which enables human beings to become different from
animals – Otto Rank

If our mother has not seen fit, as it were, to psychologically
step out of the way, to monitor and even bracket her influence upon
her fetus, and if her will obstructs or overshadows its nascent
consciousness, the images formed within the body-brain of the fetus
about itself and the external world are certainly not going to be of a
wholesome variety. She is not in a position to open the infant to a
direct unadulterated communion with the psyche and the world if her
own consciousness and emotional character has been previously impaired
by a dysfunctional relationship with her own mother. She warps the
psyche and compromises the infant's image of itself and the world.

As a result, the infant enters the world in a psychically
damaged and emotionally disturbed state. The complexion of its mind
then shapes the world with which it interacts. After all, her child
not only goes on to engage with other people and effect a million
minute changes on its environment but, more crucially, goes on to
breed the next generation of psychically deviant humans to continue
doing the same. This is a cycle of dysfunction that must be halted.

According to psychologists such as Carl Jung and Erich Neumann, and
others of their school, the unconscious is generally considered feminine
in relation to the masculine ego-conscious which arises from it and
organizes its content. Be that as it may. The evolution of
consciousness is a phenomenon that occurs in two parallel phases. It
has occurred phylogenetically over the course of millennia, and also
occurs ontogenetically during the life of a single person. This
parallel development is of great interest to Jungians who have much to
say on the subject. For them the mother is not simply a stereotypical
individual existing here and now in real time, but the embodiment of
an archetype – the so-called Great Mother – that has
existed as a bivalent image since the beginning of time.

Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung
(1875-1961)

What this means in clear language is that each female carries
within her the life-experiences of all females who lived throughout
history. Each woman living today embodies every past woman's
experiences of good and bad, love and hate, agony and ecstasy. It is
this deep, unfathomable matrix of experience that is transmuted
teleactively to the proto-consciousness of a fetal "ego-germ" in utero
and after birth. It is, as I said, a translated experience and not
pure. Of course it can never be wholly uncontaminated. But in most
cases the psychic influence of a mother is excessive as well as
needless, the volume of her self-conversation so loud it drowns out
the highly sensitized autonomous processes of her fetus or infant. Its
powers of Self-reference and Self-governance are thereby dramatically
weakened and disoriented.

As I show, this influence, when taken too far, constitutes the roots
of later pathology. This is partly because the intrusion of a
narcissistic mother's psyche serves to intensify or deintensify images
telepathically transmitted, not from her psyche, but from the numinous
creative reservoir from which all life arises. Indeed, her intrusion
acts like a lens when no lens is required, and as a distorting
lens she becomes the means by which inner and outer worlds are
perceived and conceived by her growing hyper-receptive infant. Her
will clashes with the fetus' will, obstructing and weakening it,
sometimes drastically. We grow up thinking that we think with our own
minds and see with our own eyes. But this is a working illusion. Only
a fully individuated person wins this privilege.

As to the images themselves, they are referred to as archetypal,
given that they predate an individual's existence and experience, and
constitute the basic content of his total psyche or Self. They
"inhabit" what Jungians call the Collective Unconscious, and are the
slates, so to speak, on which the world writes. The images that make
up consciousness are therefore a blend of those from the exterior
world and the interior unconscious dimensions of the psyche. As
Jungians point out, these images are the means by which inner and
outer realities – or subjects and objects – interrelate.

As Jung himself stressed, even when it comes to the nebulous unseen
world of the psyche, the subject is still an empiricist and
phenomenologist. The content of his psyche are still objects, so to
speak, as much as worldly phenomena are objects. Like other objects,
inner ones are thought about, felt, understood and known. In this way
they are embodied and also transformed. However, we see now that this
process of image-reception and integration can be blocked and
corrupted by the intruding consciousness of a mother during the early
stages of biopsychic development. This is because one of the first
phenomena grasped by the proto-consciousness is the ever-present consciousness
of the mother. Her consciousness dominates and overshadows the
ego-germ that can be psychically poisoned and misshaped according to
her malignant tendencies and subconscious ill-will. The fetus'
consciousness and body become the dumping grounds for all her neurotic
tendencies, her hang-ups, phobias and other psychological
deficiencies.

Anxiety begins to form in the relationship between the infant
and the mother, when the infant senses the mother's anxiety –
Dan P. McAdams (The Person: An Introduction to Personality
Psychology)

The images initially conceived by the ego-germ in its earliest
stage of somatic awareness are common to all persons in a culture. For
Western people the first and most numinous image or symbol is that of
the serpent or dragon. It is primal because, as said, our first
conceived image is that of the encircling mother. It is important as a
symbol because at this stage there is no essential differentiation
between the infant's consciousness and that of its mother.

The dragon or serpent is a symbol that not only represents
archetypal and stereotypical mothers, but the Imperial Self. Although
it precedes any consciousness of Self, and certainly any awareness of
the external world, it nonetheless symbolizes the original wholeness
from which consciousness arises.

The dragon symbol, as it appears as a numinous image at this
early stage, is usually depicted as an encircling uroboros or snake
biting its own tail. It therefore equates with a circle or spiral.
This encirclement is itself a seminal symbol marking the beginning of
our existence as separate beings. It sections off the personal
dimension from the transpersonal universal dimension. As a classic
ambivalent image it stands not only for the principle of enclosure but
principle of totality. It signifies the moment when we are sectioned
off from the whole, and it signifies that same lost wholeness.

As Jung, Neumann, Edinger, von Franz, and other Jungians show in
their works, we find the dragon or serpent symbol employed by almost
every ancient culture throughout the world. It is a well-recognized
mystic leitmotif. From the sand-paintings of Native American Indians
to the mandalas and yantras of eastern Buddhists, it appears as a
cardinal image of totality, wholeness and unavoidable rites of
passage. Every other shape and form derives from it. The serpent's
nature is to change shape and morph into lines, spirals, squares,
triangles and pentacles, etc. As a zero it is the parent of all
numbers. As a mythic emblem it represents the numinous, everlasting,
energy-rich abyss out of which the primordial mound and first
progenitor god appear.

The validity and reality of the uroboros symbol rest on a
collective basis. It corresponds to an evolutionary stage which can
be "recollected" in the psychic structure of every human being
– Erich Neumann (The Origins and Evolution of
Consciousness)

Modern pediatricians, neurologists and molecular biologists are
radically updating their knowledge about the mother-child bond in
utero, and are amazed at the extremely subtle interactions now known
to occur between the two on chemical and neural levels. They are also
able to see how her negative physical and mental habits, not to
mention her beliefs, fears and moods, are directly "felt" by the fetus
whose responses to its mother's consciousness can now be seen and
measured. The frontal cortex may not yet be developed, but a fetus is
not mentally blind. There is movement of all working parts
before there is perception and awareness of that movement. Even before
the development of the so-called "smell brain" – or limbic
center – the brainstem and chemical neurotransmitters are hard
at work. There is reflexivity, intelligence and memory
at work, albeit in a purely somatic and cellular mode. What we call mind
becomes what it is because of the flow of energy from the body which
eventually constellates it. Our sense of I-ness is therefore first and
foremost a symptom of pure sensation and body-intelligence, itself an
emanation and manifestation of what has been termed Life-force, Will,
Eros, Chi, Prana, Mezla, Fohat, Animus or Logos, etc. It is the
bioenergy that Freud referred to as libido. Its origin, according to
Freud, is the id or unconscious. The very word psyche
comes from the verb psychein meaning "to breathe." It denotes
the vital life-force rather than a constellated concretized mind as we
presently erroneously conceive it. Even the Greek word menos,
which is closest to our word mind, means "spirit" or "intent" –
the emphasis being on movement and action. The word emotion
comes from the Latin mortere, denoting movement.

The somatic intelligence we are talking about is still experienced
when we find ourselves being reminded of something we mentally forget
by the body that remembers, as when playing a musical instrument. And
if Wilhelm Reich was correct, as we know him to be – that the
body should be equated with the fathomless "unconscious" that never
forgets – we find ourselves on the right track, not only of
diagnosing the problems but of healing them. We understand that as far
as the participation mystique goes, between mother and fetus,
there is more being transmitted to the latter's neurons and cells than
can be measured by instruments regardless of how sensitive they are.

Infants come preloaded with lots of software in the neural
hard-drives, most of it having to do with learning – John
Medina (Brain Rules for Baby)

In 1979, University of Washington psychologist Andy Meltzoff
stuck out his tongue at a baby 42 minutes old, then sat back to see
what happened. After some effort, the baby returned the favor, slowly
rolling out his own tongue. Meltzoff stuck his tongue out again. The
infant responded in kind. Meltzoff discovered that babies could
imitate right from the start of their little lives...This is an
extraordinary finding – ibid

Synaptogenesis is a prolonged process, for an easily understood
reason: it is ridiculously complex. A single neuron has to make an
average of 15,000 connections with the locals before its wiring job
is over. Some neurons have to make more than 100,000 connections.
That means your baby's brain has to lash together an astonishing 1.8
million new connections per second to make a complete brain...The
brain will continue forming 10 billion synapses a day for almost a
year after birth – ibid

A woman's stress hormones affect her baby by slipping through
the placenta and entering the baby's brain, like cruise missiles
programmed to hit two targets...Stressed mom, stressed baby. The
first target is the baby's limbic system, an area profoundly involved
in emotional regulation and memory. This region develops more slowly
in the presence of excess hormone, one of the reasons we think baby
cognition is damaged if mom is severely or chronically stressed
– ibid

Excess hormone from mom can mean baby has a difficult time
turning off her own stress hormone system. Her brain becomes
marinated in glucocorticoids whose concentrations are no longer
controllable. The baby can carry this damaged stress-response system
into adulthood. The child may have a difficult time putting on the
brakes whenever she gets stressed out...If she gets pregnant, she
bathes her developing infant with the excess toxic stuff. The fetus
develops a partially confused hypothalamus, pumping out more
glucocorticoids, and the next-generation brain shrinks further. The
vicious cycle continues. Excessive stress is contagious – ibid

...children whose mothers are schizophrenic are twice as likely
to develop the illness as children with schizophrenic fathers
– Oliver James (They Fuck You Up)

...David Felton...began by noting that emotions have a powerful
effect on the autonomic nervous system, which regulates everything
from how much insulin is secreted to blood-pressure levels.
Felten...then detected a meeting point where the autonomic nervous
system directly talks to lymphocytes and macrophages, cells of the
immune system – Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)

...many potent emotional memories date from the first few years
of life, in the relationship between an infant and its caretakers.
This is especially true for traumatic events...LeDoux turns to the
role of the amygdala in childhood to support what has long been a
basic tenet of psychoanalytic thought: that the interactions of
life's earliest years lay down a set of emotional lessons based on
the attunement and upsets in the contacts between infant and
caretakers – ibid

One reason we can be so baffled by our emotional outbursts,
then, is that they often date from a time early in our lives when
things were bewildering and we did not yet have words for
comprehending events – ibid

Condon and Sander observed that infants not only follow voices
but also move to the rhythm, and this within the first sixteen hours
of life – Arno Gruen

Fetuses confronted with an amniocentesis needle invading the
uterus exhibit defensive motor behavior. Intrauterine needling of the
fetus causes full-blown stress-related increase in plasma cortisol
and B-endorphin levels, with modulation of the stress response slower
than the adult. Fetuses can also learn to adapt their behavior to
control the environment – Robert Scaer (The Body Bears
the Burden)

When presented with a sequence of different voices though
headphones, an infant will learn to access his mother's voice through
regulating the frequency of sucking on a nipple. The evidence for
learning by the unborn fetus in utero, by the premature infant in the
pediatric intensive care unit, and by the normal full-term newborn is
overwhelming. They learn through implicit conditional memory. The
assumption that infants in all stages of development do not
experience pain, do not register arousal with threat, and do not
process a response to traumatic stress is clearly outdated and
invalid – ibid

When a mother loves her infant, the hormones of love (such as
oxytocin, vasopressin, and serotonin) become stronger in the baby for
a lifetime. He will grow up to be a better parent to his own
children. He will have a different physiology than that of someone
not loved in early infancy...and a different brain – Arthur
Janov (The Biology of Love)

There is some evidence that the sense of touch, in part
organized by the thalamus, is already registering in the womb after
the third or fourth month – ibid

New research shows that stress before birth results in an
alteration of dopamine levels in the right brain hemisphere. This
eventually results in heightened emotionality and the inability to
regulate emotions properly – ibid

Schizophrenic mothers are five times more likely to have a
schizophrenic child, not necessarily because of heredity but because
a deeply disturbed mother produces a deeply disturbed physiology that
surrounds the fetus, eventually disorganizing limbic centers –
ibid

The seeds of heart dysfunction, palpitations, irregular
heartbeat, atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, cancer, autoimmune
disorders, depression, phobias, panic, and anxiety disorders may be
sown before we are ever able to say one word – ibid

A study of psychotics found that the cause of severe mental
disturbance may lie in the second trimester of pregnancy –
ibid

Recent experimentation has shown that DNA contained within fetal
cells pass from a fetus through the placenta to the mother's body and
brain to lodge there for decades. The process is known as fetal
microchimerism. We can be sure that the reverse process occurs, and
also that a similar transfer takes place on a subtler level between
the consciousnesses of mother and child.

Experiencing pain and anxiety starts days after conception, not
after one is born. A fetus' experience of time in the womb is unlike
an infant's or adult's experience of it. In the systems of the
subcortex, time as we know it plays no part. Time, like language, is a
phenomenon experienced only by the upper cortex which can be said to
be separated from lower centers by millions of years of evolution.
Therefore trauma and anxiety experienced by a fetus during
pretemporal, preverbal periods remains a pathological factor
throughout childhood and adulthood. It continues to burn (or kindle)
subterraneously while the new brain faces the world and strives to
overcome daily challenges. The greatest psychologists, from Freud on,
understood that anxiety is the basic emotion and disturbance for
children and adults.

Anxiety is the fundamental phenomenon and the central problem
of neurosis – Sigmund Freud

The various psycho-neurotic illnesses to which the individual
is liable can be looked upon as more or less unsuccessful attempts to
master anxiety – Melanie Klein

Crucially, in the uterine state the fetus is basically using its
mother's brain, will and soma to orient itself and sense what is
happening. The operation of the mother's right-brain is especially
important in this mutual attunement. Later, the infant's own
right-brain retains memories not only generated during the symbiosis,
but of the nature of the symbiosis. This is important because the
right hemisphere of the brain, which develops earlier than the left,
sets the tone of our conscious memories, basic sensations, feelings
and emotions. It also preservers the dissociated feelings of hurt,
shame and anger.

The right-brain relates with the world on an empathic level and
governs the means by which we relate with other beings. If it is
infirm and frozen by trauma – after attuning with a
hyper-agitated mother's toxic consciousness – we are unlikely to
feel empathy toward other entities and beings. Since the right-brain
also provides meaning to our experiences and encounters, its
impairment obviously leads to a robotic, conformist, mediocre life
devoid of meaning. By way of the right-brain we assess our own inner
environment. That is, this hemisphere allows us to feel how we
feel. And when it comes right down to it, consciousness is nothing
more than feeling. To be more specific, feeling is a perpetual
evaluation of world and Self. If right-brain function is paralyzed by
trauma, we become incapable of appropriate Self-reference and
introspection. The very act of inquiring into the Self becomes
traumatic. Consequently, we are less inclined to bother introspecting.
We deny the soma and the psyche because it's too painful to do
otherwise. We may operate in the world well enough, thanks to the
relatively functional left-brain and frontal cortex, but inwardly we
are flooded with unacknowledged, unprocessed pain, anger, sorrow,
shame, resentment, disappointment and so on. We may not be aware of it
consciously, but as the saying goes – the body bears the burden.

We see from this why a state of decay exists in our world. We
are now in a post-introspective, post-psychological world were we
prefer being medicated and diagnozed with "disorders" by the so-called
healthcare experts we've put in charge of our being. There is only one
cause of all this absurdity and avoidance — the foundation laid
by our mother's consciousess while we were hyper-dependant fetuses
inhabiting her womb.

Without emotional sensitivity our experiences are cold,
colorless and shallow. We become exceptionally codependent, relying on
other people, or on the Crowd, to provide meaning and direction, never
getting to experience and enjoy either the ecstasy of creativity or
intimacy of healthy relationships.

It is clear that the development of the frontal cortex, of balanced
social adjustment and healthy adult Self-esteem is based on the
environment experienced by the fetus during the uterine period. If
trauma and stress rise to critical levels, the amygdala creates and
secretes an opiate-like chemical to prevent intense feelings of pain
and grief from worrying and eventually impairing the frontal lobes.
This suppressing activity is the biological equivalent and origin of
the act of psychological repression that occurs in later
periods with the same objective, to stem the flow of strong emotions
such as anger, aggression and grief, etc. When the amygdala's capacity
to tranquilize emotional pangs caused by trauma upon the Self fails,
and when repression weakens, we are overcome and flooded with what we
take for "negative" feelings. It is at this point that we experience
bouts of depression, disorientation, regret, apathy, futility and
hostility, not to mention anxiety about our past and future. The
cocktail of distressing but legitimate emotions, when misinterpreted,
often cause us to blame ourselves for our past and our character. When
we look around and see what we think are happy, smiling, successful
people, we wrongly imagine that we are less than capable of getting it
together. Life seems to freeze and grind to a halt, and we spend years
suffering in a state of moribund trepidation and profound sorrow.

For the ego-germ and infant it is therefore essential that the
energy of the encircling "dragon mother" is warm, friendly and caring.
Psychic health entirely depends on a benign, non-intrusive
countenance. However, if the "visage" (environment) becomes hostile
and threatening, psychic health is immediately compromised and the
world of the ego-germ freezes and darkens. Its little world is
poisoned and defiled. As said, this is the moment when the seeds of
pathology are planted, because the earliest centers of the brain
– the brainstem and limbic system – are already impaired
by heavy stress and trauma.

In short, we understand that the world into which we are born and so
quickly introduced is colored by our mother's physical, mental and
emotional health. Indeed the damage is done earlier. This is because
the dragon mother is the mirror on which our identity, even at a
primary level, is first projected. As psychologists know, we are able
to interact with phenomena because we first conceive of ourselves as
Selves. But the first phenomenon with which we interact is our
mother's body. As far as an infant is concerned the mother's body
is her consciousness, which is why we must think of the two in similar
terms. However, the most important thing is the manner in which a
mother holds and then projects back the image of ourselves that forms
the basis of our identity. It is this act that determines every other
encounter we have as fully conscious beings. It determines the levels
of our psychic hygiene and Self-esteem.

Naturally the infant's projection of its Self-image is not something
registered by instruments. It does not occur between consciousnesses
as we later come to understand the term. The interactivity is
preconscious and telepathic. Although the infant's consciousness
functions somatically rather than mentally, on an archaic-magical
level, communication certainly takes place between the two who are at
this stage biologically fused as one being. The nature of this
communion is opaque to us later after the frontal cortex develops and
we become Self-aware and world-conscious. Our rational minds are
incapable of penetrating the mysteries of non-conscious existence, and
we have no reliable memory of the earliest stages of our own
biopsychic development. However, although a fetus and newborn infant
are certainly not Self-conscious as we understand it, they are somatically
intelligent. A mind, as such, does not yet exist, but a body with
senses and cellular intelligence does. Libido is on the move and
energy flows centrifugally and centripetally around the organism. This
is the interchange we are interested in, since what occurs between
mother and child at this time is the foundation of what is to come
physically and psychically.

...the infant is irrational, impersonal and amoral. It is his
irrationality which gives us our unwarranted opinion of the child's
inferior capacities. Actually he accomplishes far more than any adult
in his prenatal life and in the early years after birth. A good deal
of energy is involved in learning to see, to hear, to suck, and to
breathe, and the building up of his mental world through countless
experiences and experiments and is an achievement which can never be
equaled by any later efforts – Georg Groddeck (Man's
Part As A Child)

In any case a healthy, adjusted mother holds her infant's
Self-image with love and care. She projects it back in a holistic
state, perhaps embellished with approval and added reinforcement. To
do so she must be a physically and mentally healthy and a champion of
freedom. However, if freedom is something she subconsciously despises,
so much the worse for her child. If freedom is cherished, then as days
and months pass she finds no problem relinquishing the impressions she
received. She telepathically returns the Self-image to its source in a
pure condition, and all is well. It is at this stage that a mother
defines herself either as a terrible dragon mother or caring dragon
mother. In the former case the contamination or eclipsing of her
child's Self-image is her first tyrannical act, thereby establishing
the rotten architecture on which the disturbed consciousness of her
child is founded.

Historically, the dragon symbol or uroboros represents the
archetypal Great Mother in both her aspects. To Jungians she is the
gentle, caring mother and terrible devourer who either seeks to
consume her child or enslave him to her cause. In this scenario we
find the child growing into the dark knight or antihero. He is like
Mordred (the son of Morgana Le Fay) with no authentic personality of
his own. As his mother's champion his sole purpose in life is to
defeat her enemies and establish her rule. He is the young
psychically-castrated man who from adolescence swears lifelong
devotion to Shakti, Parvati, Durga or Mother Mary. He's the asexual
Bernard de Clairvaux, Simeon the Stylite, and Saint John of the Cross,
in supplication to the image of his beloved who is both mother and
suitor in one.

Mythically speaking, in cases of this sort the Great Mother in
her terrible guise captures and molds her child's identity to suit her
personal agendas. The individuality of her offspring is not her
concern. In fact it is a threat. She bestows love conditionally, as
long as he follows the dictates of her will and does whatever she
wants. He is to follow her commands without question and not criticize
her morally perfidious outlook and intent. He can do her bidding in
rags or business suit. That is of secondary importance. What matters
is his sworn allegiance to her cause. How can he do otherwise? He is a
hero in her eyes. His only reward comes from doing her bidding. She
gives his weak ego the direction it requires and structures his
frightful world. He doesn't need to win stripes to prove he's a great
man because his mother has told him he's great without such effort. He
doesn't have a problem choosing a girlfriend or wife. His mother sees
to that. She decides who is right for him, someone of course who never
challenges her supreme authority.

From this we see that the child's mind is not only contaminated but
necrophilous. He does not love life, although he probably thinks he
does. No, he is bound to adore the frozen expression and loveless
presence of his terrible mother. She has taught him well and shown him
how to get her approval by falling to his knees, thinking of her
always, and setting aside his personal aspirations and desires. In
fact he inwardly despises the individualistic impulses and
legitimately hostile emotions that arise naturally within him. He is
extremely self-condemnatory, and prefers the company of people in the
same state. He does not like the company of self-confident productive
people and stays well away from such types. Given the opportunity he
may seek the downfall of someone he despises for their virtues. If he
is a boss or coach he can penalize, unseat, badger, demote and fire
that kind of man or woman should they unfortunately come under his
hand. Their heads are laid as trophies at the foot of his mother's
altar. Their defeat signifies his superiority and prowess. He has no
appreciation and admiration for the truly integrated man because that
kind of man loves himself, not only his mother. And that's selfish.
Therefore the integrated productive man is seen as prey. His work and
possessions can be cunningly stolen, his reputation sullied and his
future prospects blocked whenever the opportunity arises. No need for
scruples or contrition. So it goes with the terrible mother's neurotic
champion, the means by which she attains what she thinks she needs to
survive. What she needs and has is an obedient slave, someone
deliberately emotionally tormented at her hands, someone incapable of
living for themselves, corrupted as they are by her repeated acts of
psychic incest.

Such a docile "castrated" personality type rarely succeeds in
freeing himself from the clutches of a terrible mother. If and when
his biological mother passes on, he is bound to replace her with a
worldly cause. Now he'll be an advocate of "Mother Russia" or "Mother
Ireland." He'll speak loudly of the "brotherhood of man," and of
"equality" and "oneness." He devotes himself to a political, religious
or mystical cause, because inwardly he finds individualistic life
unbearable. He continues castrating himself under the guise of
selflessness and devotion. He seeks a return to the embryonic sleep in
which he as an ego-germ was steeped before Self-consciousness arose.
That was the relatively quiet untroubled haven of repose, and its like
must be found again. Therefore the quest for "perfection,"
"enlightenment," "nirvana" and "global peace," is completely
justified. It must be found, but first a company of others seeking the
same "reality" must be located and recruited because he doesn't want
to travel the road of mirages alone.

So we see how the foundations of malignant Collectivism are
laid. They are the symptom and consequence of our necrophilous
relationship with the terrible mother. As illogical as it seems, we
take her image for that of wholeness and adore it because it is all we
have. There is nothing wrong with the concept within us of wholeness.
It is an image we would have kept intact had it not been for her
intruding will shaping us according to her narcissistic vision. It is
an image that is archetypal in nature and it precedes
individually-generated images. But as a primordial image it has
unfortunately been transmogrified, adulterated and transmitted to our
consciousness by someone ultimately threatened by it. This is how a
person comes to embody imperfect and malignant images of freedom and
completeness, taking them as true when they are anything but. This is
how we become people who are neither free nor whole.

In this context the myths of killing the terrible Great Mother,
by penetrating her heart with a sword or cutting off her head with an
axe, represent on a personal non-mythical level, taking back the
Self-image that has been in her keeping since the beginning, and
reuniting intellectual and instinctual hemispheres. This in turn gives
one the constitutional stability needed to negotiate world and cosmos.
The apparently incestuous piercing of the terrible mother's body with
a lance or sword is, according to Jung and Neumann, not a perverse act
but one that liberates the child-hero. It is a violent act that
establishes identity and signals a rise above the original uroboric
sleep over which the Great Mother had dominion.

In numerous world creation myths, the cutting up of the dragon
precedes the building of a new world from its dismembered parts. Just
as food must be cut up small before it can be digested and built into
the structure of the organism, so the vast world continuum of the
uroboros must be broken up and divided into objects for assimilation
by consciousness – Erich Neumann

The activity of the hero in his fight with the dragon is that
of the acting, willing, and discriminating ego which, no longer
fascinated and overpowered, and abandoning its youthful attitude of
passive defense, seeks out the danger, performs new and extraordinary
deeds, and battles its way to victory – ibid

The terrible mother's agitated intrusion arrests the infant's healthy
biopsychic development. In fact this act confirms the identity of a
terrible mother. And should the child defy her intent, he quickly
becomes subject to her loathing. As a result he is bound to suffer a
continual barrage of disapproval and condemnation, not to mention
deprivation as he grows. She seeks to disorient and belittle the child
she regards as her personal property. She sees herself as the Alpha
and Omega, the giver of life and death. As such she seeks to
control the workings of her child's body and mind. His freedom and
individuation are her greatest threat, and many are the ways she uses
to subvert his efforts to attain them.

The ego's identification with masculine consciousness produces
the psychic cleavage which drives it into opposing the dragon of the
unconscious. This struggle is variously represented as the entry into
the cave, the descent to the underworld, or as being swallowed...This
is shown most clearly in the hero myths which take the form of sun
myths; here the swallowing of the hero by the dragon'corresponds to
the sun's nocturnal journey, from which it emerges victoriously after
having conquered the darkness – Erich Neumann

The retardation of the child's healthy development is a direct
consequence of the terrible mother's eclipsing and overwriting of its
identity which begins to constellate early, before the brain cortex
develops. As said, the body and its subtle processes constitute the
brain before the brain. When an infant's Self-image begins to
constellate, a terrible mother does not mentally and emotionally step
out of the way. On a deep unspoken level she is threatened by what is
happening, by the fetus's first steps toward identity and
individuality. It is a process she was not able to experience in the
womb, and she now embodies and expresses her own mother's anxieties
and need for control over something vulnerable and relatively weaker
than herself. Her own neurotic self-image overwrites his and commands
his attention from that point on. He is now engaged not with his own
self-image but with that projected by his mother. In this way her
infant becomes a kind of screen or canvas on which she gets to paint her
image. However, to do so she must first partially or wholly, as the
case may be, erase the earlier image forming there.

Once the unholy work is done the child's Self-image cannot be
restored. The hues and colors, so to speak, will not be as they once
were. The child's loss of authentic identity is an original traumatic
experience occurring before the cutting of its umbilical cord.
He is forced to not only capitulate to the will that contravenes his
space and intent, but to impersonate the nature of the one whose
personality intrudes. This is a travesty. Not that this matters to the
terrible mother who does not acknowledge the Selfhood of her "product"
and possession. As far as she is concerned this is the reason she
conceived in the first place. Any talk of her child's independence is
purely superficial and perfunctory, and serves to cover up the
violation that goes unnoticed and unchecked.

...the mother's consciousness and her self-image are the
determining factors in the development of our own self. To the extent
that she has failed to develop an adequate autonomy of her own, her
self-esteem will be based on feelings and needs far removed from a
truly autonomous person. As a consequence, the way she regards her
own child – and thus how the child later sees itself in her
eyes – will necessarily reflect these limitations – Arno
Gruen

Children know exactly when their parents are taking advantage
of their helplessness and protracting it in order to prop up their
own feelings of self-worth – ibid

A terrible mother's eclipsing of her infant's Self-image has
severe consequences for the latter's Self-esteem in later life. On
some level a terrible mother knows that her activity in this regard is
inappropriate and detrimental. After all it violates the commonly
accepted edict that we do unto others as we would have them do unto
us. A terrible mother's crime lies in her flagrant subversion of this
universally lauded directive. I show later that her identity as a
terrible mother is already determined by her own relationship with her
terrible mother and her own birth trauma. Her disposition is usually
only confirmed after she conceives and acts like one toward her own
child. And what is it, we ask, that makes her want to conceive after
enduring a lengthy troublesome or possibly devastating dragon-fight?
Why do most women want to bear children? Is it all a matter of biology
and chronology?

If we stay true to the theories of Otto Rank, the great psychologist,
we see that the need is symptomatic of a woman's subconscious desire
to return themselves to the repose of the womb. Which makes sense. If
Rank is right – that so much of what we think and do is really
is based on finding a simulacra of uterine omnipotence, protection and
psychosomatic serenity – then we see that getting pregnant and
birthing a child serves as a working simulation for that deeply
desired end. Of course none of us can return to the womb physically,
but we can do so symbolically. We can do the next best thing. And that
is what a great many adult women subconsciously intend when they
fantasize about conceiving. The lengthy and intense processes of
pregnancy and birth allow them to return to the world of a child, to
regress and infantilize their minds with the world's approval. On a
psychological level, then, birthing a child is a compensation. The
subsequent dysfunctional relationship between mother and child –
as a person – occurs because the child's physical
presence is a reality not a fantasy. The child was a means for
achieving a deeply desired end, and is cared for because it serves
that purpose. It is not cared for as a being unto itself. As a being
with individual needs it really does not exist. When its reality sinks
in it is thereafter regarded as a tiresome burden.

Not that most mothers acknowledge this. Their denials do not make the
facts less true. If a mother comes to acknowledge the rights of her
child, all is well. She is confirmed as a good dragon mother. She
cannot help transmitting to her fetus the racial-memory of ancient
trauma, which is imprinted in all of us, and cannot prevent the trauma
associated with physical birth, but she can protect it from her
personal experiences of trauma at the hands of others. If she does not
provide this protection, by psychologically stepping out of the way,
as it were, she defines herself as a terrible dragon mother. Her
concern is, as we said, not the child but herself. Her behavior
toward the child is dysfunctional from the off. She becomes oppressive
because her desire for pregnancy was regressive. It is unlikely that
her son or daughter will grow to adulthood free of this regressive
inclination. And so the cycle of dysfunction continues to spin, decade
after decade, birth after birth. No wonder the primal symbol of the
"Great Mother," as well as the stereotypical mother, is the coiled uroboros.

CHAPTER THREE

The Six Types

As far as I am concerned, there are six psychological types of
males and females in the world; each of them a product of the
mother-child relationship as defined in the previous chapters. The six
types are:

The Masculinized Female (or Daughter)

The Feminized Female

The Terrible Female

The Masculinized Male (or Son)

The Feminized Male

The Chivalric Male

As said, there are two types of Dragon Mother – the benign
and the malign. The masculinized male and female are manifestations of
the benign mother, whereas the other four types are abnormal
manifestations of the malignant mother's influence. The chivalric male
and terrible female are the most deviant of the types, with the latter
being basically a characterological duplicate of her own terrible
mother. Our chivalric male is akin to Neumann's "terrible male."

In each of the six cases we are dealing with Jung's concept of
persona or mask, so to speak, which serves to conceal one's true
identity. However, in the cases of the four malignant types we are
dealing with persona at the expense of the Imperial Self, with
bioenergetic armoring and resistance against reality. We are dealing
with types who, having no true Self, are likely to become addicted to
the external world and its stimuli. They habitually avoid authentic
Selfhood by immersing themselves in the external version of the
uroboric abyss – the Crowd or Collective. They are not as a rule
introverted types. On the contrary, it is more likely that they will
be committed or even compulsive extroverts whose internal workings are
suppressed and ignored as they get on with their domestic duties in
the world created by others like themselves.

Central to the process of persona creation is the fact that the
terrible mother has so undermined the character of her child that they
are not inclined to miss what they have never known. Remember that the
influence of the mother on the nature of a child's psyche occurred
during preconscious years. By the time a child becomes conscious of
itself the damage to its psyche has already been done. It is
impossible to think of a more egregious state of affairs. But as I
pointed out in the Introduction it is a problem that has the greatest
consequences for the world and for humankind's future. Later, after
the child comes into contact with others, at school and other places,
he or she does begin to understand what is missing in terms of
character and personality. One is attracted to those boys and girls
who embody traits one personally lacks. In some cases the shock of
seeing how deficit one is can lead to psychic collapse. The task of
integrating lost but desired aspects is not an easy and enjoyable one.
Indeed, some children find it to be an impossibly arduous task that
exhausts energy. They are also likely to be ridiculed and shunned
because of their docility and awkwardness. All in all the process of
upgrading the personality may prove overwhelming. In other cases a
child may have the fortitude to continue the process of identification
and integration. They still need to resist the regressive tug of a
terrible mother threatened by the changes she senses and witnesses
happening to her child as they successfully negotiate the world. If
all goes well, a maladjusted child does indeed reclaim those lost
traits observed in other children, and does move on to live more
meaningfully and completely.

◊

Masculinized Female types are basically grounded, balanced,
sensible and creative. In some cases they appear distinctly feminine,
but in such cases it is their environment that compels them against
their will to be less masculine. This was the case for women such as
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson and
Frida Kahlo. Left to themselves they are active, assertive and
productive. But with a dominating mother or father, as in the case of
Browning, they are forced into docility or full-blown infirmity. Left
to themselves they admire rather than envy men and work alongside
productive men easily. However they do not allow themselves to be
outdone or put down and will strive to hold their own if challenged.
They are for the most part moral and just. If their relationship with
their mothers was difficult or dysfunctional their masculinity
constitutes the manner in which they distance themselves from her
unpleasant influence. They want no part of her ways and do not
subscribe to her ideas and outlook. This type is therefore a
considerable threat to a terrible mother whose attempts to dominate
and control are spurned. A terrible mother will in this instance be
poisonous and deeply envious of her more well-adjusted daughter. Her
daughter is seen as a means to an end, as a strong son would certainly
be seen. In cases of this kind the daughter will be resented for her
independence and failure to become a servant of her terrible mother's
will. To remove herself from the toxic presence of her mother such a
type marries the first apparently compatible man to come along. The
marriage partner is never accepted or endorsed by her terrible mother.
In extreme cases the mother will be secretly overjoyed at every
failure and upset experienced by her aspiring daughter. This type of
masculinized female can sometimes become hard and excessively
competitive in a subconscious attempt to rise above the uroboric abyss
in which her mother's oppressive and corrupting influence first became
apparent. Although this hyper-masculinized type is often loud, brash,
self-assertive and competitive, they are not usually immoral or
repulsive.

The Feminized Female is a character who has been undermined by a
terrible mother who implicitly or explicitly despises masculinized
males and females. She is therefore characteristically docile and,
paradoxically, willing to be led by masculinized and chivalric males,
working best with the latter. Her need is not for love but for
strength. Despite appearances she despises masculinized and chivalric
males as much as her terrible mother. But fortunately for her the
latter type tends to operate in the world as a dominator. Power is his
raison d'etre, so he is inclined to control the docile female and she
is likely to allow herself to be sculpted into whatever shape he
desires. She allows this even though it is not him she cares about.
Indeed, she does not love him for himself, only for the strength and
power he wields and brings into her life. She does not admire him, she
envies him, and inwardly despises herself for her chronic dependency
on him and his type. This can in turn lead her to eventually seek his
downfall. In her most neurotic moments she seeks to drown him in guilt
over some misdemeanor or infraction of his own rules, or go so far as
to penalize him sexually. Her docility is likely to extend to
frigidity, itself a symptom of her mother's influence, conditioning
and male hate. In other words the feminized female envies and despises
her male counterparts, while the masculinized female admires them. Of
course you might be asking why a feminized female, a potential
terrible mother in her own right, goes on to procreate, knowing she
will probably bear sons as well as daughters. This is because as a
woman her biology demands she marry and procreate. After all any child
of hers, male or female, can be controlled, feminized or
hyper-masculinized after they are born. In the best case scenario she
does well for herself – her true Self – by seeking out an
adjusted masculine type and learning from him. However because she
wears a false persona, knowing the right course is not as clear and
distinct as it should be. What is more, she is not interested in a man
for his own sake or as an embodiment of true values, only for what he
can supply. She is overjoyed to find out that she is attractive to
chivalric types, and as far as she is concerned, that is good enough
to get on with and exploit. So she tends to embellish feminine traits
and takes care to hide her identity behind a veil of mystique. In this
way she enthralls men who race to champion her cause and "know
everything about her." The suitor she brings back to mother is
accepted because he is able to give mother's docile daughter the
"strength" of character she lacks. Moreover, he does so without being
a threateningly independent or perceptive male who sees through the
female wiles in which he is snared. A typical feminized female often
seeks out a chivalric type because, at the so-called phallic stage
(between 3 to 6 years of age), she subconsciously wished to steal her
father away from the mother. She wished to have him for her own,
physically and sexually. The mother was therefore regarded as a hated
obstacle who must be destroyed and removed. The chivalric male comes
to stand, in her mind, for her unattainable father. Winning a tall,
brawny, apparently self-confident stereotypical male allows her to
flaunt her success in front of her mother. Of course this desire to
attain the kind of man "most women want," in order to impress a
terrible mother, can easily backfire with serious consequences for the
feminized type. In any case her childhood and adult fantasies, desires
and actions are inauthentic from start to finish.

The Terrible Female is the terrible mother to be. She is
basically a close approximation of her own terrible mother. She
repeats most of the behavior of her mother toward her when she was a
fetus and infant, superficial differences notwithstanding. She also
tends to vent the considerable rage she harbored during childhood
toward her mother. In cases of this kind the terrible female grows
into an overbearing, dictatorial, defensive, severe, condescending,
frigid woman disliked by almost everyone she meets. Her character
traits and neuroticism are largely based on her childhood
competitiveness with her own unloving, distant or promiscuous mother.
In many cases the man she attracts to give her a child may be of a
similar type as her own father. He is likely to be a chivalric male,
but might also be a feminized type who falls into lockstep with her
every demand and wish. In this case he will tend to act as her
champion. This does not mean he is particularly heroic, either in the
home or the world, but his wife and he himself subconsciously think he
is. In the company of masculine men he can fairly easily pose as
something he's not and affect an air of manliness. But when he is out
of their presence he reverts to the docile type he truly is. He is at
the beck and call of his wife who has him well at heel. This is also
how a terrible female usually acts with their child right from the
off. Her son or daughter is part of her body, and if they have a mind,
it is of her making. Same goes for their soul. And she will be sure to
set herself up as her child's primary object of devotion. She sets
about criticizing and prohibiting every sign of individuality
displayed. Her son or daughter are not able to live their own lives,
not for a second. They are bound to live her life, think with her
thoughts, and view the world pretty much as she sees it. Even if they
develop independent attitudes, they will not be able to express them
freely and openly. From a child's viewpoint this kind of mother is a
frightening and foreboding character who must not be crossed. Even her
smile carries a hidden threat. And if she smiles with her lips, her
eyes do not express happiness or joy. The terrible female invades her
child's free space from the start, and does so for as long as she is
able. It is unlikely that her child will ever break free from her
incestuous clutches. A son might succeed in becoming either a
feminized or chivalric male, but not in becoming existentially free.
He will suffer being corded to his overbearing and devouring mother on
an emotional level for quite some time, maybe to the end of his life.
Outside her dominating presence he might not even relish the feel of
freedom, and will therefore attract a wife who resembles his terrible
mother in many respects. Because of this his own children find it
difficult to experience what it is to be mentally and emotionally free
beings. If he secretly resents his mother's domination, he might
attract a feminized female for a wife. In which case he will adopt a
domineering and even violent role toward her, making her pay for his
mother's sins. This is a very common scenario among dysfunctional
couples. If his mother hasn't passed on, she might openly approve of
his stance toward his meeker wife. This is especially true if she has
brought him up to believe that all women are perfidious creatures. In
the case of a daughter, she is likely to strongly identify with her
mother despite her inner loathing of her. After all, her mother came
across as a strong "queenly" woman to be envied if not admired. She
had power over men who tended to be servile in her presence. For the
terrible female it is therefore essential that the woman or wife has
the "whip hand." She must aspire to be better than men and feminized
women, in business and domestic life. Her children must also be
"better" than the children of relatives and neighbors. They must
outshine everyone at school. The terrible female certainly possesses a
strong Animus, as Jungians term it, that is, she is apparently
strongly masculine. But it is a malignant form of masculinity, akin to
that displayed by chivalric males. Indeed, the terrible female (as a
terrible mother) usually gives birth to chivalric types, as well as
the terrible females who embody her traits. Feminized men and women
are also bred by this type of terrible female, after she becomes a
terrible mother. In short, she is the prime breeder of the four main
malignant types here delineated.

The Masculinized Male is basically a balanced type with decent
parents. His Self-image was not warped and contaminated by his mother
during the first days and weeks after birth. When he acts in the world
he does so as a sincere, forthright, moral agent, and his sense of
what is right and wrong is not determined solely by his superego
– the impositions and prerogatives of parents and society.
Rather they emanate from a deeper source, from his Imperial Self and
conscience. He finds himself attracted to decent women, but soon
learns that he is matched best by masculinized women. Feminized types
are attracted to him, but he finds them too pliable, docile and
insincere. He learns that their enthralling mystique merely serves to
conceal their shallow personalities. He also realizes that he must be
on guard against chivalric types who attempt to one-up him. He learns
to beware of this type although he rarely suspects what underlies
their character traits. He does not realize that the power they wield
is not their own, and that they are merely agents of a more sinister
force which possesses them. Nevertheless he can on some level smell
the foulness below the hyper-masculinized façade, and because of this
he strives to go his own way and not become an ally of chivalric
males. On the downside this type might be so extrovert and
self-reliant that he may forgo peace, quiet and aloneness. Aware of
his capacities he may work to excess and drive himself too hard. His
connection with his feminine side or unconscious may therefore be
relatively weak. He may have little interest in psychological and
philosophical matters, and be suspicious of males who have such
interests. He can be impatient, driven and goal-oriented. Failure is
not regarded as an essential phenomenon on the road toward success.
Rather, it is condemned, and if all does not go well, this type is
likely to severely blame himself. His world tends to be seen in black
and white, and as a result he leaves himself open to manipulation by
those more cunning and farsighted than himself. The more he finds
himself out-maneuvered by such types, the more withdrawn, apathetic
and resentful he becomes. The world is now chock full of adult men in
this state. Their goodly mothers never got around to teaching them how
to be dishonest, showy and superficial. The masculinized male and his
counterpart, the masculinized woman, do not know they are outnumbered
by immoral and amoral types. They are not aware that they are in
combat with four deviant types who breed more of their own kind,
thereby making the world a perfect haunt for psychopaths hell-bent on
satiating their every perverse desire. Crucially, the masculinized
male is the architect of culture. He builds sanely and decently
because, being sane and sincere himself, his rapport with nature and
study of nature's ways is rational, sensitive and non-exploitative. He
does not think of nature as a dead thing there for his exclusive
entertainment and abuse. Nature is not merely a resource to be
plundered. Indeed in early times the masculinized male closely
observed nature. He did not excessively fear it, as we have been told
by disingenuous urbanized "experts." On the contrary, he revered
nature as his maker. His first words mimicked the call of birds and
mammals. The fire he invented and lit came from nature's womb. It had
to first be latent in nature in order to become part of human culture.
So it goes for every original cultural element. Nature provided it and
man made use of it, bending it into shape according to his needs. If
nature did not hold the implicate template, culture could never have
arisen. The masculinized man remains conscious of this and does not
create structures or paradigms that ignore or contradict this vitally
important fact. In short, the industrious masculinized male's effort
created and established each culture that thrived up to the present.
His demise means the end of civilization. The perverse and destructive
elements that bring ruin to his culture are the products of his
nemesis, the feminized male and female.

The Feminized Male is a type least influenced by the authentic
masculine polarity. It is the influence of the terrible mother that
dominates his personality. He is the mystic-humanitarian type with
liberal attitudes. He does not despise the female principle because he
actually embodies it, albeit in a neurotic or malignant mode. He seeks
the underlying reality of things and shows an interest in religious
and spiritual matters. He deifies the female and becomes a devout
acolyte of some exotic tradition. He is the seeker and reformer with a
cause. He is the philanthropist and communitarian, against
individualism and for collectivism, an advocate of the brotherhood of
man. He disapproves of aristocracy and takes exception with
exceptionalism. He tends to be a bleeding heart and acts as if he and
those like him are humanity's mothers or caregivers. He feels
relatively comfortable in the company of feminized females,
masculinized females and chivalric males, but is utterly repulsed by
masculinized males. He identifies less with the chivalric male even
though this malignant type is merely his more exaggerated and armored
alter-ego. The chivalric male is a feminized male who has learned to
cover his true identity with psychosomatic armoring. The feminized
male is usually not as physically armored as his counterpart, but can
be mentally just as resistant and narrow. Although he can be
productive in his own way, his preferred outlook is critical and
negative. He poses as a critic of that which is built by masculinized
men and women, and cynically attempts to undermine their ideas and
creations. As a son, he is not genuinely loved and cared for by his
terrible mother. This is because she'd much prefer him to be a
chivalric type. Because of this deficit the feminized male does what
he can to impress and win his mother's affection. His commitment to
various "hippy" causes stems from this subconscious need. Like the
chivalric male he idealizes the feminine and the female, which in turn
makes him a willing ally of most females. Even masculinized females
are wont to turn to him at times, using him as a shoulder to cry on or
convenient eunuch-like toady. All in all this is one of the least
loved and admirable types. Consequently he is not only deeply wounded,
but might in certain cases substitute love for power. In these cases
he works in a behind-the-scenes capacity for his chivalric
counterparts, giving needed advice and approval to these more
energetic types he secretly loathes. He never comes to realize that
his nature has been determined by the terrible mother he blindly
serves in one way or another. As an emasculated male he finds the
attainment of success and greatness elusive, even though other
"castrated" males and feminized women may look up to him and shower
him with rewards for his apparently selfless service to their causes.
On occasion the feminized male poses as a chivalric male. This is done
if and when he comes into contact with these types. It is relatively
easy for him to blend in with them and disguise his natural docility
and passivity. The feminized male might seek a mate who is
masculinized in order to find the structure and strength he lacks. He
does not mind being controlled because he has experienced that
throughout his childhood. And for the most part he approves of this
kind of relationship. What would his life be without it? So when he
leaves the bosom of his mother, and her protecting presence, he seeks
a surrogate mother to structure his days and guide his projects.
However, despite his intentions he might be driven toward a feminized
female for company, since it is unlikely that an adjusted masculinized
female will be permanently attracted to him. He might even fall prey
to a maladjusted terrible female, the same type as his mother. Since
he is basically an "oral" type he will not be overly bothered by this.
If he marries a feminine type chances are his children will be as
feminized as their parents. If he ends up with a terrible female, his
children will probably develop into one of the four malignant types,
unless some other positive influence enters to prevent this from
happening. If he develops conspicuously neurotic traits, they tend to
be of the masochistic variety. For this reason, he often finds respite
by way of marijuana, opium, LSD, ayahuasca, or some other psychotropic
substance that affords him an "out of body" experience, sense of
bonding with what he takes to be the Great Mother, or sense of
oblivion. He never realizes that he is either attempting to find a
simulacra of the serenity experienced in utero, or to exorcise and
assuage repressed memories of his troubled and traumatic time in the
womb. In one sense the feminized male is the most "castrated" type.
When ancient priests and goddess acolytes physically castrated
themselves they did so not to prevent entry into the mother goddess,
but to hand over their masculinity to her. She became the keeper of
their member which henceforth is always "in her." So it is,
figuratively or symbolically, with the feminized male. When he feels
as if he is "taken up" into the cosmos or feels as if he is "one" with
the universe, he announces his subconscious desire to return to the
serenity of the womb. Since this is impossible physically, the womb
situation is projected elsewhere - onto the crowd, world or cosmos. It
is projected into a heavenly abode where one becomes an "angel." We
see why it is that so many feminized types become clergymen and
priests. We also see why so many of their leitmotifs and accoutrements
– hairstyles, attire, chalices, wafers, beads, mantras,
architecture, and so on – are directly traceable to goddess
traditions. If a feminized male turns to philosophical speculation, he
is likely to adopt a Schopenhauerean perspective on existence. He is
likely to be mystical, gnostic, fatalistic, resigned and dour, as well
as sanctimonious. Although he secretly fears women he might be
inclined to openly denigrate them in order to bolster and emphasize
what little masculinity he possesses. In any case, in word and deed he
poses no threat whatsoever to any woman, most of whom are far more
assertive and confident than he. He can also introject the womb. As we
see later, the so-called "unconscious" serves as perfect metaphor for
the mother's all-embracing womb. More concretely, the feminized male
is victimized by his mother and her presentation of males. His
perception of his father and of the male world is that which has been
customized and handed down by his terrible mother. It is therefore an
inaccurate and deformed image that underlies his distaste of the male
gender and world, and which orients him toward malignant femininity.
Even when his mother stands accused of mental, physical or sexual
abuse toward him, she excuses herself by indicting her husband, or
some other male for their grievous ways against her, or against
"women" in general. A terrible mother is likely to make her child
falsely believe that her strictness and cruelty are at the behest of
the child's father. Thus she plants the seeds of male hatred early on.
From that point an abused child is sure to regard his father, not his
mother, as his chief violator. He consequently comes to despise male
strength which he falsely thinks is the source of all evil in the
world. In any case, under no circumstances will a terrible female or
mother, or feminized male or female, acknowledge and address female
crime. They know nothing about the female psyche and do not care to
know anything about it. For these types there is only one malefactor
in the world, and that is man.

The Chivalric Male is an abnormal type who has overly
masculinized his consciousness in order to escape the overwhelming and
stifling influence of his terrible mother. He is the masculinized male
gone wrong. His masculinity is of a malignant rather than a wholesome
kind, even though it is born from a semi-legitimate desire to overcome
the terrible dragon mother whose countenance turned malign when he
demonstrated too much Self-will. As a result of his contrived persona
he is not overly attracted to masculinized females. On the contrary he
prefers feminized females, and does so to cover his underlying
loathing of his terrible mother. Thus his show of hardness and
rectitude is a pretense, his masculinity based on his false image
of it rather than on the reality. He poses as an adjusted "civilized"
male by his disingenuous courtesy toward feminized females around him.
He takes their cause and offers the security they sorely desire. As a
result the majority of his relationships are loveless. His
enthrallments turn sour all too soon. According to Wilhelm Reich's
brilliant and perceptive analysis of abnormal personality types, our
chivalric male personifies a highly "armored" type of person. As such
he is the world-builder, fashioning a world custom-made not only for
types such as himself, but for the comfort of the feminized females he
adores. His preferred environment is open, spacey, square and well
lit. This is because he subconsciously seeks to escape the memory of
the claustrophobic darkened "cave" wherein his mother's incestuous
attentions first undermined his masculinity. From a Freudian viewpoint
a chivalric male attempts to escape the influence of the terrible
mother by overly identifying with his father or some other idealized
male. Although such an identification provides temporary psychic
relief, it does not get to the heart of the problem or lead to
wholeness. This is partly because the chivalric male cannot know for
certain whether the male figure with whom he identifies is not himself
an inauthentic type unable to face himself beneath his own
psychosomatic armor. The psychological fallout for this type can be
severe. This is because by the time he falls from grace he has risen
quite high, even if only in his own estimation. When his fortress of
self-deception crumbles – when he suspects he is not the virile
civilizer he thought himself to be – he is usually incapable of
making sense of what has happened. He remains so disoriented, crushed
and apathetic that he inevitably turns to substance abuse for
consolation. To the end of his days he never learns the truth about
himself or the female psyche. This type has been on the go from the
dawn of historical time. We live in worlds made by such men. The
adjusted masculinized (or truly civilized) male is his direct opposite
and nemesis. The latter must work to change the world for the better
against the chivalric man's wishes, even though temporarily there may
be collusion between the two types. The main thing separating them is
their relationship to their mothers and to women in general. It is
totally different for each of them. The masculinized male is not
controlled or controllable by female types, whereas the chivalric male
definitely is. It follows that, for all his feelings of omnipotence,
his creations are weak from the start. To compensate for this he sees
to it that everything he erects is superficially sturdy and rigid, and
this goes for physical structures or theoretical ones. He armors his
world and finds it good to do so. He never realizes that the world he
constructs – the world in which we all live – is
precarious and likely to crash at any time. If there is anything truly
stable and hygienic in his world it was invented and produced not by
him but by his nemesis, the masculinized male and/or female. The
chivalric male is likely to choose a feminized female for his perfect
mate. His choice, like all men's choices of partner, is based on the
nature and intensity of his own inner feminine or Anima, as Jung
termed it. (Likewise the feminized female's choice of a mate is also
determined by her inner masculinity or Animus.) Consequently the child
of a feminized female and chivalric male is potentially off to a bad
start. And the likelihood of such children growing up to dominate
world affairs is heightened if the world system prefers and promotes
such types. Indeed, this is the situation in the western world today.
The chivalric male's masculinity is an artificially contrived version
of masculinity. It is an image of masculinity to which he holds all
his life. As an "anal" type he does not like to let go of what he has
made. Structure, familiarity and regularity are vitally important.
Since he was dominated by his terrible mother he has no idea what
constitutes authentic femininity. Thanks to his deviant upbringing,
his conception of femininity is as warped and wrongheaded as his
conception of masculinity. This will of course be bound to create
problems between him and most women, particularly with masculine
women. He does not find himself compatible with them or with terrible
females who, like his mother, are of an overly controlling
disposition. This is why he is more likely to be attracted to
feminized women who are not inclined to control him. He wants to be
the one in control, and does not want any other women to dominate him.
This awakens too many unpleasant memories. Consequently he is inclined
to dictate what his partner does, says and looks like. The chivalric
male's distorted image of manliness goes hand in hand with his image
of God. And he usually believes in God because his malignant
masculinity is reinforced by doing so. As I show later, such a belief
is part and parcel of his entry into the so-called solar phase of
development. During this stage a chivalric type's pose as a heroic,
superhuman "civilizer" of humanity must appear one hundred percent
perfect to himself and everyone dazzled by his persona. His works and
world must be superlit and unstained. This is best accomplished by
establishing and worshiping a bright solar deity on high who showers
that world with meaning and approval. This divine force also serves to
cast back the shadows of the underworld, that is, of his own
unconscious. He craves the sunlit world and worships his fatherly Lord
above in order to not be dragged down into the swamp of his own
troubled emotions. His love for his heavenly father is born from his
subconscious hatred of his terrible mother. As an exhibitionist the
chivalric male also strives to have people envy his supposed sexual
prowess. Indeed, he may be quite the lady's man. However, his inner
wish is not for sex but for comfort, gentleness, acknowledgement and
pleasure, all of which he sorely lacked during infancy. He might even
become an aggressive semi-sadistic lothario in order to disguise his
true needs from himself. His haughty, dismissive attitude
toward lovers stems from his self-deception that ironically prevents
him receiving what he desires most from a partner. The chivalric
male's world topples when he confronts the fact that his god's light
has not served to permanently banish the "devil's" influence, and that
worse, he has become incapable of feeling. When he realizes he has
become desensitized sexually as well as emotionally, he panics and
turns to prescription drugs to mend what he thinks is broken, or to
medicate him when all hope fades. In extreme cases he might even
pretend to himself that he has renounced the ways of the "flesh," to
go in search of God. In this way he emasculates himself in a similar
manner as his terrible mother did in earlier times. Although he goes
on to blind himself with light, he does not succeed in deepening
sensitivity. All that happens is that he becomes contemptuous and
hateful toward the men he sees who do feel deeply about things. They
must be destroyed, and if they have the misfortune to come under the
hand of an extremely armored psychotic chivalric male, they might find
themselves being destroyed. This is a scenario we see played out time
and again in history, one that is not about to come to an end. Even if
the chivalric type does not really believe in the existence of God, he
is likely to opt for the Kantian consolation and say to himself "...if
there is no God, there should be!...We must invent him, since we all
need the phantasmagoria of God to stay sane." Certainly the
mysteria-haunted chivalric male depends on his images of masculinity
and God to keep himself and his world together. The chivalric type is
basically an Apollonian. His transcendental heavens and supersensible
eternal Platonic forms, like his science and rationality, are merely
fictions offering needed stability. They are the means by which he
escapes and sets bulwarks against the Dionysian abyss into which he
and his kind must not fall. His beloved paradigms must not be
assaulted by dissenters. They are to be exterminated because they seek
to topple the towers which elevate us above the female miasma and
shield us from cultural obliteration. What has been built high can and
should be built higher still, so let's get on with it. That which has
been polished must be repeatedly surveyed for corrosion. That which is
straight and level must never become skewed and bent. Under no
circumstance must weeds be allowed to grow through the cracks, must
fresh air get into the sealed chambers, or dirt and germs get on one's
hands. We must be fast, driven, active, bright, loud, erect and awake.
The chivalric male takes refuge in ideas and ideas about ideas. He
chooses this course because it distracts him from feeling and
dealing with feelings that emanate from deeply laid memories of the
uterine condition. His rigid, clean, superlit, stable, safe world is
one which prevents the return of disturbing memories. As I show later,
his ascent to the apparent safety of the "solar world" does not
provide him with a successful plateau and defense against his
innermost fears and phobias. It merely becomes a new theatre in which
he must re-enter the dragon fight he so desperately seeks to avoid.

◊

The types I delineate here are determined before the
commencement of the Oedipal phase which begins around three years of
age. This means that the essential complexion of one's temperament is
well and truly set before one arrives at the first of Freud's five
psychodynamic stages, these being the Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latent and
Genital. In fact when it comes to sexual orientation the child's
character can be predetermined in utero. In any case the attachment or
fixation on one of the parents, which occurs during one of the five
Freudian stages, is already predetermined by what happens earlier. It
occurs because of the nature of the mother-child relationship during
pre-Oedipal periods. If an adolescent or adult regresses to the oral
stage it is chiefly because of their unfulfillment during earlier
stages of development. Subconsciously they wish to devour or embody
the object of interest. This in turn fulfills their inner emptiness
and pang of rejection. Once, during the earliest stage of development,
the ego-germ was embraced by the All. It was indistinct from the
energetic ocean in which it effortlessly floated. The memory of this
sublime undifferentiated condition holds sway over every mind, be it
infantile or adult. The oral type simply wishes to "eat the world" and
take it again into oneself. More correctly, it desires a dissolution
of the frustrated and disoriented Self into the uroboric abyss.

If a person regresses to the anal stage, it is because fear of
loss is the dominant syndrome – fear of the loss of self that
is. This is a fear that arises because of a terrible mother's stifling
devouring presence. Running alongside this need for possessing the
other, is an equally strong impulse to reject, demean and negate. This
occurs because the conditioning of a scrutinizing and disapproving
terrible mother forced one to self-condemn for acts of self-will. One
seeks the terrible mother's approval by rejecting aspects of
personality she deems inappropriate and reprehensible. The child says
"...See, watch me get rid of everything dirty and willful in
me...Aren't I good?...Am I not doing exactly what you want?" Of course
for everything jettisoned there comes a compulsive feeling of
emptiness. This void is eventually filled with stuff from the world.
Each bit of stuff appropriated by the psychic hoarder stands for
something inwardly lost or banished. With the emptying out and
self-rejection process comes compensatory feelings of masochism or
self-loathing. Aspects of the Self are being shoved into the
shadow-world so one is accepted in the sunlit world inhabited by
all-knowing parents. It is at the anal stage that a child learns what
it can get away with as far as Self-will is concerned. Freudians are
correct here, as long as we realize that the earlier dragon-fight has
also served to let the infant estimate the strength of will of his
adversary. Nevertheless, the infant's attempts at sphincter control
and feces retention constitute acts of will. The intervention and
disapproval of the parents at his attempts to form the basis of his
ego-ideal and superego which manage his post-Oedipal Self-image and
moral sensibility. Indeed, the ego-ideal is not only the seat of our
all-important Self-image, but of the unrealistically inflated images
of our parents. Because of their influence and conditioning, the
ego-ideal generates a Self-image that is actually a pseudo-self which
takes the place of the Imperial Self occluded during earlier stages of
development. In any case the anal stage signals a time when a child
may begin curtailing overt acts of Self-will in order to win approval,
becoming increasingly acculturated, conformist, socialized and
inwardly unhappy. In pathological cases a child becomes emotionally
and even physically static or autistic. This is simply because at this
stage their life-force or will has once again been severely curtailed.
They may masochistically start to associate pain with feeling. If such
is the case the child grows to either inflict pain on others (starting
with animals), or wishes to receive painful treatment at the hands of
others. Exhibitionism, body-piercing, tattooing, collecting weapons
and bizarre pets, together with an interest in dangerous sports and
violent games becomes a child or teen's way of exorcising repressed
self-hate, as well as hatred toward authority figures. In this way he
physically responds to his inner tension caused when his flaccid,
disoriented ego is repeatedly hectored and shamed by an overly strict
superego. In extreme cases his penchant for self-damage can lead to
attempts at suicide. Before reaching this level an anal character
might suffer from bouts of schizophrenia in which he inflates his
self-image despite the searchlight of his superego. He might believe
himself to be Napoleon or Jesus. In these histrionic moments he says
to the world (or parents) "...You can't blame me or suppress my will
anymore!...You can't fuck with me now!...See who I am!" In this case
his so-called schizoid personality disorder is simply the result of
the two dominant parts of his consciousness sparking in violent
struggle, as his personal will attempts to come out from the shadow of
his terrible mother's all-encompassing will. If the superego comes out
on top, the child retreats into masochistic denial and hopelessness.
If and when he encounters other people, or makes friends, his unspoken
rule is "...I exist so you are able to see how superior you are to
me...You're better than me at everything, that's why I'm your friend,
so I can look up at you, while you look down on me...Thanks for your
friendship, but I know it won't last long...Sooner or later you'll
tire of my loathsome presence."

...the rage that is aroused because their autonomy has been
destroyed becomes a destructive drive in its own right and stimulates
their desire for power. If nothing happens to relieve their situation
– if they are not treated humanely, for example –
children soon learn that pain itself is an effective means of gaining
power over others. They understand that pain can alter their own
mood, and they begin to assume that everyone and everything can be
controlled by inflicting it – Arno Gruen

Importantly, it is at the anal stage that a negative body-image comes
into play. This in itself gives rise to neurotic tendencies that
persist throughout one's life. Few child psychologists or therapists
give the body the attention it deserves. This is partly why healing
neuroses takes such a long time. It is why the techniques of Wilhelm
Reich and Arthur Janov are so superior when it comes to overcoming
pathological tendencies. (See Appendices
II and III for more on this.)

At the phallic stage one enters what Erich Neumann refers to as
the Solar Phase of psychic development. At this juncture a child has
already embodied the Reality Principle. They are aware of the world
and the parents, and become susceptible to the imperatives and
strictures imposed by both. However, as an analysis of Neumann's
stages reveals, the impositions which constitute the Freudian superego
are often overlaid upon a conscience which has developed poorly due to
the negative influence of a terrible mother. As a moral center the
superego directs one imperfectly since imposed prohibitions are not as
effective as rules of conduct emanating naturally from the Imperial
Self by way of a wholesome conscience. As a result it is possible that
the moral center – or superego – is not sufficient to
prohibit one from violating the will of other people. In cases of this
sort we find ourselves dealing with a deviant and potentially
delinquent type intent on running amok. It will only be the
intervention of a strict authoritarian male or female that brings such
a wayward child to heel. Failing this, it is the State that is bound
to take over. This is a situation that has become all too common in
today's world.

In his attempt to clarify what Freud stated about the advent and
nature of the superego, Otto Rank believed it was primarily the
mother's influence that determined the complexion of the child's moral
center. I believe he was correct. I also believe that Melanie Klein
was correct when she stated that a child's character was predominantly
determined before the onset of the Oedipal phase.

At the phallic and genital stages the absence of previous
body-contact with the mother comes to bear. If a terrible mother has
seen fit to deny warmth, kindliness and nourishment, her child's
feelings of lack and emptiness will be compensated for by way of
sexual feelings toward one or other of the parents, or towards
siblings or some other object. Freud erroneously thought that this was
the time when a male child becomes erotically attached to his mother
and antagonistic toward his father. However this is not the case. The
sexual feeling merely compensates for the lack of feeling that would
not exist had his mother been warm, caring and physically attentive
during the natal period. Freudian sexual ardor toward one parent, and
antagonism toward the other, is really an early manifestation of the
Will-to-Power. It is a symptom of the need to demand, control and
conquer; tendencies well learned by most infants after observing their
authoritarian parents.

CHAPTER FOUR

Psychic Incest

There are mothers whose genuine capacity for love is
undeveloped, atrophied or poisoned and who, as compensation for their
own negative fulfillment, fling themselves on their children, not in
order to give away a super-abundant love, but in order to fill their
own emptiness with the child –Erich Neumann

The dragon mother becomes a terrible mother partly because of the
natural urges within her offspring to individuate. She wishes her
child to remain strictly under her control, an intent felt even in
utero. Therefore any sign of authentic Self-will is disapproved of and
crushed. As long as the child remains under her power all is well. The
child, male or female, exists to do her will. In the case of a male
child, he is the champion who will one day ride forth to bring her the
world. He will right the wrongs done to her and he will defeat her
enemies. However as Erich Neumann points out, in many cases the son is
subconsciously treated not only as a champion but also as a lover.
This is not as abnormal as it sounds, since each father and husband
was originally himself a son. In mythological as well as psychological
terms, the son precedes his father. Consequently the son's
relationship with his mother is often psychically incestuous. Given
the intimate, if toxic, nature of this relationship, any sign of
Self-will on the part of the son is likely to be instantly condemned
and punished. If the son persists and attempts to contradict the will
of his terrible mother, he stands to suffer retribution. She is in a
position to undermine his Self-esteem and Self-will. This destructive,
depersonalizing process is often accomplished by cold indifference,
demeaning speech, severe looks and a perpetual air of disapproval.

A growing child is quite capable of punishing its mother for
lack of affectional bonding and conspicuous neglect. It is certainly
capable of registering and resenting her underlying animosity and
obsession with control. Pediatricians and psychologists take this as a
given, and know how to detect a mother's true feelings about her child
by the behavioral responses the child displays toward her and its
immediate environment. They know that paranoia, withdrawal, hostility
and outright aggression are classic means by which infants attempt to
strike back at their mother's subtle or overt domination:

...in the first few months of life, infants pass through states
of persecutory anxiety which are bound up with the 'phase of maximal
sadism;' the young infant also experiences feelings of guilt about
his destructive impulses and phantasies which are directed against
his primary object - his mother – Melanie Klein

If an infant displays aggression toward its father, it is
generally because the father is perceived as being under the control
of the terrible mother. It is his weakness and complicity that is
registered and despised. When one or both of the parents guess the
reasons for their son or daughter's fixations, tantrums and bizarre
routines, they usually react oppressively and punitively. This merely
exacerbates the child's antipathy, but since the child is not big and
strong enough to physically strike back or "castrate" both parents, it
processes rage nonverbally through playacting with dolls and other
toys, and through fantasies, dreams and nightmares. An analysis of the
average troubled infant's dreams reveals to psychoanalysts the
intensity of rage that lies just beneath the surface. Once the
defensive capacity for repression develops sufficiently (during the
approach of the genital stage), the hostility and aggression that were
for a short time apparent disappear from view.

The considerable hostility expressed by troubled children does
not originate during Oedipal stages, as so many otherwise competent
psychologists are wont to believe. The child expresses resentment
which existed in unmanifested form in utero. Melanie Klein herself
noted that the various neurotic tendencies that existed in many of the
children she analyzed were the same as those found in their mothers.
In other words the neurotic patterns were transferred by mothers to
their sons and daughters.

The great child-psychologist Melanie Klien
(1882-1960)

Certainly, in the first year of birth the infant's ambivalence
and hostility is more explicit. And as the infant grows, its tantrums,
bed-wetting, nail-biting, tics and general disobedience also reveal
its underlying resentment. By year one the child implicitly discovers
that the mother it needs and loves it also hates. Hence each child and
adult must deal with the attraction versus repulsion dynamic
accompanying every other relationship. The question arises as to
whether such an inner dichotomy can ever been healed. As far as I am
concerned, this act of repair and Self-analysis constututes real
Shadow Work. We must become consciously aware of our own hostility
toward our parents and ultimately toward ourselves for incorrectly
imagining that we are its origin.

Of course for a child inner conflict can be abated in another
way, by completely falling into lockstep with a terrible mother's
intentions and directives. A child might decide that even though he
inwardly disapproves of a mother's attitudes, his world is safer and
easier when he accepts her peccadilloes. In extreme cases a child
might begrudgingly concur with every irrational attitude and plan
concocted by his mother. After all he is under her spell and
thoroughly addicted to her incestuous attentions. He may never fathom
what kind of person she is, or comprehend the syndromes that makes her
tick. He never discovers that she regards him simply as property. She
is the wellspring from which he first emerged, the nurturer who fed
him as he grew toward consciousness, and director of his will now that
he is conscious. All in all, he is her creation. As both an
unconscious and conscious being he belongs to her and her alone. This
means that his exploits and conquests also belong to her. If he
willingly lays his successes at her feet, all is well. If, on the
other hand, he attempts to cleave them to himself he will be
disapproved of and punished. He might be spurned in favor of a new
child or lover, given that the father is absent. As far as a terrible
mother is concerned, after her champion's energies are exhausted on
whatever quests she sends him on, he is bound to return to her arms.
Even if she does not consciously think this out, it is there latently
within her mind. From her body he arose, and to her body he will
return when his short ego-life is over. This attitude, whether
explicit or not, is morbid and destructive. With this underlying
intention a terrible mother sabotages attempts at wholeness and
centroversion. She prevents her child's climb toward the light of
consciousness and individuality, happily arresting him at oral and
anal stages of development.

...there is a tendency to take Freud's use of the term incest
too literally. This has led to a rather widespread misapprehension.
For the concept of an unconscious, psychological incest does not
postulate overt sexuality, not a conscious wish for sexual intimacy
with a closely related person, but rather a fixation of psychological
energy or libido within the family group, preventing the individual
so bound from seeking a suitable sexual and emotional relationship
outside the family – Mary Esther Harding (Psychic
Energy)

In utero or during infancy, if the child's will and natural
capacity for centroversion is persistently resisted and obstructed, as
in the case of a terrible mother, the child may become manic,
outer-directed and excessively demanding – the proverbial
"little terror." Since he is always on guard to be countered, he is
alert for moments when he can exert his power. Children of this kind
are usually mysteriously composed and agreeable in the presence of
strangers. It is usually only with their mothers that they demonstrate
hostility and defiance. If the child's will is met with acceptance and
love, he is likely to wed his personal will with love and thereby
become an adjusted human being. In extreme cases, if the terrible
mother's will intractably counters her child's will, the latter is
likely to masochistically resist his own impulses for maturation. At
this stage he becomes autistic. Rather than being open to it, he
resists the flow of Logos and as a result becomes morbid and deranged.
In extreme cases the will-less child grows to abhor women and their
sexuality. This accounts for the profile of a good many murderers and
rapists. In many cases a man out to kill proves to be less violent
toward women who do not resist his attack. If they fight against him
they usually do not live to regret it.

The implicit destructiveness of necrophilous relationships
between a mother and child serve to contaminate the complexion of the
world around us. The man who walks around possessed by the spirit of
his terrible mother is not going to appropriately serve humankind or
set the world's wrongs aright. On the contrary he is likely to make
things a lot worse. As a psychically and emotionally arrested person
he is sure to add to the ruin we see around us. Little do we suspect
the origins of his toxicity and delinquency. We do not realize that,
as a rule, male violence is merely a symptom of psychic violence
perpetrated in the dark, as it were, by terrible mothers who go
unpunished.

The warm, erotically and often sexually tinged tie to mother is
what Freud had in mind when he described the Oedipus complex. While
this type of incestuous fixation is most frequent, there is another,
must less frequent, kind of incestuous fixation that has very
different qualities and may be called malignant. It is the type of
incestuous fixation that...is related to necrophilia – in fact
it may be considered one of its earliest roots. I am speaking of
children in whom no affective bonds toward mother emerge to break
through the shell of autistic self-sufficiency. We are familiar with
extreme forms of such self-sufficiency in the case of autistic
children. These children never break out of the shell of their
narcissism: they never experience the mother as a love object, but
rather, look through them as if they were inanimate objects, and they
often show a particular interest in mechanical things – Erich
Fromm (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness)

We should not be surprised to hear of this battle of wills
between mother and child. This is because as far as many ethnologists
and anthropologists are concerned, Self-will is, like many other
faculties of consciousness, a recent acquisition or trait. In the
writings of the ancient Greeks we do not even find mention of a thing
called "mind."

Homer's work does not refer to cognitive or noetic terms such
as desire, think, believe, doubt, or decide, etc. There is no mention
of mind. Free will is largely, if not entirely absent, as are
references to independence of action. God and actions prompted by
divine beings and deities is very common. There is a great emphasis
on the spoken word, and on agreements of a spoken or written kind, as
in contracts, etc – Gellatly and Zarate (Introducing
Mind and Brain)

That is right; the term psyche only turns up during the
Socratic era. We see then how things were through the centuries. In
tribal collectives mothers enjoyed total authority over their sons and
daughters until they grew to become parents themselves. Then the
terrible mother became a terrible grandmother, with considerable power
not only over her grandchildren's lives, but over the tribe itself.
Images of tutelary goddesses predate images of gods and male deities
by thousands of years. Cave art shows a goddess figure presiding over
the hunt, and some specialists believe that many societies throughout
the world were matriarchal through and through. We must, therefore,
revise our understanding of the power exercised by women throughout
the ages, and contemplate the power that still exists under a
different guise today, particularly as it manifests in the
mother-child dynamic.

From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby first
confronts its twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to
forces of outrageous violence, called love, as its mother and father
have been, and their parents, and their parents before them. These
forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of the baby's
potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful. By the
time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being
like ourselves, a half-crazed creature, more or less adjusted to a
mad world. This is normality in our present age – R. D. Laing

We must also realize how perilous a child's gradual ascent toward
consciousness is, and how that ascent can be stunted by the influence
of a terrible mother. The intrusion of her will and intent constitutes
a formidable obstacle to the attainment of Self-consciousness and
Self-expression. We see what we are dealing with more perceptively
when we tie mythology into the dynamic. The mythological record shows
us that even when we acknowledge the ascent as a fight against the
power of the dragon mother, in her terrible aspect, we fail to see
that the fight is often a test set for the son by his terrible mother.
After all, what kind of champion will he be for her if his mettle
isn't tested? When he fails he becomes the docile feminized male, but
when he triumphs he becomes the chivalric male who falsely believes
himself victorious over her. He then goes on to win and shape the
world, not in his image as he thinks, but in hers. For all his
contrived masculinity he remains possessed by her spirit and an agent,
albeit unwillingly, in her service. To carry out her secret wishes he
must shape up to her image of him. Of course this effort merely
augments his characterological inauthenticity. Her intent at this
stage parallels her earlier intrusion during the preconscious
stages of development. Her dutiful son's attempts to accommodate her
image of him, and his continued dissociation of the traits that
constitute true Selfhood, constellate into a new image of himself,
which in turn determines the complexion both of his superego and
ego-ideal. We see that it is a mother's influence that primarily forms
one's moral sensibility. We also see the implications this has not
only for her son's personal life, but for the state of the world in
which he and others like him live. We now uncover the hidden
relationship that exists between women, morality and culture. In
short, society becomes a terrible mother's ally in the process of
shaping her child's moral sensibility. After all, the child imagines
his mother's attempts to make him into something he's not, and to win
him the world, are born from a competent understanding of the world's
ways. He thinks he is being acculturated for the good by someone who
truly means him well. As we said, this weak-willed type never
penetrates beneath the surface to investigate the roots of the female
psyche.

...the neurotic's need to appear perfect leads to repressing,
first, everything that does not fit into his particular façade and,
second, everything that would render it impossible for him to
maintain that façade – Karen Horney

In some cases the mothers of narcissistic personality disorders
are emotionally cold and exploitive narcissistic personalities
themselves. They ignore their children's separation and individuation
needs in order to mold the children to fit their own perfectionistic
standards and to serve their own emotional needs – James F.
Masterson (Search for the Real Self)

Feminized types are those who find themselves being shaped for
world success by their terrible mothers. They are, however, least
likely to put up an iota of resistance against the strictures imposed
by her and the society into which they are thrown. Consequently, they
are the most repressed, frustrated and sado-masochistic of the types.
All the while, throughout the time their devouring mothers fervently
mould their behavior to suit the world's norms, a feminized type is
bound to repress his anger toward his overbearing mother. This act of
dissociation, of legitimate emotion, also serves to reinforce the
superego. From a Reichean point of view it is the cause of
psychosomatic disease.

The Self is born, but the ego is made – Edward Edinger

If you give up the past you naturally detach from the past; you
lose your roots in the soil, your connection with the totem ancestors
that dwell in your soul. You turn outward and drift away, and try to
conquer other lands because you are exiled from your own soil
– Carl Gustav Jung

We see from this that it is certainly not the dread of physical
castration by a father that primarily constructs the superego and
feminizes a child, but the psychically castrating process set in
motion by a terrible mother. It is a process that continues throughout
the child's life, even after she departs his presence.

Classical theory has it that the boy fears castration by father
as punishment for his sexual interest in mother. This is not verified
by my clinical experience. It is his mother whom he fears...The
mother cares for and disciplines the child and it is her attitudes
toward excretory function and the genital organs and autoerotic
activity that basically determine the child's fears...It is the rule
in my experience for the patient to reveal the mother as the agent of
mutilation. Throughout life, the man fears the woman as castrator,
not the man – J. C. Rheingold (The Fear of Being a
Woman)

The more experienced I become the more I have to recognize with
what toxicity the castrating or phallic mother intervenes in the
castration complex of men...In therapy, impotence due to fear of the
father yields rapidly, but that due to fear of the mother is
tenacious – John Leuba (Mere Phallique et Mere
Castratrive)

After a terrible mother's departure it is society that looms as
the next psychically castrating influence. Because of his feminized
condition he is unable to meet society's challenges heroically as
masculinized types do. Rather he finds himself overwhelmed by
society's impediments and prohibitions. He exhausts his energy trying
to negotiate the many blocks in his way, and blames himself after each
supposed failure for not living up the standards explicitly or
implicitly set by his mother. He has been programmed to never see the
truth, that his failures are the direct effect of her undermining
influence and suppression of his Imperial Self. In the end he is
driven to distraction by his guilt-ridden superego and failure to
achieve chimeras of success and power. As a result he finds himself
taking on the role of his mother, by mentally and emotionally
castrating himself, in the mistaken notion that this corrects his
dilemma. Of course it does not work. He simply drenches himself in
more guilt and shame, and experiences deeper bouts of anxiety over
feelings of forbidden desire, and from ignoring the call of his
conscience which sounds as an alarm bell that all is not well. In the
end he becomes all the more introverted, self-berating and
sado-masochistic.

As time passes he is driven to seek solace in whatever tawdry
escapes or short-term "highs" prevent him facing his inner pangs of
self-hatred. In extreme cases, as the tension and anxiety reach
critical levels, he is forced to act out sadistic impulses that have
up until now been introjected. At this point, despite the restraint of
his superego, he is likely to engage in perverse and criminal
behavior. If he is still a relatively young adult, his behavior will
have him labeled delinquent. If his terrible mother's attentions were
tinged with eroticism, or were conspicuously incestuous, his immoral
activities will probably include sexual crimes against women. He seeks
to violate women in a similar manner as his mother violated him. As we
can see, this category of crime has dramatically increased over the
years.

Psychologists who study the moral development of children
typically have confined their investigations of aberrant behavior to
why children lie and steal. Virtually no important studies have been
made about the psychological development of children who become
involved in serious violence. As a result, psychologists and
criminologists cannot accurately point to those youngsters or even
adults who are the most prone to violence – Carl Goldberg (The
Evil We Do)

The syndromes formed by repressed mother-hate can lead to the
development not only of chronic frigidity but of homosexual
tendencies. Most lesbians avoid becoming criminals, but their
homosexuality is a direct consequence of deeply repressed mother-hate.
Their sexual interest in fellow women is merely born out of a desire
to defy their mother's need for grandchildren. That is, the lesbian
subconsciously dis-identifies with what it means to be female. This
attitude is often reflected in their "look." The average lesbian is,
in her own imperfect way, attempting to counter her terrible mother's
power and control. She is saying "...You think you made one thing, but
I'll shock that notion out of you...You made a freak, so what are you
going to do about it?" If the lesbian's father was brought to heel by
her mother, which is probable, her estimation of men is unlikely to be
high, but men are not really in her sites at all. If this were the
case, lesbians and male homosexuals would tend to loathe each other.
For the most part such is not the case. No! The lesbian hates her own
femininity because it was shared and violated by her terrible
mother. This hatred goads her to refuse sexual advances from males. It
might even compel her to subconsciously attract an incestuous
experience with her father. In this way she succeeds in displacing her
hate and anger. Her enemy is now a male rather than a female. She can
also now justifiably turn toward women for consolation, rather than
strive to fit into the male world. The overt condescension shown by
most lesbians toward masculine men is meant to simply ward them
off, and is not due to a complete absence of sexual attraction to
them, suppressed and displaced as it is. Only if they are neurotics
will their contempt toward men be genuine. A girl becomes a lesbian
also because she has no desire to enter relationships that lead to
pregnancy and birthing. In other words she will do anything than turn
out "like mother." The company of other women also fills an important
need for her. They take the place of the emotionally-absent terrible
mother, providing the care and touch she was deprived of during
infancy. Lesbians often speak more kindly of a grandmother or even
grandfather, than they do of their actual parents, because it is
likely that they experienced a deeper love connection with these
elders. The average lesbian girl may not know this or acknowledge this
theory, and may say that their sexual orientation is accounted for by
the fact that her mother desired a male child, and was disappointed
when the fetus turned out to be female. But as far as we are concerned
this is not the case. What a terrible mother wants is either a
feminized male or female who will not resist her will at any stage. If
Self-will comes to bear, it is countered regardless of whether it is
displayed by a son or a daughter. Gender is, therefore, less important
here than the battle of wills. The reason why excuses are made by the
victim of the psychic battle against a terrible mother's overbearing
will, is because of the repressed memories and emotions that arise
because of it. The superego is, as we will see, the mother's ally,
preventing the victimized party from feeling what they have been
taught not to feel.

A terrible mother's influence is central to the lives and sexual
orientation of homosexual men. Recent studies find that genetics has
little to nothing to do with homosexuality. Experts now realize that
the lives, biology and sexuality of gay men and women is decided by
their childhood identification with one or other of their parents, not
to mention their repressed antipathy toward them:

Gay men are twice as likely as heterosexuals to come from a
distinctive family constellation, half of them painting the following
picture of their boyhood: the mother likes to be the center of his
attention and they are unusually close; she regards the
rough-and-tumble play enjoyed by most boys as dangerous, and is
excessively anxious about his health and safety; this inhibits his
aggression, and he is clinging and highly anxious at being separated
from her; in early adolescence she may be flirtatious with him and
she is a dominant, powerful woman who is uncomfortable with
masculinity – emasculating even; she takes the family decisions
more than the father, and is the stronger personality – Oliver
James (They Fuck You Up)

Terrible mothers constantly dump their troubles onto their children,
thereby forcing pseudo-empathy to replace the real thing. They openly
speak about their worries and problems and fill the child's vulnerable
mind with images of doom and gloom. The child is bound to carry her
weight on his shoulders. That was the plan all along. In the case of a
male child, he serves as her crutch, champion and surrogate lover in
one. After years of "shouldering," a thoroughly feminized son's
empathy circuits are overheated. He becomes the sister or "mother" to
everyone he meets, particularly of anyone who is apparently in need of
"love." Sons of this kind become suckers for every hard-case story
around. They become doormats for every bleeding heart, and have no
idea that it is they themselves who are drowning in problems
psychologically and sexually. Because of the ambivalence fairly
characteristic of this type, some men become homosexual because of
their subconscious repulsion toward the body of their mothers. Their
sexual orientation is, in this case, the result of their need to
remove themselves from her psychically and even physically incestuous
presence. They are also inwardly petrified at meeting and falling in
love with a woman who turns out to be as overbearing and manipulative
as their terrible mothers. Since their terrible mother's sexual
frustrations and remonstrations have probably served to denigrate
masculinized men, her son is driven to seek out the company of
homosexual males in a similar state as himself for comfort and
understanding. Few of these types ever confront their underlying
mother-hate and thereby get to live emotionally rewarding lives. Their
stereotypical fastidiousness is the result of them breaking their
superego's dictates on the matter of sexuality. It is a compensation
for defying their mother's will and society's norms.

Coming back to our main types, the process of inauthentic
character-development accounts for why so many chivalric men
eventually come to denounce their lives and creations, and why they
often, at the height of their power and success, become alcoholics and
drug-addicts. It is because deep down inside they know the truth. By
suicide some men in this category hazily think they can finally strike
a deathblow against their terrible mothers in whose name everything
has been achieved. If such a man is lucky, his mother might condescend
to throw a withered flower on his grave, since after all he was not a
masculinized male who broke the spell she cast over him, to thereafter
go his own way and make the world a better place for all. This also
accounts for why ideas about male violence are so wrongheaded. By
setting tests for her champion-lover, the terrible mother has set him
against the world. She has figuratively placed a bloody sword in his
hand. It is her weapon used in her name, despite what
the vast majority of narrow-minded, man-hating feminists and their
kind are wont to believe and advocate. Unlike feminized or homosexual
men the chivalric type seeks to cover up his inner docility and
dependence on his terrible mother. His ardent interest in sports,
competition and trophy-winning, not to mention his suppression of
women and nature, derives from his tendency for dissembling. His act
of self-deception finally drives him to exhaustion. Reality does not
remain at bay. It intrudes into his apollonian world in one way or
another, and forces him to face the truth about himself. His way out
is neurosis or even psychosis. As Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, R. D.
Laing and other great psychologists have noted, this type descends
into madness rather than faces their repressed content. They will
rather choose insanity and schizophrenia than become authentic human
beings.

The great psychologist Otto Rank specialized in identifying the
many physical, symbolic and psychic traits, motifs and fantasies that
betray a person's subconscious desire to return to the womb. For Rank
a neurotic tendency exists as an abreaction to obstacles encountered
that prevent reentry into the womb. However he also comments on the
toxic atmosphere that a child frequently experiences in utero. He
believed this was certainly the case for paranoid types. As they grow
to adulthood they are unable to escape the memory of the engulfing
terrible mother's uterine atmosphere. The toxic conditions and lack of
centroversion in utero continue to plague their emotional life. The
fears of destruction suffered by paranoiacs – of being attacked
and killed by magic or electromagnetic waves and by poisoning, etc
– are symptoms of their original uterine anxiety that has not
been assuaged. Rank writes:

Paranoia seems characterized by the fact that in it the outer
world is charged with libido far exceeding that in a normal
adjustment; the whole world is, so to say, a womb, to the hostile
influence of which the patient is now exposed...the entire situation
of the mother's protecting womb...has here become a unique, gigantic,
hostile entity – (The Trauma of Birth)

Chivalric and feminized types are those most likely to become
paranoiacs – believing the whole world is against them –
since it is they who deny and repress legitimate feelings of pain and
loss experienced after their pre- and post-natal traumatization.
Feelings of omnipotence, common in manic types, are also symptomatic
of attempts to overcome original feelings of disempowerment by
identifying with an iconic male figure.

A key facet of the psychic incest that exists between a terrible
mother and her son-lover is her deviant portrayal to him of her
husband. In other words, the father is not perceived directly by the
possessed child. It is his image in the eyes of the terrible mother
that is transmitted to his mind, an image that eventually poisons a
son or daughter's perception of maleness. As a male child grows to
share his mother's contempt of males, he soon comes to loathe his own
maleness. Consequently, he suppresses his masculinity in order to win
her affection. He becomes the feminized male utterly under her
control. He develops a love-hate relationship toward males he meets at
school and elsewhere. He is attracted but also repulsed by them.
Indeed, the same dynamic exists in relation to masculinized females.
They may be strong and certain like their mothers, but are far more
indifferent and free than malignant types. Their mothers do not
consciously seek to control their every thought and move. Of course
the son who falls under the terrible mother's spell, conditioned to
believe that all males are corrupt and evil, has no way of knowing
that an apparently distant, uncaring father has been pushed away from
his family by a crafty self-serving mother who thereafter, apparently
justifiably, rains down contempt on all men. He cannot grasp how such
a mother has worked to secure his undying allegiance. Now that her
apparently self-serving husband has deserted her, she needs a
comforter and ally. No guesses as to who that will be. From the outset
the terrible mother wishes to prevent her son's identification with
his father, or another male figure, because he may then find himself
strengthened by the experience, enough to vengefully turn on her. As
long as he remains feminized, she is safe.

It is very different when the son turns the tables upon the
Terrible Mother and adopts her destructive attitude, directing it not
against himself but against her. This process is represented
mythologically in the fight with the dragon – Erich Neumann

An alternative strategy to demeaning the father is to compare
the son with him. If the terrible mother idolizes masculinity it can
lead to feelings of inadequacy. If she can make her son believe he has
no way of rising to the standard of his father, or of another male
(such as his maternal grandfather), he will be steeped in
self-loathing and self-condemnation, as intended. He is therefore
bound to become a feminized male posing no threat whatsoever to his
terrible mother. He raises no scepter against her, and patiently
tolerates her emotional freeze-outs and spiteful moods. He does not
leave her side or put his own ideas and plans first. What is more,
because of his supposed physical or sexual inadequacy, he stays away
from masculinized women who remind him of his terrible mother, and
might be inclined to ridicule him. If he finds himself in the presence
of such a female he is markedly uncomfortable and insecure. Onto that
unsuspecting girl projects images associated with his terrible mother.
He is attracted, as we said, but also overwhelmed with her aura of
self-confidence and strength. He goes to pieces at the slightest
non-intentional criticism, and decides that from then on he had better
avoid such women like the plague. His mother is more than pleased, and
rewards him with additional doses of psychically incestuous energy. In
extreme cases such a possessed son forgoes sexual encounters
altogether and dedicates himself to some religious path or cause. He
relinquishes worldly desires and aspirations and sets out seeking for
God or enlightenment. He gets dizzy the moment he rises from his
knees, and avoids doing so for the rest of his frustrated docile life.

In extreme cases the terrible mother sets out to recruit her
son-lover as an ally in her antisocial and criminal exploits. Even if
these do not pan out as intended, she so messes with her son's mind
that he ends up finding another terrible female to lead him further
down the path to perdition. The courts are filled with bickering
delinquent couples in this predicament. Their mothers are always there
in front of the camera, screaming loudest for justice.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Making of Heaven and Hell

...there can be no heroic and creative activity without winning
the anima, and the individual life of the hero is in the deepest
sense bound up with the psychic reality of the anima – Erich
Neumann

In order to escape the stifling embrace of a terrible mother,
and the stygian abyss she inhabits, the hero (our chivalric male)
must, according to Erich Neumann, posit the existence of a heavenly
realm to which he must aspire. This free airy region stands opposed in
his mind to the chthonic abyss from which he once arose, the dark
depths over which his terrible mother has dominion. To enter heaven
the dragon of darkness must be combatted and destroyed. However, to
attack the dragon mother in her own lair means to enter the unhallowed
halls of the unconscious and face the dangers that await there.

Neumann is referring of course to the process of individuation
as delineated by Jungians; the process of overcoming the malign
influence of the terrible mother, whose frowning, severe countenance
caused so much emotional trauma and self-doubt. However, confronting
the terrible mother entails revealing a part of one's own Anima. One's
own feminine side must be integrated for the process to succeed.
Jungians warn of the dangers here, but suggest that we do attempt to
integrate the Anima. Doing so releases a greater cache of libido or
bioenergy, which in turn brings a man greater intellectual and
emotional power. A completely successful integration can be said to
open the doors to paradise.

The main block to entering the underworld, so to speak, to
commune with and confront the Anima, is fear. We hesitate to turn from
the light and the familiar world in which we commonly operate and
commit to this aspect of Shadow Work. Nevertheless something compels
us to undertake the "journey" into the darker recesses of the psyche.
We are motivated because on some level we know there are missing
pieces of the Self to find. Because of the forbidding and prohibiting
aspects of the terrible dragon mother we grew up to be fragmented and
often neurotic men and women. We have problems within and problems
without. We have troublesome relationships and frequently feel
misunderstood and obstructed. Or we feel decidedly uncreative. Other
people seem to be so much more productive and happy. We do not feel
like enduring our mysterious inner pangs much longer, and see no
choice but to set out on a journey of Self-discovery.

This compulsion toward Self-improvement can be caused by meeting
people in the world that we come to admire. As said earlier, the
process can start in school, after seeing this or that person who
seems to be effervescent, confident and well-liked. As we spend more
time observing people we get to know more about our personal deficits
which may be sensational, intellectual or emotional. We may eventually
turn toward the subject of psychology and get into therapy. We might
begin reading psychological books to become familiar with human
complexes and syndromes. We may start analyzing our dreams and move
from there to learn about archetypes and the antique reservoir of the
race memory that undergirds waking life. As we do so we begin to
notice the mythic leitmotifs that flow in and out of our daily lives,
which are more pronounced during the many rites of passage
experienced. We become more conscious of the interplay of numbers,
symbols and similar events that occur. As we become more aware of
internal processes our awareness of nature and the world around us is
enhanced. We might strive to spend less time in a city environment,
and seek to be closer to animals. Carl Jung himself retired to a
remote Swiss lake to live a very simple life where he was able to
meditate and produce works of art.

As we inquire within, and get more experienced asking serious
questions about being, time, cosmos, nature, God, religion and death,
we realize that most of what we are asking and pondering should have
been encouraged in school by our teachers. It should also have been
encouraged by our parents. We end up wondering why it wasn't. We also
question why after centuries, most people go about their lives in
unreflective contentment. As perceptiveness develops, we begin to see
that the crux of the matter lies in men and women's serious lack of
insight and information about the female psyche. This fact appears
even stranger once we contemplate how often we come up against the
female psyche in daily life. As I show in previous chapters, the
female psyche was the first phenomenon encountered in life. Whether
you are a man or woman, you are the product of the female psyche. Why
then do you know so little about it?

Sigmund Freud famously questioned what it is that women want. In
a letter to a colleague, he wrote:

The great question that has never been answered, and which I
have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research
into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

Apparently Freud, who had treated numerous women patients
throughout his career as a psychoanalyst, had not found the answer to
his question. A logical person might seek to find the answer by
questioning women about their natures and desires. Of course that
project breaks down if it turns out that women are a mystery to
themselves. Answers to the question will be few and far between if
women do not know what it is they want, or if they should find
themselves, for some inexplicable reason, unable to determine what
their core nature is like. A logical person might then say that the
answer to the mystery lies in observing what women do in and for the
world. What is their legacy? In this book I abbreviate that
undertaking by analyzing the mother-child relationship in its earliest
stages. This is because for generations women have acted in the world
through their sons and daughters, primarily through the former. The
world a mother experiences is the world as shaped and brought to her
by her sons, modern social and sexual changes notwithstanding. And as
we are seeing, the manner in which a son (or daughter) acts in the
world is predetermined primarily by their mothers. Their activities
are based on their temperaments which are in turn determined in large
part by what "face" was displayed to them by the dragon mother during
the preconscious stages of life.

The hero – male or female – who enters the thickets
of the unconscious emerges as an empowered person when they confront
the dark side of the female psyche. Doing so arms one with the power
wanted by both sexes. A child's confrontation with his terrible mother
means to once again stand and witness her inexplicable hostility
toward him, whether it be conveyed by expression, word or deed, or all
of these. He does not win his stripes by returning a countenance of
frigid indifference. This hard-bodied "armored" approach is often that
of men who refuse to become psychologically empowered. Their demeanor
toward women is characteristically defensive and suspicious. This
attitude does not prove that one is "a man," and does not empower
except on a superficial level. No! The constructive approach is to
express the feelings that arise when in front of the stern countenance
of the terrible mother. There is no set way of walking this painful
road, and no set predictable outcome. It is a process that may lead to
psychic collapse or to deep inner transformation. The hero does not
realize that this act is not unique to himself. Indeed it is an act
with mythic antecedents. As Neumann eloquently writes:

Oedipus becomes a hero and dragon-slayer because he vanquishes
the Sphinx. This Sphinx is the age-old foe, the dragon of the abyss,
representing the might of the Earth Mother in her uroboric
aspect...This heroic answer, which makes him truly a man, is the
victory of the spirit, man's triumph over chaos

In myth, when the hero enters combat with a frightful monster,
he often does so in order to free a captive female. Once freed, the
princess or goddess invariably falls in love with her liberator. In
practical terms she simply represents the feminine side of the hero.
Their marriage represents the reintegration of missing instinctual
elements within his own personality.

Neumann emphasizes the consequences of a successful
confrontation:

The union of the adolescent son with the Great Mother is
followed by a phase of development in which an adult male combines
with a feminine partner of his own age and kind, in the hieros
gamos...He is no longer the tool of a superordinate Earth Mother

The hero emerges as a free person, able to go about attaining
his desires under his own steam. He subsequently attracts a female of
higher order than his terrible mother, someone who is his true equal.
He is no longer enthralled or under a spell. As a whole being he is no
longer victimized by entertaining a false impoverished image of
himself, as transmitted in infancy by his terrible mother. Great
challenges still lie before him as he moves forth to prove himself in
the world. But he is now able to face challenges without being
terrified of the world. His successes affirm his Self-esteem, and his
failures do not stir pangs of inner emptiness or compel him to overly
condemn himself. In other words, he has a healthy and productive
relationship with the world. He is not taken up into heaven, he walks
into it on his own feet.

What the hero kills is only the terrible side of the female,
and this he does in order to set free the fruitful and joyous side
with which she joins herself to him – Erich Neumann

Whereas the average individual has no soul of his own, because
the group and its canon of values tell him what he may or may not be
psychically, the hero is one who can call his soul his own because he
has fought for it and won it – ibid

The hero, in this mode, is not our chivalric male. He is the
masculinized male pure and simple. He is not perfect, and not without
his share of foibles and problems. But he is a whole being able to
take on whatever the world throws at him. He is not an armored type
unable to face what he is beneath an artificially hardened exterior.
Unlike his chivalric counterpart, the masculinized male has cracked
the question of what women want. In other words he knows a great deal
more about the nature of the female psyche. His descent into the
underworld, and neutralization of the terrible mother's power, sees
him regaining and repairing his lost capacity for centroversion. It
sees him attuning disparate hemispheres of his own consciousness. His
rational or intellectual power has reunited itself with the
instinctual power he once lacked. After all, in the dark regions he
had to dig down and find powers greater than reason to sustain him.
These powers were in the keeping of his terrible mother from the
beginning. That is, she prevented him from integrating them when as an
ego-germ he was under her dominion. These coveted instincts are
nothing less than lost facets of the Self. Once he successfully
reawakens the feelings he experienced as an infant – feelings he
was forced to suppress because of the terrible dread of rejection and
destruction – he overcomes his adversary and robs her of her
demonic power. He takes back into himself the lost facets of his
psyche, and becomes complete. Heaven and hell, as it were, come
together, and the hero individuates. The murky chthonic depths which
held him from greater achievement in the sunlit realm, no longer
fascinate and bind his emotional self. He has won the true battle of
Armageddon, in relation to which other conflicts prove far less
taxing. And because he has freed himself from the inner pangs of dread
– the fear of his own psychic roots – he is gradually able
to drop the bioenergetic armor by which his ego attempted to protect
itself from the elusive threats. This act allows him to step anew into
the world and meet it on healthier terms. As his psychic and emotional
defenses fall away, he is able to establish himself on firmer ground
in the world he now has no intention of "conquering" or "subduing." He
enters the world intent on setting its wrongs aright. Unlike the
chivalric male, he alone is authorized and properly equipped to do so.

Armed with his newfound knowledge about the female psyche, the
hero's course through life is made infinitely more interesting and
comfortable. His heroism inevitably enables him to hand the bright
scepter of freedom to other souls intent on banishing the psychic
darkness that daunts them on their own journeys of Self-discovery.

CHAPTER SIX

Acts of Psychic Tyranny

Rheingold says categorically that annihilation anxiety is not
part of the child's natural experience but is engendered in him by
bad experiences with a depriving mother – Ernest Becker (Denial
of Death)

Obviously, mothers are older than the children they birth. They
have experienced birth, infancy, schooling, illness, failure, success,
dating, marriage, pregnancy, death and other facets of worldly
existence. By the time most women become mothers they have already
experienced abuse, fear, hatred and envy, not to mention
self-loathing, self-condemnation, guilt and shame. Consequently,
unless a woman is psychologically empowered it is unlikely that she
has come to terms with the effects of these experiences and syndromes.
By not confronting the dark sides of her own Anima and Animus she is
unable to overcome her moral and emotional deviance and reintegrate
her authentic Self-image. Rather than engage in a dragon-fight with
her own negative Anima, and heroically emerge, she decides instead to
become a terrible mother herself.

However, it is unlikely that she will be in a position to raise a
healthy child. She is simply responding to the call of her biology,
heedless of her psychological state. The child she gives birth to
relies on her will to productively direct and structure its libido or
bioenergy. But if her own thoughts, feelings and desires are
misdirected, impaired and deviant, how can she hope to guide her
newborn child correctly, either in its preconscious or self-conscious
stages of development? Her child has little chance of reaching the
sunlit realms as a free whole being if she herself remains victimized
by her terrible mother. If her own mother did not sensitively
hold and nurture her projected Self-image, and did not properly return
it to her, the chances for the successful individuation of her newborn
child are not high. Indeed, her impulse to bear children is
psychologically driven by her underlying desire to return to infancy
herself. By birthing a child she is able with the world's blessing to
regress to an infantile level of consciousness.

In other words, she is on her way to becoming a terrible mother
herself. Although her conscious intention may not be overtly malign,
she craves the oceanic feeling experienced by her newborn child. She
enters the zone not as a hero ready to win back her lost Self-image,
but as one who hopes to find it in the child she births. She is not
aware that this desire constitutes an act of psychic rape. She
certainly does not realize that this violent act undermines her
child's temperament and personality, not to mention their adjustment
to the social world. As I have stressed from the outset, her manner of
entering the oceanic zone with her ego-germ, constitutes a block to
the flow of archetypal images that move freely between the matrix and
her child's consciousness. That matrix or essence can rightly be
denoted as the Great Mother. It is therefore the duty of the
stereotypical mother to correctly mediate the interaction. To do so
effectively means that her own psyche must be hygienically attuned to
the matrix. Sadly, this is a rarity.

Her intrusion effects changes on the libido of the ego-germ.
Aggression required for growth is misdirected toward spurning her
invasion. Although the consequences of this wastage of energy may not
be clearly seen until the onset of the so-called Oedipal stages, the
problem already exists in utero. As we saw, the chivalric male is a
type who has from the uterine period onward pushed against the
over-shadowing presence of a terrible mother. The feminized male and
female have simply given up the fight and learned to acquiesce to her
control. These "castrated" types are inclined to favor collectivism
over individualism. Unable to direct their own lives, they prefer to
be led by the crowd, which stands in psychological terms as an
exterior encompassing uroboros.

Since mothers of this psychically invasive, regressed and
narcissistic sort are unable to raise children who individuate as
whole beings, the next best thing to do is to guide the child toward
the chimeras of worldly achievement and success. The next best thing
is to turn the child into a lover of power rather than of love. During
these acts of compensation the child not only becomes its mother's
crutch, but also the means by which she dons the mantle of motherhood,
as if she knows what the word and act means. As we saw previously,
most maladjusted mothers can be only one of two deviant types –
a feminized female or terrible female. The latter type is a close
approximation of the terrible mother, whereas the former is a docile
type who has been thoroughly emotionally impoverished by her own
terrible mother. Even if she was abused at the hands of a malignant
father, she is inclined to inwardly blame her mother for her trauma
and scars, and rightly so. After all, deviant men are attracted to
deviant women, and vice versa.

As psychologists point out, abused children are inclined to
irrationally blame themselves for their parents disapproving
and violent behavior. They are often victims of guilt and shame. We
experience the former emotion and syndrome when we rightly or wrongly
believe we have committed some infraction of the rules as established
by our superego. We experience the latter when and if we believe we
have abused or hindered ourselves. If we steal someone's property or
hurt another's feelings we can always apologize and guilt is thereby
lessened. But if we feel shame at not standing up for ourselves when
abuse rained down upon us, it is less easy to find solace. If we
discover that it was perfectly correct to attribute blame to abusive
parents, we might feel as if we seriously wronged ourselves by not
doing so. We will be inclined to berate ourselves for projecting our
own goodness on those who ill-deserved it.

Of course most people do not engage in this kind of
self-analysis. They live with their guilt and shame and never question
why they feel so incomplete and forlorn. They certainly do not take a
good hard look at their relationship with their mothers. Instead they
choose to raise children of their own, thereby reliving and repeating
the dynamic that occurred in uterine periods. One wears the same
forbidding countenance on their face that so petrified them during
their own infancy. One relives the scenarios that paralyzed them
emotionally, only in reverse. One becomes the tyrant in the tyrant's
stead. For all this, one does not become any more enlightened as to
what it is all about. One indulges in a fruitless powerplay leading
only to further confusion and disempowerment on all fronts.

The point of importance is that it is unresolved guilt and shame
that compel a mother to violate the sovereignty of her child in utero
or during later stages. These syndromes cannot be abated unless Shadow
Work is prioritized. Each person in this situation is bound to
reintegrate the dark side of their Anima as described in the previous
chapter. Until they do so they are doomed to labor under the illusion
that their own mother's perverse and violent acts toward their being
were acts of love and care. This is the situation that commences when
a victim of abuse identifies with the object of its legitimate hate.
It is a legacy that occurs when the superego rather than the
conscience operates as the moral center. It is the situation children
are condemned to experience not only in the home but in the society of
which they are a part. In most societies today, and for a long time
past, the psychically integrated person finds himself alienated,
spurned and criticized. The codependent fragmented person finds it
easier to bond with others of his kind. The authentic man or woman,
seeking absolute freedom of expression, stands in relation to his
fellows as a neurotic type.

How could it be different? If we want to progress in the truly
neurotic world of schizoid people, emotionally scarred by their
parents, we must do so as schizoid men and women do. If the world on
which we depend is chock full of psychically impoverished types, we do
well only if we become as they are. Conscience be damned. And this is
what occurs to most children after the Oedipal stages commence. The
superego replaces the conscience as the moral center, which means that
fear replaces love as the basis for action and existence – a
bully has replaced a sage. The armoring process begins, or as Jungians
are wont to express it, the persona replaces the Self. The mother's
guilt over her acts of psychic incest transform her into the
super-efficient, helicopter-parent who makes sure that the doors of
the world are open for her extraordinarily talented and brilliant
child.

However, although the child grows to have its pockets stuffed
with worldly successes and accolades, he or she moves in the world in
an existentially vagrant manner. The world has been reduced either to
an arena or playpen. Either way the child's imagination is not fully
stirred or stimulated. His libido has in fact been tightly reined in,
and the parameters of what is right and wrong clearly marked. To stray
from the demarcations set by parents and society entails the collapse
of everything secure and familiar. A person in this state never
willingly sets out on the journey of Self-discovery. He does not
willingly initiate Shadow Work.

If and when this process starts, it does so as a frightful
interruption in the daily routine. It does so when impulses from deep
within the Imperial Self, that has its roots in something deeper than
the realm inhabited by the dragon mother, stirs within. As Jung noted,
it occurs if and when the course of one's banal domestic and social
life is compromised by numinous dreams that in their own mysterious
manner force us onto the road of individuation.

There are many evocative symbols making an appearance during
numinous dreams, including winged horses, birds or beasts of prey,
flying crafts, surreal zeppelins, ghostly ships, ticking clocks and
strange humanoids such as wild men, old blind men, thieves,
tricksters, comedians and criminals, etc. Royal-type personalities can
also make an appearance, as well as zoomorphic types such as speaking
animals and elven creatures. One of most alarming and mysterious
numinous symbols that frequently appears is the encircling dragon or
serpent. It appears because, as you know by now, a dragon-fight awaits
the hero. It is likely to reoccur in dreams and fantasies as long as
the combat is avoided, that is, as long as Shadow Work is ignored.
Symbols of this kind are, as Jung stressed, generated by the Imperial
Self which essentially calls the ego toward a state of greater
wholeness. If the dragon symbol is considered threatening or negative
it is not only because it can represent the Dragon Mother in her
terrible aspect, but also because it represents the lost healthy
Self-image undermined during the uterine stages of development.

The uroboros, traceable in all epochs and cultures, then
appears as the latest symbol of individual psychic development,
signifying the roundedness of the psyche, life's wholeness, and
perfection regained – Erich Neumann

The dragon symbol represents the lost wholeness yes, but also
the fear that grips us as we attempt to change our life-course. This
is because the uroboros reminds us subconsciously of two acts of
separation; the enclosure from the essence or Logos – the actual
root of being – and the later severance from the womb as the
umbilical cord is cut and one is parted forever from the mother's
body. So traumatic were these events that we are inclined to resist
change of other kinds, particularly change which removes us from the
familiar and comfortable. Leaving the familiar behind, distancing
oneself from friends and colleagues, forgoing success, pleasure and
advancement, and spending time alone in remote settings is not high on
most people's list of preferred activity. This is why numinous dreams
and strange moods of dejection and emptiness send a lot of people to
therapists.

As Karen Horney noted, the average client enters therapy not
because they desire wholeness and authenticity but because they think
something is "wrong" with them. When their car breaks down it is taken
to a mechanic. Similarly, when the mind stops working correctly, one
goes to a therapist or specialist, hoping a quick spring-cleaning will
do the trick. Perhaps getting a few peeves and frustrations off one's
chest will suffice. Maybe a creative "block" can be removed. In the
end the person resists deep change. In fact, as Horney soon realized,
most people in therapy are not in the least bit interested in that.
They play a kind of game with their therapist. The game is called "fix
what isn't broken." Or it can be termed "fix what I've purposely
broken to attract your expert attention." Neurotic traits that matter
are thereby concealed under pseudo-neurotic traits that do not matter
as much. All in all, the underlying neuroticism – the symptom of
one's obsessional but unfulfilled need for approval from the
dysfunctional world – goes unaddressed and unhealed. The client
feels that therapy has been successful if they are able to effectively
return to the world as is, not if they come to see their lives and
world as completely inauthentic and dehumanizing. They blame
themselves for not being up to scratch or able to pump it 'till it
hurts, and win every trophy going. They blame themselves for not
winning approval from every authority figure who crosses their path,
and obsess about finding appropriate ways to fit in perfectly with a
false, deranged, hypermanic world. Whatever clinical neurosis they
suffer does not bespeak the condition of their conscience and Imperial
Self, but of their superego and persona. It merely pertains to their
incompetence as inauthentic entities pursuing ultimately
self-destructive goals. Round and round they go with their engrossed
therapists until the day comes when the latter discern what is
happening, and when it becomes apparent that the client is simply
manufacturing neurotic symptoms in order to avoid legitimate
suffering.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Logos and Sophia

...it is through its mother, who is Self, society and world in
one, that the child first experiences order, limitation, affirmation
and negation – Erich Neumann

Long before a child becomes aware of the role of the father, and
before it knows the nature of the male world, it experiences
principles erroneously thought to emanate from and distinguish
patriarchal culture. A fetus already experiences structure as it
progresses from the status of ego-germ to semi-conscious and then to
fully Self-conscious egohood. This process of ascent is made possible
by a force Neumann terms "centroversion." It is the principle of
entelechy determined by the natural order, and to which each human and
non-human organism is subject.

Deep contemplation on the matter of entelechy tells us something about
the vital nature of the essence from which all life arises. However
this is not the place for a dissertation on teleology and nature's
negentropic creative processes. We are interested only on one main
process, that which brings human Self-consciousness into being. This
upward creative process has been referred to as consequence of Logos,
and been identified with the masculine principle. In terms of the
natal period the principle of centroversion or Logos is not
orchestrated by the stereotypical mother. How could it be? She is
herself an emanation of the process that brings her child into being.
It follows that the centroverting principle emanates from a deeper
source than that occupied by conscious minds and bodies. Indeed, it is
the source or essence of all we perceive and know. It is the core of
bioenergy that never ceases flowing throughout the universe. It is the
unknowable essence and Logic of life in all its forms. Given
that it has been named Logos, and identified with the masculine
principle, we see that the feminine or Sophic principle is not primary
but secondary. Logically the Sophic principle must refer to the
influence of the dragon mother's consciousness which comes to bear after
conception occurs. It does not refer to the matrix from which all life
arises, or to moments when archetypal images flow between matrix and
fetus.

Since the Logos is the principle by which a human organism
individuates, it must be seen to attend a person from conception on to
the moment of death. In this case it is the energy or essence that
manifests on both physical, intellectual and emotional levels. Clearly
it is the masculinizing force or element in nature. It follows that
the Sophic principle is the feminizing pole, force or element. The two
interacting forces polarize as ego-consciousness awakens and subjects
begin to be set off against external objects. For the child the
polarization occurs when it becomes aware of itself as separate Self,
and first consciously distinguishes itself from its first
object, the mother. As we said, this can be a traumatic period for the
mother as well as for the child. For her it signals a period of her
child's growing independence. For a terrible mother this is a
threatening stage of development. A terrible mother's attitude toward
her son or daughter is likely to darken and sour at this juncture. It
may get no friendlier as time passes and individualistic tendencies
continue to appear.

Regardless of the problematic dynamics that arise between mother
and child after the latter has become a Self-conscious being, we see
that the child has already experienced structuring principles early
on, both in utero and subsequent natal periods. We emphasize this to
distinguish the action of the Logos with the apparently creative force
employed by chivalric types to bring the world system into being. The
chivalric male, who is largely responsible for creating many of the
elements of culture, is, as we have seen, not a wholesome being. His
personality type cannot, therefore, be a true emanation of Logos.
Given that we have defined the chivalric male as a feminized type, we
see that the energy or will he employs to manufacture his reality must
be feminine or Sophic, albeit in artificially hardened form. In utero
and for a while afterwards, consciousness as it was at the time was
shaped and infused by Logos. As the encirclement of the dragon mother
completes, the ego-germ is sectioned off from the pure matrix and
becomes almost entirely subject to the feminine polarity. As I show in
previous chapters, it is during this time of enclosure that
bioenergetic tension arises, as the terrible mother's influence is
resisted by the fetus in its proto-conscious state. The centroverting
compulsion is the expression of what remains of the Logos that, after
consciousness arises, manifests as intellect and emotion, the means by
which we assert identity, organize and make sense of outer and inner
realities. In this sense the Sophic polarity is negative and
relatively uncreative. This is not to say that the dragon mother and
terrible mother are wholly negative or uncreative.

Women are as much a creation of Logos as they are of Sophia. In
classic Jungian terms, a woman's character is a product of her Animus
as well as her Anima. Our emphasis is on the pole to which one
explicitly or implicitly leans or identifies. And we see that the
chivalric male, feminized male and female, terrible female and
terrible mother types identify with the Sophic principle more than
with Logos. They do so with society's blessing. This implies that the
Logos energy is to be found in its most unadulterated form in the
lives and creations of masculinized males and females. However, as I
point out, these types are demographically the minority. They must
fight against the four other types throughout their lives. In any case
their offspring are sure to be outnumbered by those of malignant type.

The anxiety that burns in the recesses of malignant minds and
hearts is less pronounced in masculinized males and females, or at
least in their higher octave exemplars who have seen fit to introspect
and develop psychologically. For a developed masculinized person the
wound is not deep because their mothers did not overly impose upon
them their own toxic consciousness, thereby impeding and contaminating
the flow of images between the living matrix and mind of the child, a
flow that was stronger before the serpentine ring began closing around
the ego-germ, sectioning it off from the matrix. Moreover, after its
conception, when the infant projected its protean identity upon the
mother, she accepted it sensitively and returned it holistically,
perhaps even reinforced with approval and certitude.

In any case, the question that concerns us at this stage is whether
the matrix or unconscious essence is truly the origin of negative and
destructive features, as most Jungians and psychologists are wont to
believe and advocate. In Disciples of the Mysterium I show that
his idea is not absolutely tenable. After all, how can the impulse for
individualism arise from an undifferentiated energetic matrix with
neither subjectivity nor conscious will? Jungians are not able to
satisfactorily solve this puzzle. But it seems obvious where the
answer lies. As pointed out in previous chapters, the false image of
the unconscious realm carried in most minds is inherited after
the terrible mother's interference with a fetus's somatic
consciousness as it functions on an archaic-magical level. This
intrusion starts in utero, but continues unabated for years thereafter,
regardless of the various ways in which a child aggressively resists
it.

Since the interference begins during preconscious stages, a
child inevitably grows to adulthood with unstable and disturbed
unconscious roots. He grows and struggles through life without
realizing the origin of his existential malaise. We see that it is the
presence and mentality of the stereotypical mother which compromises
the proto-consciousness and ego-consciousness of a child in relation
to its primeval roots. In our opinion the terrible mother is the main
origin of the wholly perverse and preposterous picture of the
unconscious as a potentially alien, foreboding, chaotic and
destructive realm.

Logos and Sophia can be considered interchangeable with Animus
and Anima, terms employed by Carl Jung to explain the masculine and
feminine polarities that shape consciousness. The latter terms also
denote two of Jung's most important archetypes, or constituents of the
Collective Unconscious. They and other archetypes exist in relation to
minds as DNA exists in relation to biology. According to Jung, males
possess a feminine side or Anima, while women possess a masculine side
or Animus. These archetypes occasionally appear in dreams, especially
those of a numinous kind. But as Jung emphasized, each archetype can
express itself negatively, thereby traumatizing consciousness and
upsetting one's daily routine. In extreme cases they are, according to
Jung, the cause of neurosis and even psychosis. They are likely to
make an appearance when we are out of balance psychically, so
regardless of their threatening guise, they work as agents of
homeostasis. And although as archetypes their original form is not
conditioned by individual minds, when they appear, they frequently do
in forms somewhat familiar to us. The Animus may appear in a dream as
a grandfatherly type or wise king. The Anima may appear as a beautiful
lover or stately motherly woman. This individualistic coloring is
important and emphasizes the personalistic element often ignored by
psychologists and people in general.

Erich Neumann was of the opinion that the dual nature of the dragon
mother is determined by the child itself. If the mother meets its
needs and if her countenance toward the child is soft, warm and
loving, she is pictured as the loving dragon mother. On the other
hand, if her demeanor is cold, hard and forbidding, she will be, says
Neumann, regarded by her distressed child as a terrible mother. He
also believed that it is the Animus of the mother, her masculine
proclivity, that comes to bear when the fetus' being and embryonic
universe is structured and organized. However, as shown in this
chapter, I think this is an inaccurate interpretation of the dynamic.
The Logos or Animus that structures and organizes is not emanating
from the stereotypical mother, but from the superlative archetypal
matrix that precedes the existence of mother and child. In other
words, the Logos is located in the child as much as it is in the
mother. More precisely, it is the child. The child is the
emanation of Logos. Its material bed, so to speak, is Sophia, but
without the animating and guiding Logos it cannot become
Self-conscious.

The idea that the centroverting principle is equivalent to the
Animus of the mother makes little sense. After all, if she embodies
the Logos which forms her child, where was that Logos when she was
herself a fetus? No! The human does not embrace the Logos, it embraces
the human. If it were otherwise it could not be the source of and
impetus for individuation. We know that the terrible mother chafes
against the manifestation of individualistic tendencies within her
child, so it is not she who is in charge of that impulse. That is
simply not a logical notion. The centroverting Logos which orients the
child's proto-consciousness, and which guides the ego-germ to more
evolved stages of individuality, is akin to the Logos or Animus
dwelling with her, but that does mean she is the director of the Logos
that directs her child. Logos is the director of every life-form.
Sophia is its emanation, appearing when and if Logos moves or comes to
rest. Logos is present as the individuating, centroverting principle
and force. That it exists can be plainly seen in everything that
exists and grows. Each living organism strives to be itself not
something else. Our universe is replete with individual characters
expressing distinct identities beside one another. This is the case in
the human world, despite man's inexplicable tendency to collectivize,
conform and arrest individualistic expression.

Reinforcing my view in this regard are Jung's and Neumann's
explanations of the differences between conscience and superego. For
Jung specifically, the conscience is the moral center of the Self,
whereas the superego functions as the moral center of the ego.
Although some functions of the ego resemble those of the conscience,
there are ultimately major differences between the two centers. The
conscience is less articulated to the mentality of the crowd whereas
the superego is the mental mirror or amplifier of the mass mind. It
transmits and embodies the social rules and imperatives that most
people in a culture tend to obey. The voice of the superego condemns
us for breaking society's rules and trying to go our own way. The
superego is also the center from which guilt feelings arise.
Alternatively, when we violate the conscience, or Self, we experience
shame.

As shown previously, the differences between guilt and shame are
important. At this point, I draw attention to the fact that the
superego is less a center of individuality than it is of collectivity.
It is therefore formed after the terrible mother decides to begin the
process of behavior-correction in order to make up for impairing her
child's Self-image, an infraction that cannot be rectified after the
five Oedipal stages end and adulthood begins. Her own guilt compels
her to do "right" by her child.

What this means in practice is that she becomes a
helicopter-mother overseeing every move her child makes. She is
inclined to recruit the father in his task if her own badgering and
hectoring fails to have the desired effect. Indeed, it is as this
point that the father's role might come to bear for the first time. In
any case, the mother is the prime mover, since it is her wish to set
trials for her hero-son so he can later win the world for her. In
other words, regardless of what aspirations her son has personally,
his course of action is preset for him. To not do as she says is to
defy her power. As a result he is bound to feel her wrath. So is the
complexion of his superego preordained. In this way are his notions of
right and wrong established.

Unlike Freud, Neumann does not recognize the father as the main
programmer of a child's superego settings. He rightly regards the
mother as the one in charge of the process. And he was quite right in
this regard. The terrible mother is the one who primarily attempts to
orient her child toward the world and its rules. The father is merely
an ally in the process.

Our interest at this point is in the terrible mother's influence
on the superego during the pre-Oedipal uterine period. The superego's
advent, for Neumann, begins earlier than Freudians believe. Although
Neumann does not say it outright, clearly superego formation is the
consequence of the terrible mother's psychic intrusion during the
uterine period, and later during the post-Oedipal phase. During the
earlier phase the terrible mother's obstruction of the centroverting
process forces the infant to resist her. Since this act of defiance is
frowned upon, the infant learns even at this early stage what is right
and wrong in terms of the rules of engagement laid down not by society
but his terrible mother. This is not to say that society's standards
have no influence on the infant's consciousness at this early stage.
They certainly are a factor given that his mother is herself a member
of society and knows about its rules and standards. What is more
important for us is that the superego which first embodies a terrible
mother's punitive side, is still a secondary apparatus to the
conscience, which is the moral center of the total Self, as Jung
defines it. This conscience is not constituted by the influence of the
terrible mother. It is a product of the centroverting and
individualizing factors set in motion by the overarching,
all-encompassing Logos.

In this sense the conscience embodies the child's innate
knowledge of what is right and wrong despite what this or that person
deems to be right and wrong. Conscience represents a personalistic
expression of morality, as opposed to a collectivist one. And
conscience precedes superego. This much is conceded by Jung and
Neumann. Conscience is the remnant of the presence and influence of
the Logos as it appeared in the first moments of life, to shape and
orient the ego-germ which has no awareness yet of parents or society
and their moral influence. Conscience is the voice of the universe
rather than the voice of the crowd. Its effect on the psyche is also
markedly different than that of the superego. As we said, shame and
guilt have differences.

Given that the development of conscience precedes that of the
superego, and that its constitution is not formed by or directly
dependent on the terrible mother's influence, we see that Logos does
indeed precede Sophia. In Jungian language, the universe as Animus
precedes the universe as Anima.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Origins of Violence and Destructiveness

A disturbed or destroyed primal relationship seems to be one of
the main causes of the psychosis known as schizophrenia –
Erich Neumann

Each and every fetus and infant suffers trauma from the time of
its conception. The former experiences trauma during preconscious,
pre-egoic stages of development, whereas the latter experiences trauma
as a Self-conscious being. What is important is to accurately
establish which instances of trauma are the most egregious and
damaging, and how the effects can be lessened or overcome.

As far as Sigmund Freud and his school are concerned, the
traumas of importance occur, for the most part, at the outset of the
Oedipal phase which begins approximately between two and six years of
age. At some point during these stages a child becomes a sexual being
with consequent spells of attraction and repulsion toward each of its
parents. The classic Freudian position is that male children develop
an incestuous longing for their mothers and fear of their fathers who
are regarded as rivals for the affection of the coveted mother. A
female child, after seeing male genitalia, develops a hankering for
the sexual favor of their father and regards the mother as rival for
his affection. The various neurotic tendencies and phobias plaguing
men and women derive, according to Freud, from this particularly
troubled period of development. The oral and anal stages are
regressive because during these times a child has not completely
differentiated itself from the embryonic phase. A child's behavior
often indicates a desire for a return to the relatively stress-free
repose in the womb. The genital and latent stages signal a time of
greater differentiation when subconscious desires and urges lessen and
individualistic tendencies solidify.

Of course if trauma exists as a significant factor earlier than
the Oedipal stages, the sexuality of the child will not matter as
much. During the undifferentiated periods the trauma is the same for
female fetuses and infants as it is for their male counterparts.
Moreover, if significant acts of trauma occur during pre-Oedipal
stages of development, much of what Freudians believe about neurosis
and other psychological syndromes and complexes may not be wholly
correct.

The man who first attempted to prove that this is the case was Otto
Rank, the secretary of Sigmund Freud. He went on to become a great
psychologist and thinker in his own right, and in his important book The
Trauma of Birth, he explained that the trauma that disaffects
personality and causes neurosis of most kinds, begins before
the periods emphasized by Freud. Rank's perceptive ideas radically
revise many of Freud's seminal ideas, but are of paramount importance
because they substantiate the themes expressed in this book regarding
the early mother-child relationship.

The Vienna School of Sigmund Freud. Otto
Rank stands behind Freud's chair on the extreme left. Rank was
expelled from the group two years after this photograph was taken.

One of Rank's main interests was the castration complex, as
supposedly experienced by young males during the onset of the Oedipal
stages of physical and psychic development. The classic Freudian view
is that the young son develops amorous desires toward his mother and
as such regards his father as a rival for her affection. The son
supposedly lives in dread of his father's wrath, and fears that his
penis will be violently cut off by his father if and when his secret
desires become known. For Freud this penis-related phobia results in
neurotic tendencies that may continue to plague a man throughout his
adolescent and adult life.

Rank believed otherwise, and regarded the Freudian castration
scenario, if it occurs at all, to be two stages too late in the
neurosis-generating process. In other words, according to Rank an
initial castration fear paralyzes infant consciousness before
the one posited by Freudians. This was the moment of separation
between mother and child when the umbilical cord is cut. And we take
his point. After all, during the uterine and post-uterine stages the
infant perceives no difference whatsoever between himself and his
mother. Her body is in effect his body. The fusion between
himself and his mother, mentally and physically, is so complete that
the act of separation experienced in the first moments of birth is
symbolically as well as literally regarded as a veritable castration.
The castration or severance occurs not to his penis but to what he
takes to be his entire body. Can we think of a more
traumatizing event? According to Rank the answer is no we cannot. It
follows that this act of trauma undergirds all others that occur
during the Oedipal phase or at later periods of development.

Once we appreciate the positive significance of the child's
total dependency on the primal relationship, we cannot be surprised
by the catastrophic effects that ensue when that relationship is
disturbed or destroyed – Erich Neumann

And given that sexuality plays no major part during the period of this
initial traumatic event, girls as well as boys are scarred in the same
way. Their fixations on their parents and genital phobias occur
relatively late in the day, after the initial trauma as described by
Rank has already dramatically disaffected their consciousness and
planted the seeds of neurosis. Even if castration phobia and penis
envy, as Freud describes them, come to bear, they are of secondary
importance and may simply serve to replay the initial traumatic
event. In this sense the boy's phobia of losing his penis to an older
stern sexual rival merely reawakens emotions experienced during his
first very real "castration."

For a girl, her so-called penis envy is simply a natural
identification with her father, born out of her need to repress and
forget the initial trauma, while at the same time seek for the lost
wholeness experienced before that event. Yes, it was her mother's body
that was severed from her, but her identification with her father and
his body is understandable. She is simply displacing the object of
lost wholeness from her mother to her father, because her mother's
body – specifically her mother's vagina – has become a
source of considerable subconscious anxiety. The sexual organs of both
children are the means by which lost wholeness is regained, at least
on a temporary basis. His penis is the means by which a boy re-enters
the hallowed vagina from which he once emerged prior to traumatic
severance, and the clitoris is a girl's means of regaining something
of the pleasure experienced in utero before the traumatizing act
occurred that debarred her from her original immersion in that
pleasurable vesicle.

What interests us, and what Rank did not specifically hone in
on, is the mentality of the mother who stands as the missing
"castrated" piece of an infant's Self. The traumatic event he
describes is a mechanical one that cannot be avoided. The physical
cord between mother and child must be cut, and physical separation
between the two is inevitable. However, there are other acts that
traumatize a child during and even before this act of severance.
Should they not also be considered castrations of a kind? Rank admits
that after the initial castration event there comes another, this time
during the weaning period. Again we take his point. If the mother is
slow to provide needed warmth and milk to sustain her newborn infant,
the initial trauma does not fade but looms up again and again. If she
denies care and nurturement, or offers the latter in a mood of
indifference, hostility and frustration, the infant experiences it as
a further incomprehensible and uncomformtable trauma.

Given that Rank is correct in his assessment of the pre-Oedipal
situation between mother and child, we see that the Freudian idea of
the father's role must be radically revisioned. After all, if the
father is not a "castrator," and if he holds no conscious or
subconscious ill-will toward his son, as stressed by Freudians, where
do a son's fears and phobias about castration originate? And if a
daughter's idealization and adoration of her father is relatively
non-sexual and natural, what are we to make of her so-called "penis
envy?" What is more, was not the father himself once a son in a
similar position to the son he raises. His son's trauma is his trauma.
If anything, a father has ingratiating and sympathetic feelings toward
his son rather than anger. He does not see his son as a rival and
threat because of his supposed amorous ardors toward his wife. Rather,
he is more likely to identify with his son's need for comfort and
solace. Therefore a son has nothing to fear from his father unless the
latter is intentionally cold, condescending or abusive. If anything
the son has a greater chance of overcoming any latent or apparent
neurosis by way of his father's presence. After all, his father is the
one who enjoys a sexual relationship to the object of trauma. He is
the one who has succeeded in "entering" the hallowed place. He must
therefore know paradise. Any envy on the part of a son or daughter is
therefore understandable and correct. It is mixed with admiration and
fosters resilience in the mind of a child. The child soon learns to
love and care in a non-neurotic manner, since this leads to sexual
congress and pleasure which constitute moments evoking memories of the
original paradisiacal union that once existed between mother and
child.

In my opinion the father is also often idealized by both boys and
girls because he represents the one secure defense against the
invasive tendency and incestuous grip of a terrible mother. A girl
does not necessarily desire a penis, and remains satisfied with her
genitalia as it is. She desires a replacement not for a body part per
se, but for a nurturer, provider and caregiver who supplies what is
needed, physically and emotionally, without wanting so much energy
back in return. Her intentions toward her father are therefore pure
and correct. Frustration results only when she realizes that her
father, as a male, is not in a position to physically provide what her
mother can. Regardless, her father remains an idealized figure, and
for good reason. We see then that severe conflict between a father and
son or daughter occurs only if the father is an abusive brute. As said
earlier, a male of this sort enters the picture because of a terrible
mother, that is, a female just as violent as he, even if she is adept
at obscuring her violent nature. In the end the mother is blamed more
than the actual perpetrator of abuse. This is the case even if the
mother is herself victimized by an abusive husband. As far as the
subconscious of her child is concerned he is not as much of a problem
as she. This fact is of course rarely if ever brought to
consciousness. On the contrary, in most people it is well and truly
repressed. In modern society males are frequently singled out and
blamed for infractions they did not commit, whereas females are often
found innocent of any and all infractions they do commit. Our world is
infested with this egregious bias.

Although the memory of the initial traumatic event is repressed,
we must not think it has gone away. On the contrary it festers within
in the deepest layers of consciousness. As Rank stated, it is the
source of neurotic tendencies that plague people throughout their
lives. Because of this we see that there are two main elements that
suffer repression, namely, the memory of the loss of the original
embryonic sanctum, and the memory of the pain of separation caused by
the castrating event. As said, the separation occurred at a time when
the infant did not distinguish between itself and its mother's body.
This is why the effect of the castration is of a greater magnitude
that Freud conceived it to be. However, as Freud, Jung, Rank and other
competent psychologists know, that which is repressed must find
expression somehow, if complete neurotic breakdown is to be avoided.
We believe that the primal traumatic incidents are played out again in
the theatre of the male world. This theater is chosen simply because
the special deep-set anxiety experienced in the presence of a female
(the terrible mother) is less pronounced there. Identification with
the father – occurring during the Oedipal phase – can
therefore be seen as the initiation of a time when the repressed
memories and pangs can be exorcised in one way or another. In other
words, the father's world – the male world – becomes the
repository of intensely violent emotions, as well as the theater in
which these emotions will in some form be played out.

In her psychoanalytic investigations of children, Klein
discovered that early feelings of overpowering rage, directed
especially against the mother and secondarily against the
internalized image of the mother as a ravenous monster, make it
impossible for the child to synthesize "good" and "bad" parental
images – Christopher Lasch (Culture of Narcissism)

The choice of the male world is also spurred by the fetus's or
infant's attempts to spurn a terrible mother's invasive and stifling
influence. As we have seen, this defiance begins in utero and
continues throughout the natal period. We also saw that the resistance
against the terrible mother has a purely positive purpose. It occurs
to get the stereotypical mother's influence out of the way so the flow
between the so-called Great Mother and her child is not impeded
or contaminated. We understand that we are now speaking of
interactions and periods not acknowledged by Rank or other non-Jungian
psychologists. Be that as it may. This basic impulse of aggression
toward the terrible mother's interference cannot be underestimated. It
is the cause of later identification with the male and his world,
which in turn occurs for the purposes of psychic exorcism. We can
agree that infants desire a return to the uroboric sleep where they
languished in an undifferentiated non-conscious state. But we no
longer need to associate that condition and time exclusively with the
consciousness of a stereotypical mother figure, particularly one of a
negative or terrible type, even though she is certainly present in
that time and space. The state the infant seeks to perpetuate or
regain exists on a deeper level than that wherein the stereotypical
mother's presence is experienced, a period before the
encirclement of the dragon mother occurred. This oceanic state is not
brought to an infant by its mother but by an infant to its
mother. Acts of psychic incest derive from her will, not from that of
her fetus or child.

Both boys and girls succumb to the desire to flee the sex
represented by the mother; they need little coaxing to identify with
the father and his world. He seems more neutral physically, more
cleanly powerful, less immersed in body determinisms; he seems more
"symbolically free," represents the vast world outside of the home,
the social world with its organized triumph over nature, the very
escape from contingency that the child seeks. Both the boy and girl
turn away from the mother as a sort of automatic reflex of their own
needs for growth and independence – Ernest Becker

In every case the man-to-man relationship strengthens
consciousness and invigorates the ego principle, no matter whether
the alliance appears psychologically as the combination of ego and
shadow, or the combination of ego and self – Erich Neumann

The preference for the male world by those needing to exorcise
their innermost pangs of loss and emptiness unavoidably leads to the
association of violence with masculinity. And to a degree we have no
argument with the association. It is in the male world that we witness
most acts of criminality, injustice, violence and destructiveness. I
have already identified the chivalric male as the prime mover in this
regard, since he is primarily responsible for constructing the theater
of which I speak – the world of concrete and steel, politics,
religion and chronic conformity. He and his kind laid the foundations
of the culture in which we find ourselves. I have explored his
psychology to know more about the lineaments of his preferred society.
We have seen that he is, for all his presumed manliness, under the
spell of the terrible mother. He and his type busy themselves with
their extrovert projects without any deep understanding of their own
psychology or that of the female type responsible for the nature and
orientation of their minds and behavior.

The correlation of consciousness with masculinity culminates in
the development of science, as an attempt by the masculine spirit to
emancipate itself from the power of the unconscious – Erich
Neumann

We do not need to be rocket scientists to see the implications of
this. Unless there is a radical upgrading of psychological knowledge
and insight, and of personal introspection, our world will continue to
be plagued with violence and destruction. The first step toward
rectification involves the reassessment of the role of the female
psyche in regards the criminal history of the world.

It is not sustainable to argue that women are quintessential victims
trapped inside the male world, condemned to bring up children despite
the violence and destructiveness around them, not of their making.
This has become the hackneyed excuse levied against men and their
world by feminists and people who subscribe to feminist ideology. In
fact, as you can plainly see, women are not victims of men but of themselves.
The men they condemn are their own sons, fed and nurtured, needed and
also traumatized by them. The men they accuse of building an
unsuitable world and culture are a species of men deeply traumatized
by their terrible mothers. The imperfect world that chivalric males
create provides a haven of a kind, where their minds and emotions
exist free of her malign influence. Sadly, we see the futility
of the project that men of this type undertake.

The light used by chivalric types to banish the shadows they
fear, merely serves to strengthen and enliven those same shadows.
Without engaging in the correct kind of Shadow Work, the light we use
to walk the roads of life and build culture remains inadequate, its
source being the ego rather than the Imperial Self.

CHAPTER NINE

Lunar and Solar

The development of the child personality from the matriarchate
to the patriarchate is mirrored in the development of the ego...By a
number of stages the ego develops from the matriarchate to
confrontation with the father archetype and then on to achieve its
highest degree of independence in the patriarchate – Erich
Neumann

In the final section of The Child, Erich Neumann divides the
ascending stages of ego-development into two distinct phases he
classifies under the headings of Lunar and Solar. He also employs the
term phallic, and stresses that the term can be used to
describe the state and health of both female and male egos. He uses
this term connotatively to refer to the autonomy not only of the ego
itself but of the body and its form of intelligence that precedes the
formation of the ego. In fact, as he shows, the ego is a manifestation
of body-intelligence, which is in turn the result of the forces of
centroversion. The term phallic, in this sense, refers to the
constitutional strength and vertical (centroverting) activity of body
and ego as they develop through the months and years from lunar to
solar stages.

Neumann points out that when the body and ego are at a lunar
stage, the driving phallic force is experienced as exterior and
transpersonal. Only later does an ego regard itself as containing and
expressing this creative force. According to Neumann, at this
non-self-conscious stage the unconstellated proto-consciousness
associates the phallic force with gods and divinities. We see that the
hero figure of mythology is nothing less than a fictive rendering of
the egoic child as he becomes Self-aware and capable of introjecting
the powers that formed him. When he understands that these powers
emanate from himself he comes into relative opposition to gods and
demons, aspiring toward the status of one and away from the other.

Neumann refers to the earliest manifestation of phallic consciousness
as phallic-chthonic to emphasize that at this stage the
ego-seed is under the power of the uroboric or dragon mother. This
less activated level of being equates biologically with the vegetable
stage. The following more active stages Neumann refers to as magic-phallic
and magic-warlike. At these lunar stages there is enhanced
development even though the ego still operates at a preconscious
instinctual and emotional level. As the magic-warlike stage concludes,
the lunar ego morphs to the solar phase of development. The following
two stages are referred to as solar-warlike and solar-rational.

At the earliest phallic-chthonic stage the ego-seed is as passive as
it will ever be. It is akin to the vegetable kingdom in terms of
consciousness and activity. At this pre-conscious, pre-rational level,
the ego-germ is still in a unified participation mystique with
the so-called Great Mother, the numinous omnipotent force which, as we
noted previously, should properly be equated with the Logos or Animus
rather than with Anima.

The vegetative ego of the phallic-chthonian stage is passive
and receptive toward the directing activity of the Great Mother. Her
uroboric character is manifested in the fact that toward the child
she is also masculine, an active giver – Erich Neumann

According to Neumann it is during the solar phase that the ego begins
resisting the terrible mother's influence in order to individuate.
Neumann says nothing throughout his work about this factor in the
process of individuation. He focuses exclusively on the archetypal
dimensions of uterine telepathic activity, and rightly notes that it
is during the solar phases that the ego masculinizes itself. As
far as we are concerned, the ego-germ (regardless of its sex) is
itself a manifestation of the universal Animus. The ego-germ's
masculinization can be seen as an identification with the primordial
creative force or Logos. In terms that Hegel or Schelling might have
employed, it is at this moment that the World Spirit or Geist
objectifies itself. Spirit moves to know itself as creator within its
created world. In Jungian terms consciousness upgrades to become Self-consciousness.
Once this process of evolution is grasped we see that it is an active,
purposeful, rational process rightly described by the term Logos. In
this context we see that the feminine Anima is a secondary
manifestation of the Animus or Logos. Like the moon which does not
shine by its own light, but by that cast over it by an originary
source, the sun, so does the Anima emanate from and act on the
direction of its source, the Logos or Animus.

In any case, the Jungian view is that the act of individualization
equates with the act of resistance against the Great Mother. In our
revised appraisal it equates with resistance against the obstruction
of the terrible mother – the stereotype rather than the
archetype. Our critique is justified since we find it impossible to
envision the manner in which an individuating object repels an
individuating cause. How can Logos resist Logos? It more likely and
logically repels an antagonistic force or influence. The
resistance is not solely against the feminine but is an attempt to
subsume powers under the control of the feminine principle. In mythic
terms this is is exemplified by a violent dragon fight, hunt and
ritual kill. This is because the vegetable and animal forms of nature
are under the dominion of the goddess figure whose suzerainty is
defied and transcended. Thus the stage at which the ego begins to
resist the passivity of the uroboric state is referred to by Neumann
as the magical-warlike stage. It is magical because the act is
partly an attempt to appropriate powers and features embodied by the
female, and warlike because of its defiant and ultimately rejecting
intent. After the solar phase is attained, the magical mode of
cognition gives way to the rational mode in which subjects are set off
more distinctly from objects, when bodies and minds are less attuned,
and when attention to society's customs predominates.

At this stage the ego has so far removed itself from the lunar phase
that every one of the antecedent steps of its development become hazy
and vague. The only time they may become less indistinct is when a
woman conceives and gives birth. This moment of replay allows a
stereotypical female to temporarily impersonate the goddess
archetype. This constitutes the awakening of her masculine side in
relation to the relative passivity of the ego-germ she births. It is
only when the ego-germ begins resisting her influence that her Animus
is challenged and defied. If she retracts her Animus she leaves room
for the positive development of the ego-germ that relies on her body
for basic somatic existence. The ego-germ relies on the Logos for
centroversion as well as mental or spiritual existence. This is the
case for all infants be they male or female. It was as true for a
mother during her own nascency as it is for her newly conceived child.
If the mother does not restrain the intervention of her Animus, she
becomes a terrible mother who unnecessarily blocks the biopsychic
infusion of Logos-energy. The ego-germ is bound to resist the imposter
influence, an act constituting one factor of its individuation.

However if the terrible mother's psychic interference is not
sufficiently resisted, the infant's consciousness takes the form
dictated not by the numinous omnipotent Logos, but the relatively
impoverished Animus of the stereotypical mother in her terrible
aspect. As noted earlier, this perverse orientation is responsible for
the formation of the superego which becomes the center of moral
sensibility in place of the conscience. This ensures that anxiety and
guilt play a dominant role in the life of children and adults
attempting to fall into lockstep with the rules imposed by a society
made up of similarly psychically impaired people. In modern times men
are inclined to take on the job of setting the rules in place and
policing them. This fact allows some unreflective women to accuse men
for being overly imperious, intolerant, controlling, aggressive and
cruel. When we see that women are equally to blame for the formation
of the imperfect world in which we live – and when we realize
that men of all sorts are their sons – we are able to
make a proper start at setting things aright. In Jungian terms the
complexion of the solar child is determined by what occurs to his
consciousness during the lunar phase of development when the terrible
mother has complete dominion over his identity and nature.

...for the life of the child, this means that regardless of her
personal behavior, the mother, the vehicle of the archetypal image,
becomes, in the transition from the matriarchal to the patriarchal
world, a negative power from which the ego must turn away –
Erich Neumann

The interference of the terrible mother continues after birth
and throughout the five Oedipal stages. This is conceded by Jungians.
As Neumann himself writes:

C. G. Jung attributes many of the disorders of the child psyche
to psychic disorders of the parents. This means that, up to puberty,
there is normally a partially unconscious union between child and
parents, especially the mother

The consequence of this, during the solar phase, is the
misrepresentation to a child of the father-image by a deviant mother.
Indeed, given her dominion over consciousness during the lunar phase
of development, and given the likelihood that her male child will be a
feminized type, the picture she presents of her husband and the male
world in general is likely to be believed and embodied. We see at once
how damaging this conditioning is in terms of psychic health and
social adjustment.

In my opinion much of the family dislocation and teen
delinquency that plagues our modern world derives from this malignant
programming. In other words, the father experienced by a feminized
male is not the father as is, but as is presented by his prejudiced
terrible mother. The child gets to see the father and the world
through the eyes of his terrible mother who may herself be infected
with male-hate as well as self-hate. Even if she has suffered abuse at
the hands of a male or males, her accusation of males is narrow and
wrongheaded since it will not include intelligent and perceptive
accusation of their mothers. This is unacceptable since, as I show, it
is their mother's behavior toward them, from the time of conception,
which accounts for their deviance and delinquency. The adult male who,
as a child, was perpetually victimized by psychic incest, can hardly
be expected to grow up psychically strong enough to competently sort
out the wrongs he finds in the world. No! He is more likely to grow up
to perpetuate the problems of the world and probably add to them.

As we have seen, his choice of a female partner will be the
result of sexual enthrallment rather than true love. The woman he
finds attractive will be either a feminized female or terrible female,
both near approximations to his terrible mother. And since he, and the
other psychically impoverished types who share his syndromes and
neuroses, breed more offspring than hygienic types, the world soon
fills to the brim with men and women of malignant kind. To vicariously
exorcise their inner pangs they find solace in the worlds they make
for this purpose – the worlds of religion and politics and
mass-consciousness which serves as a very real exterior womb of the
all-knowing totemic mother offering needed direction and stability to
deeply distressed, psychically infirm children.

...the conscious state is the late and uncommon phenomenon, and
its complete attainment is far more of a rarity than modern man so
flatteringly pretends, while the unconscious state is the original,
basic, psychic situation that is everywhere the rule – Erich
Neumann

This misrepresentation of the father-image becomes an even more
egregious problem for daughters. Girls are wont to attend more
carefully and diligently to their mother's opinions and outlooks than
most boys, and are therefore more likely to adopt and share their
mother's aberrant view of the father and male world. The consequences
of this travesty do not need to be spelled out.

The psychically contaminated daughter goes on to become a
feminized female or terrible female in her own right. Her partner of
choice will probably be as malignant as she, and their offspring lost
to themselves and deeply neurotic from the outset. Their entire
understanding of what it means to be male or female is unreal and
deviant. The girl who has embodied an erroneous estimation of
masculinity can hardly embody healthy feminine traits. She cannot hope
to raise a male child in a functional manner and will not read the
world situation perceptively and correctly. For her the world is a
place dominated by recklessly violent and destructive men who must be
reined in and kept in subservient positions if order and safety are to
be guaranteed. In her eyes most men are one small step above the level
of the beast. Consequently, should the men in her company display the
manly traits she abhors, so much the worse for them. And this includes
the behavior of her son or sons. So much the worse for them to find
themselves victimized by the severe scrutiny and disapproval of a
devouring or terrible mother. Chances are that they will become either
feminized males crushed under her heels, or chivalric males flogging
their guts out to bring her the world and thereby win an approving
smile.

After reading Neumann's brilliant description of the five consecutive
stages and two phases of ego-development, we might imagine that the
child finally comes under the dominion of the solar-father as he
manifests himself as the biological father and world of males. However
this process of identification might not come about as expected. As we
have seen the males the child meets after infancy and during
adolescence might be feminized males or chivalric males who do not
represent authentic masculinity. Even worse, the child may himself be
of malignant type. In this case Neumann's solar world is not as
masculine as he believed. Since the world system is constructed by
chivalric males who on the outside seem very male, it can appear
overtly masculine. And that is how most people view the western world.
It is not, however, a correct view. No matter how many drums are
beaten and how many sabers rattled, or how much blood flows in
skirmishes and wars, or how many colossal statues of imposing male
gods loom above us, the world we find ourselves in is not built
by hygienic males heeding the voice of their conscience and attending
to their Shadow Work. It is built by compulsive collectivists and
conformists misdirected by one another. It is built at the behest of
the demagogues enthroned by physically overactive but psychically
static types desperate to present a falsely masculinized image of
themselves to each other. The exalted, fascinating icons of false
masculinity – as embodied by physical chiefs and inflated media
personalities – serve as templates for malignant types who crave
the armoring that holds them and their deviant world together.

The good news is that although the ego may disown the Self, the
Self never disowns the ego. If it did there would be no voice of
conscience to set us again on the right course, and absolutely no hope
for man and the world. There would be no shame, legitimate suffering
or compulsion to throw off the false and mediocre. There would be no
need to leave the toxic world of the crowd or reconnect with nature
and the force that brought us into being. Individuation would cease
and thinking for oneself would perish forever.

As long as malignant feminized males and females dominate and
procreate, progress on all fronts, biologically, psychologically and
socially, is retarded. There are basically four subtypes in the world:
those who have been traumatized but have, in one way or another (via
repression, dissociation, inebriation or medication), anaesthetized
their hurt and thereby forgotten all about it; those who know they
have been traumatized only to do nothing whatsoever about it; those
who know about it but prefer to find ineffective and inauthentic ways
of healing themselves; and those who knowing they have been
traumatized go on to correctly heal. The latter person is
either a masculinized male or female who thinks and operates in
accordance with conscience. They alone experience legitimate suffering
and thereby avoid neurotic misery. They strive to live authentically,
preferring to take instruction from nature rather than from the crowd.
They are less inclined to raise gods and masters above them, and not
as likely to have slaves in servitude below. Their dealings with each
other are fair and virtuous. Their estimation of good has not so
eroded that they find it impossible to identify evil when and if it
confronts them. And although their offspring will never outnumber
those of malignant types, they go on to bring to the world all that is
deep, healthy, beautiful, inspiring and true. The healthy parent has
made sure to not incestuously invade the consciousness of their child,
either in utero or at later stages of development. They know their
personal contributions are not solely sufficient to raise the whole
child. Therefore, energetically speaking, they know when to step out
of the way and let the child's own Animus be directed by the numinous
and omnipotent Animus or Logos that brings all things into being. The
sensitive parent knows that this interchange is not to be impeded at
any cost, particularly during the earliest stages of development. The
malignant parent does not know this because their own
proto-consciousness was corrupted and their own Self-image
contaminated. Unless they realize this fact and do something positive
about it, the cycle of corruption is not likely to cease. As I said in
the Introduction, regardless of what has occurred in the past, or how
deviant and dark our world becomes, we as free beings are able to
effect change here and now. By way of the Logos we are endowed with free
will. We can employ our will to enslave and destroy or liberate and
create. Either way the choice is ours.

If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is
wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me.
Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first. For this
I need – because no outside authority no longer means anything
to me – a knowledge of the innermost foundations of my being,
in order that I may base myself firmly on the eternal facts of the
human psyche – Carl Gustav Jung

By acting in accordance with the voice of conscience – the voice
of Logos – we are guided rightly in our affairs. Without this
guidance we have little chance of effectively bringing order to our
own lives or to that of other people. We stand to be misguided by the
influence of others, experiencing the very problem we encountered at
an earlier place and time when our strength of personality was first
undermined. When we allow ourselves to be guided correctly, by the
voice of conscience, we feminize ourselves in the correct and
productive manner. The voice that directs becomes the masculine
polarity of our consciousness. It is the speaker and we the listener.
It is this communion that constitutes a true act of mediation as well
as of meditation. It alone is the holy state in which every
psychosomatic hemisphere is united.

CHAPTER TEN

Who Made The Sun?

We think with our bodies – Friedrich Nietzsche

As I show, a child's identification with the father and his
world, which occurs at the onset of Phallic Stage, is an attempt to
escape the claustrophobic embrace and overly-invasive psychically
incestuous and traumatizing influence of the terrible mother. It is a
means of finding a less emotionally contaminated environment in which
to repose and exist.

It is in my opinion also an attempt to reconnect with the Logos and
Imperial Self. It is an identification that is a response to the voice
of the conscience which normally goes unheard because of the louder
bark of the superego. The change-over from the preconscious to the
following state can be referred to in Jungian terms as an enantiodromia.
Biologically it corresponds to the period when the old brain is
supplanted by the "higher" neo-cortex. The frontal brain faces the
exterior world which enhances our subjectivity or sense of I-ness. It
also constitutes a biological as well as psychological "Berlin Wall"
preventing a certain amount of interchange between its circuitry and
that of the mammalian and reptilian systems that, hierarchically
speaking, lie "below." Time and language are two vital features that
arise with the development of the orbitofrontal cortex, as it is
technically called. Because of this our relationship with our deeper,
darker Self radically changes.

The barrier between the temporal and pre-temporal hemispheres can,
depending upon other factors, mean that emotions and feelings
underlying waking ego-consciousness are rarely if ever experienced and
processed, or that they are forced to increase in valence to
perpetually compromise homeostasis and feelings of wellbeing. This
dynamic gives rise to our essential temperament and character. It
determines whether we become, in Arthur Janov's terminology, a parasympath
or a sympath. These modes of character correspond loosely to
Jung's introvert and extrovert types. The parasympath is inclined to
use their "right-brain" more, while the sympath tends to operate from
their "left-brain." The right-hemisphere of the brain matures before
the left and is bigger in size. It deals with creativity and its frame
of reference is deeper and wider. It is the center that relates to the
world inclusively and empathically. It is the center that processes,
prioritizes and permanently records our feelings. The left-hemisphere
is focused, practical, analytical, critical, organizing and
futuristic. We can also use the terms lunar and solar to denote the
characterological antipodes. In any case, mythologically and
historically the upper stratum of the brain, and mode of consciousness
that goes with it, is traditionally associated with masculinity and
the world of the father. It is the Olympian or Apollonian realm
standing high above the stygian Dionysian realms of Hades.

Arthur Janov's The New Primal Scream.

In dreams the divide between hemispheres of the Self, and attainment
of solar world, is often symbolized by a great river or crevasse, by
time-travel, space capsules, battle scenes, wars of Armageddon, sleek
fast vehicles, towers, skyscrapers, white winged horses, galloping
horses, competitions and races, eagles, phoenixes, hatching animals,
train journeys, spinning carousels, flying machines, engines, clocks,
summery landscapes, heroic characters, radiant supernatural beings,
teachers, wise sages, priests, wordsmiths, acrobats, tightrope
walkers, gymnasts, steeplejacks, sword-masters, generals, suits of
armor, the defeat of adversaries, conquering extreme odds, discovering
new lands, happy-endings, successful outcomes, weddings, winning
awards and recognition, feelings of lightness, power and
effervescence, brightly lit or noisy environments, etc. We see
renderings of this transformation and attainment in myths such as that
of Mercury receiving wings for his feet, Perseus receiving his armor
and protection, Samson regaining his God-given strength, King Arthur
pulling Excalibur from the stone, Hercules overcoming the Hydra, St.
George piercing the dragon, and so on. The tale of Jack and the
Beanstalk is, for example, one illustration of the ascent from
Chthonic to Apollonian worlds and identification with the father
image. The dark underworld descent, a common mythic motif, represents
the hero's brave attempt to free his own roots so he can advance to
kingship (or independent manhood) and marry his queen (or awaken
authentic femininity).

Our experience of trauma at the hands of a terrible mother, during
early preconscious stages of development, shapes our character and
orients us toward being a sympath or parasympath type. Most of us
swing between the two extremes and a few people have them harmonized.
But of course we may go on to suffer various forms of trauma at the
hands of other people. We may be stressed by a relationship with a
brother or sister, relatives, associates, workmates, bosses, sexual
partners, husbands or wives. Any one of these experiences can upset
our biological and psychological equilibrium and fix us at one of the
extremes. We might find ourselves being permanently parasympathetic or
sympathetic in disposition. In the former case, we do not fully emerge
from the shadows of the underworld. We remain semi-paralyzed by
intense emotions which, even though they do not become completely
conscious, nevertheless inhibit our will and undermine
Self-confidence. In the latter case we are so engaged with the world
and our domestic and social duties, energetically attempting to fit in
and win approval that we live on the surface of ourselves, in our
persona, thereby dissociating from the pain and grief that boil below.
This is unhealthy because the repressed emotions are legitimate.
They constitute our Shadow Self which must at some stage be integrated
if we are to truly overcome syndromes and live holistically and
authentically. However, regardless of what secondary influences serve
to reawaken initial traumatic memories, it is our relationship with
the terrible mother that sets the vicious cycle turning.

In my studies of adolescents who had an impaired sense of self,
I found that many though not all of them had mothers who themselves
suffered from an impaired self. The mothers too feared separation,
and attempted to prevent it at all costs – James F. Masterson
(Search for the Real Self)

...the mother's consciousness and her self-image are the
determining factors in the development of our own self. To the extent
that she has failed to develop an adequate autonomy of her own, her
self-esteem will be based on feelings and needs far removed from a
truly autonomous person. As a consequence, the way she regards her
own child – and thus how the child later sees itself in her
eyes – will necessarily reflect these limitations – ibid

Despite the troubles and challenges that attend us after the
development of the left-brain and frontal cortex, the solar world is
where we get to hide in the light and escape the devouring terrible
mother and her stygian realm of shadows. From our lofty pedestals we
invent alternative ways of dealing with feelings of past trauma.
Instead of enduring a healthy descent into the underworld –
instead of facing our repressed taboo feelings – we rationalize
and intellectualize them. We become philosophical and psychological.
But as Arthur Janov asserts, this Apollonian approach to quieting
subterranean maelstroms can end up leading us down many a cul-de-sac.
It might simply be another form of dissociation and way of denying the
body and the memories it holds for decades. It might be another way to
again infantilize ourselves, this time in the womb of a uroboric father
rather than mother.

...the earliest forms of both archetypes always involve a
uroboric element. As uroboric mother, the mother archetype is also
paternal and masculine, while the uroboric father archetype is also
maternal and feminine – Erich Neumann

...every archetype has two aspects, one "good," the other
"terrible" – ibid

What matters, says Janov, is not our ideas about feelings but the
feelings themselves. Biology matters more than psychology. And he is
quite right. After all, psychologizing about agony is not the same
thing as experiencing it. Shining bright light into the dark does not
remove shadow, it only causes darker shadows to appear. Being clasped
tightly by a father's strong arms might feel exceptionally satisfying,
but it can still detain us from finding our own legs, which is what
individuation is all about. The right decision of a traumatized man or
woman in the solar world is the rational decision to descend
again into the underworld and enter the dragon fight. It is the
intention to not allow oneself to be eternally hindered, weakened and
ultimately defeated by the past. The wrong decision is to hide in the
light, blissfully dissociating.

Give sorrow words, the grief that does not speak, Whispers the
oe'r-frought heart and bids it break – William Shakespeare

The great physician Sir William Osler once said that the hurt
that does not find its expression in tears may cause other organs to
weep – David Viscott (Emotional Resilience)

Undoubtedly one's character can be damaged by over-identification with
the father image. This is the situation commonly seen in the lives of
chivalric types. But we must never forget that this
over-identification, pathological as it is, is a symptom of the
terrible mother's influence and activity. The attempt to embody true
masculinity leads the child-hero to formulate ideas and aspirations of
a pseudo-mystical type. Religious concepts about God, heaven, hell,
conquering evil, sin and divine punishment, and so on, arise from the
minds of malignant chivalric types seeking escape from the terrible
mother in Apollonian ideas and beliefs. The religious world is filled
to the brim with chivalric types bent on converting others to their
way of seeing. They intrude and invade the minds of people in a
similar manner as their terrible mothers were wont to do during their
infancy. Their picture of God and of the perfect world built in his
image is a patently hierarchical and armored one. The women who
inhabit this world are either impossibly exalted pure types, or
complete sinners attempting to subvert it. The world of the truly
mystically inclined is not as hierarchical. It is not manufactured by
malignant minds but by holistic minds engaged in Shadow Work, which
entails the correct integration of body and psyche. This state once
existed after conception, before the projection of Selfhood and
anti-individualizing influence of the terrible mother. It existed when
the Logos was in direct connection with the Imperial Self. And it is
this unadulterated state that the mystic seeks to reclaim. If we speak
of being haunted by demons, we mean being overwhelmed by repressed but
legitimate feelings of grief, hatred and anger. If we speak of
the soul reuniting with a Creator, we see the description as a
metaphor for biopsychic reconnection with the Logos. If we speak of
paradise we do so meaning reunification with a devoted, caring parent
who provides a warm, restful environment for us.

Uroboric mysticism is a longing for a womb-like return to an
illusory paradise, a failure to ground oneself in the world –
John P. Conger (Jung and Reich: The Body as Shadow)

In biological and psychological terms, the reconnection with Logos
entails breaking the control of the terrible mother and re-masculinizing
oneself:

The activity of masculine consciousness is heroic in so far as
it voluntarily takes upon itself the archetypal struggle with the
dragon of the unconscious and carries it to a successful conclusion
– Erich Neumann

The Oedipal project is the flight from passivity, from
obliteration, from contingency: the child wants to conquer death by
becoming the father of himself, the creator and sustainer of his own
life – Ernest Becker

The reclamation is impossible until the seeker delves for himself into
the problems detailed in this book, and is fully aware how his psyche
was disoriented before full ego-consciousness arose. Healthy
identification with the father simply means that a healthy
identification with the masculine is desired. This is an
essential and proper process for adjusted boys and girls. After that
identification takes place the journey certainly begins on a good
footing, but there is a long way to go before the end of the rainbow
is reached. This is because the seeker can only find within himself
what he truly needs – his eclipsed Self-image. Society does not
provide techniques for an outsider to achieve this goal.
Society's ways are those he wishes to avoid and transcend. Moreover
the words, however wise, of other people who have gone ahead, are of
relatively little practical use. They inspire but cannot replace the
wisdom that must someday awaken within a seeker's being. Wise words
from others resonate within him and prove there is indeed a need for
deeper insight and investigation into Self and world, scientifically
and psychologically. This is the commitment a person finds after
arriving at Neumann's solar-rational stage of development.

However as I said, the path leads nowhere unless Shadow Work –
as delineated by Reich, Lowen and Janov – commences. This means
a shift of perspective from the psychological to the biological, from
ideas to feelings. And no well-meaning fellow can assist in this
undertaking. There are no A to Z manuals detailing what is to be done.
The manner in which one goes about unifying their bioenergetic
hemispheres is itself an expression of Selfhood. It is an ideographic
process which cannot be shared with others. It is therefore not a
religious process which any number of people can undertake as a group.
It is as we said a mystical process in which one attempts to confront
the emotions that arose in their body and mind, in utero and later,
when a terrible mother's agitated psychic intrusion was experienced
and defied. The aggression brought to bear against her interference
simultaneously strengthened identity and autonomy. It was the fuel
which drove consciousness to rise from the lunar to the solar phase
where we experience Self-consciousness, and which brought us to
know the world of external objects and entities. It was the fuel which
made it possible for us to separate from our mother's body and mind,
regardless of her subconscious and conscious attempts to prevent the
detachment.

For Freud self-knowledge means that man becomes conscious of
what is unconscious; this is a most difficult process, because it
encounters the energy of resistance by which the unconscious is
defended against the attempt to make it conscious – Erich
Fromm

It is very different when the son turns the tables upon the
Terrible Mother and adopts her destructive attitude, directing it not
against himself but against her. This process is represented
mythologically in the fight with the dragon – Erich Neumann

In the newer understanding of the castration complex it is not
the father's threats that the child reacts to...the castration
complex comes into being solely in confrontation with the mother...It
all centers on the fact that the mother monopolizes the child's
world; at first, she is his world. The child cannot survive without
her, yet in order to get control of his own powers he has to get free
of her – Ernest Becker

The mother is not the giver of love, as she imagines, but of
care. She mediates the interaction between infant and Logos. The Logos
is the transmitter of love, in that its action first harmonizes the
hemispheres of being. When the terrible mother interferes with this
numinous process, she neutralizes the love, replacing it with anxiety,
and by doing so capriciously and selfishly undermines her child's
psychic sovereignty.

...a distorted development of autonomy is the root cause of the
pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings –
Arno Gruen

The good dragon mother does not impede the natural and vital severance
between her consciousness and that of her infant. She realizes that to
do so stunts the character and will of her offspring. She knows that
her child deserves to be a whole Self. Her sensitive caring
action ensures that after Oedipal stages begin her child's ego-ideal
and superego are not impaired. Instead of the superego being the
exclusive manager of moral sensibility, she ensures that her child's conscience
dominates the process. In this case, the way is open for her child to
interact with the world in a healthy manner. Because his
characterological roots are strong and vital he does not enter the
world as a neurotic person, deeply dependent on the approval of the
crowd. In the case of a son, he grows to be a masculinized male who
hankers not for a perfect sunlit world as imaged by his chivalric
counterparts. Rather, his project is the reunification of opposites in
which one side is neither split from another nor exalted above it. The
gods he worships are not those maintaining a rotten status quo or
endorsing the repression of natural instincts. His intent is religious
to the extent that it signals a return to the natural and a
reconnection with the Logos. However, his concern lies not with the
fate of masses but with that of individuals willing to stand up as
outsiders and go their own way. His concern is not with heavens
opposed to hells and gods opposed to devils. He knows that hell is
simply the state in which one remains estranged from the Imperial
Self.

Ego strength is also helped through identifications. A boy is
fortunate who has a strong but sympathetic father with whom he can
identify. Likewise the girl is helped in forming a strong ego through
identification with a mother who is gentle, loving, yet firm. If the
parental images are deflated early through disappointment, neglect or
cruelty, the ego of the child is left without adequate support and
the many problems confronting the child tend to overwhelm him
– Percival Symonds (The Ego and the Self)

In the case of a non-malignant girl, masculinization allows her
to be receptive to the Logos, so she is able to mediate it to her
children after conception. In this sense the masculinized female is
the representative of the Great Mother or Goddess that in some
traditions is equated with the essential creative power. And to an
extent this is a valid association.

The good dragon mother logically recognizes that the vicious
cycle begins and ends with her. When we hear specialists speaking
about "trauma," "stress" and "anxiety" maladjusting a fetus or infant,
we must decode these technical terms and get to the heart of the
matter. What they refer to is the consciousness of a mother who may be
drenched in self-hate, father-hate, mother-hate, world-hate,
reality-hate, or some other irrational complex.

If a women tells us she cannot wait until she gets pregnant, but
admits she has been traumatized by her parents, we ask why she wants
to bear a child without first dealing with her syndromes. As far as I
am concerned she is irresponsibly perpetuating the cycle of
dysfunction. The masculinized female sees this folly for what it is
and takes a different course. If she has been subjected to trauma she
deals with it in a productive and correct manner before she
gives birth.

The masculinized female's primary concern in life, whether she
bears children of her own or not, is to resist being transformed into
one of the malignant types – a feminized or terrible female. She
must educate herself about the female psyche and understand the
implicit connections that exist between malignant types and the
society of which she is a part. She must come to see that the
apparently civilizing forces bearing down on her consciousness are not
healthy. On the contrary they are pathological. They give rise not to
hygienic souls but to malignant men and women living loveless,
parasitical lives. These types in turn create the schizogenic
societies that future generations are condemned to occupy. It is the
duty of masculinized types to actively and intelligently oppose and
rectify this travesty. This cannot be achieved until the nature and
workings of evil are investigated and correctly understood.

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound
reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly
difficult the discovery of individuality is – Carl Gustav Jung

The extremism endemic to the world made by malignant types leads
to misgiven ideas about the nature of and relationship between the
masculine and the feminine. It leads to imbalance after the solar
phase of development commences. At this stage, although we are
Self-conscious subjects able to recognize the natural world, we are
bound to denigrate that world, exalting human reason over and above
it. We do so because we have become detached from the roots of our own
being. That severance or split between hemispheres reoccurs on all
subsequent levels of consciousness, through the lunar to the solar
phases. Nietzsche was of the opinion that there is no reconciliation
possible between polarized opposites. They are ontological and their
interplay constitutes whatever change and progress we know and
experience.

This was not the position taken by Jung. He believed that there is an
over-arching third principle which represents lost unity. He
was speaking about the Logos, which he referred to as the Self. We
take his point. Perhaps in order to recognize opposites we can
logically infer a holistic way of seeing and agree that it is the
Logos as it manifests in the universe and the consciousness of men and
women. It has been identified as the driving individuating impulse
leading to the solar-rational dimension. It is the archetype behind
the idea of progress which occurs without leaving previous achievement
behind. It is the intelligence that posits a concentric expansion
instead of a linear, vertical one. It is the intelligence to
understand that what occurs in one hemisphere invariably affects what
happens in another, and that nothing in the universe remains in a
static state.

The feminine principle or Anima is simply another means by which
the archetypal Logos or Animus manifests itself. This is why these
energies are not to be considered separate realties. They are deeply
interwoven. What is more, these forces operate on the transpersonal
and personal levels simultaneously. This is why Jung and Neumann could
not accept the reductionist theories espoused by Freud and his school.
For them the unconscious was not simply a dumping ground of repressed
traits. It is not simply the place to which we banish attributes that
do not conform with our Self-image as generated by the ego-ideal and
superego. It is the place wherein we locate the Imperial Self and
reconnect with the flow of archetypal images that once invigorated and
directed our psychosomatic intelligence. If we fear entry into that
place – that is, if we fear allowing these constituents of
consciousness to flow freely through us – it is because we have,
in a pathological sense, risen so far above our own roots that we fear
to fall into the depths from our comfortable elevated summits. It is
also because we do not wish to re-enter the dragon fight which
paralyzed our will during the early stages of existence.

The problem is that one cannot attain the truly masculinized or
individuated state without returning to their roots. The refusal means
that fear and frustration undergirds and arrests one's psychic
development. It means that one is bound to project outwardly one's
complexes and syndromes and operate as either a feminized or chivalric
type. Therefore to secure oneself properly in the solar world and
embody the masculine polarity, one must fearlessly confront repressed
emotions. This occurs only after one makes an unbiased study of the
female psyche, given that it is the ultimate root of the pathological
tendencies that impede development during the lunar and solar phases.

The chivalric type has no intention of attending to his Shadow
Work. He contents himself by building his sunlit world full of ivory
towers. From his high Apollonian plateaus he congratulates himself on
work well done. Lesser active and successful chivalric men coming up
behind the more adroit exemplar are treated not as friends but as
rivals. This is what Freud imperfectly described when he writes of the
father-son rivalry. He believed the rivalry was rooted in a son's
amorous desires toward his mother and sexual antipathy toward his
father. As we have seen this is not wholly correct. The rivalry is not
over the mother, but over the will exhibited by the elder man who
appears to the child to have escaped the domination of the terrible
mother. This estimation of the father's independence can of course be
wildly wrong. However the young child has no way of knowing he is in
error over the matter until later in life. When he does realize his
mistake (during teenage years) he usually indignantly rejects his
father and his ways. The father senses this rebuff and his attitude
toward his son becomes harder and less sympathetic. He berates the son
for this or that foible, and stiffens his persona to assume a manlier
guise.

As noted, this rivalry between chivalric males is a vicious
circle. Nothing changes because neither party cares to examine their
relationship with the female psyche. Their combat is played out
endlessly in the home, on the streets and political stage, and is
solely concerned with establishing who "owns" who. Which male is
inferior to the other? Which is the property of the other? That is the
primitive motive for their conflicts that rock the world. As Arno
Gruen wrote: "Men are deeply tormented over doubts about their
superiority." Although the rivalry often takes the form of "whose god
is greatest?" we must not think of the tussle in religious terms. That
does lead in the right direction.

And for chivalric types it is not, as feminists believe, about who
owns the girl. No! For these hypersexual supermen the "girl" (or
terrible mother) is the supreme owner rather than the possession. As
far as personal relationships go the chivalric male knows only
enthralldom not love. Much of what he makes and does is certainly for
the sake of his feminized counterpart's greater good. But the doing
is valued more than the end result. After all the chivalric male is an
extroverted and compulsive doer. His is in an imperfect world
that must be maintained and mended constantly. When he clashes with a
rival who contests him he and his equally muscular foe might convince
themselves that they spar over some woman's affections, when she is in
fact the coveted prize after the fact. This is a common ruse for men
of this type. Inwardly they know their real desire is to remain
ensconced on that small territory which reduces in size as one ascends
each tier of the hierarchy built by types like themselves. At the top
of the power-pyramid one becomes God, with the right to have
everything one wants, including the desired female. Think of the vital
energy that gets wasted in tussles of this sort. Adlerian man pushing
against his reflection violently and destructively. Would not it be
better to refocus that energy on the real problem, on the Shadow Work
that leads to holistic development and expansion?

The chivalric male's addiction to the solar world is not born
out of accurate understanding and insight into its complex ways.
Rather it is born out of his attempts to not deal with legitimate
inner feelings of grief and anger. From childhood he has made the
decision to avoid facing the legitimate hurt he represses in favor of
hyperactivity in the world. He walks around in an emotionally
anaesthetized state, but is not bothered since most of the people with
whom he interacts are in a similar state. If and when these emotions
attempt to flood in, he tranquilizes himself with drugs or booze, with
over-eating, over-gossiping and with his all-important "plans" for
achieving success. His micropolitical dealings with others in a
similar state to himself provides him with a superficial feeling of
superiority to which he also becomes addicted. Actually his inferior
feelings and microagression arise from two sources. First is the
pre-Oedipal combat with the terrible mother, and second the rivalry
with similar types as himself, after he has reached the solar-rational
phase of development and misidentifies with the chivalric archetype.
From both sources come feelings of weakness, incompetence,
insufficiency, frustration, hopelessness, antagonism and rivalry. Such
a type is blinded by the light that shines on him from above, and
paralyzed with dread over the dark depths that loom below where his
roots lie. No wonder such a type is addicted to the norms of the
crowd. Those parameters are his stabilizers, and once he has found a
semblance of security with them he sets out automatically to impose
them on everyone he meets. Anyone who resists his act of colonization
is condemned and destroyed. When asked to explain why he does what he
does, he invariably ironically declares "...It is for the good of the
Father." He has little more to add.

We see from this that Freud's ideas must take second place to
those of Alfred Adler, whose theory of psychodynamics places
aggression and Self-expression above sexuality as the most important
drives. Sadly, for all his perceptive ideas on child-development,
Adler did not see that the Will to Power originates during an infant's
conflict with its terrible mother. Like Freud he believed that the
will to rise and achieve Self-expression is a consequence of the
superego, occurring after the Oedipal stages commence. As far as I am
concerned, the Will to Power is born originally from the will to resist
the intrusion of the terrible mother and win back a complete
Self-image. It is an emanation of the Logos which promotes
centroversion and positive psychosomatic growth. It is from this
preconscious stage that unbearable feelings of inferiority arise.
Adler did not see that a child who has had his will humiliated in
pre-Oedipal periods – who has his legs well and truly cut from
beneath him – is hardly in a position to learn Self-reliance in
adolescence, regardless of the intentions and efforts of his parents.

The psychologist Alfred Adler (1870-1937).
Like Otto Rank, Adler was eventually to disagree and part with Freud.
He went on to establish the school of Individual Psychology.

Shadow Work is nothing less than a deconstructive process that
operates simultaneously on every level of being. It is a process that
must first be directed to one's emotional self, and secondly toward
the somatic self or body. In the womb it was as a body-brain that we
first encountered the influence that subverted our will and blocked
access to the flow of the Logos. Although our aggressive resistance to
this intrusion is identical with our Will to Be or Will to Meaning
– the will to become Self-conscious, Self-directed beings
– it was continuously countered by the terrible mother. As a
result we experienced not only an impaired Self-image but also bouts
of grief and guilt. And where there is guilt and shame there must be Self-forgiveness.
If you grew up to think of legitimate anger as something to be
shameful about, then you have Shadow Work to do. Thinking you feel
good is not the same as actually feeling good, so learn the difference
between language of the head and language of the heart.

If your parents made your life hell, you do not need to forgive them.
That is the wrong thing to do. You need to heal yourself, remembering
all along that good is always to be rewarded and evil always
punished. It is never to be excused and forgiven. If your body's vital
processes have been artificially sent to sleep by the volume of your
terrible mother's mental and somatic cacophony, or later attitude of
disapproval, you need to attend to it and recharge its bioenergy. You
will not be able to think straight until you do. If your emotions and
moods run you ragged day and night, it is time to turn the tables,
awaken Self-love and set about the process of healing your
anaesthetized hurt. If your mother's influence separated you from your
instinctual ground, you must attend to it and reground yourself. This
means getting out of ideas and ideas about ideas. It means not being
in denial and denial of denial. It means getting out of the city and
into nature, which in turn leads to communion with the Logos and a
profound psychosomatic "rebirth" under its auspices. If you have never
loved an animal, now's your chance to end your emotional apartheid and
speciesism. It is your chance to express feelings toward a being who
does not judge or glaze over, and to heal repressed feelings of
abandonment. If your imagination has seized up and you live in shame
while envying others for their creative abilities, stop it and get
back to doing what you love. If you are overcome with thoughts of
failure before starting a project, realize where these thoughts come
from and pay them no heed. If people around you cease respecting and
loving you, then you are in the wrong place, so move out and on. If
the world tells you to censor "negative thoughts" tell them to fuck
off. You are not into censoring any part of yourself. On the contrary
you are into listening to every voice and song within you regardless
of what it says or how it makes you feel. If you haven't been talking
to yourself recently, it is not a good thing. Start doing it on a
regular basis. If your presence disturbs other people, let it. It's their
problem. And if you find yourself overly absorbed in fixing and
re-hardwiring the minds of other people, take a break. If they fall,
it is okay. Maybe it is what should have happened a long time ago. Now
they might find their legs without help. In any case, as long as you
are not intentionally hurting other people there is no need to prove
your worth to them over and over again. And stop trying to let every
Tom, Dick and Harry know who you are. You cannot know all there is to
know about a person, and they can't know all there is to know about
you. Keep your privacy intact and do not turn yourself into an
emotional prostitute. Maybe you do not see people for who they really
are, okay, start learning to see them in a truer light. Make it top
priority. Get psychologically empowered. Know your abilities and also
your limits.

In other words, assess what you have control over and what you don't.
Pay no mind to that which falls outside your power to change. Get on
with the things you can change. When you find yourself at a loss as to
what to do, do nothing. Just relax and watch things work themselves
out. When you find yourself forgetting where you are because of morbid
memories or anxiety over tomorrow's potential troubles, remember that
you are here on earth for about seventy summers and resituate yourself
in the present. When each new day dawns make sure to greet it
with a friendly hello! Topple any idols above you from their pedestals
and set free any slaves on their knees below you. If you are morally
superior you don't need medals to prove it. When someone tells you you
have inherited a false self-image from your terrible mother, listen
hard and do not spend your lifetime defending and maintaining it. It
is not who you are, so letting it go is the only way to kiss goodbye
to your distress and anxiety. Learn the difference between recreation,
occupation and vocation. If you are not working hard at something
without interest in the financial profit it brings, you are not
finding out who you truly are. Be okay with getting things wrong. It
means you are getting close to getting it right. In life and work,
take every failure as an essential step on the road to success, and
take pride in being able to start from scratch with the mind of a
beginner. You'll go far that way.

...in our society it is not those who suffer that are weak but
those who fear suffering. People who have made the most successful
societal adjustment actually turn out to be the weak ones. To conceal
this fact, the "well-adjusted" have for millennia been propagating
the myth that sensitivity means weakness...they are the ones who
perpetuate a distorted view of reality that is, the ideology of power
and domination – Arno Gruen

To regain feeling one must fully experience all of the hurt
blocking it, and bring the pain to conscious awareness...Feelings
predate thoughts. In terms of evolution we are feeling beings long
before we are thinking ones – Arthur Janov

Integrate, or disintegrate – ibid

Shadow Work is an act of love. It is actually the only act of
love of which we are capable. What we feel for other people we value
is care. We do not understand this difference because most of our
infatuations with other people are based on various forms of romantic
enthrallment which soon turns us into emotional prostitutes.

The yearning of a separated part to rejoin its missing halves is
a yearning correctly associated with love, although we displace it to
the exterior world. We do well to realize that it is the yearning of
internal hemispheres seeking for reunification.

The more love I turn toward the outside world the less love I
have for myself, and vice versa. Freud is thus moved to describe the
phenomenon of falling in love as an impoverishment of one's self-love
because all love is turned to an object outside of oneself –
Erich Fromm

In this sense, the true act of care is the willful reunification of
every biopsychic hemisphere fragmented during the uterine period and
through infancy. When they effectively work together we feel complete
and centered. There is perfect peace, resoluteness and heightened
aliveness, the state that alone deserves to be called love, a word
best understood as a synonym of Wholeness.

Among Freud's most important discoveries is the realization
that the underlying cause of psychological disturbance is our fear of
self-knowledge: information which when consciously recognized induces
us to feel weak, incompetent, ashamed, and unworthy – leading
to self-hatred – Carl Goldberg

Shadow Work constitutes a new uroboric enclosure and return
full-circle to the roots of yourself. The ego set out to find the
temple of the Self, which entails a temporary return to the dark
depths of lunar time and triumphant return to world of solar time. It
means returning to the present moment as an Imperial Self.

Although the self is my origin, it is also the goal of my quest
– Carl Gustav Jung

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Time, Freedom, Nature

Self-knowledge in Freud's sense is not an intellectual process
alone...It is not only knowledge by the brain, but also knowledge by
the heart – Erich Fromm

Freud was right. The awakening of the knowledge of the heart is akin
to the power activated within us by the Logos or Animus. Only by
re-masculinization can a man or women come back into alignment with
the cosmic order of which they are a part. In fact the very word cosmos
connotes order.

The Animus is primary, the Anima secondary and derivative. The
latter is the means by which the former expresses itself, but it has
no independent identity. This is why it is ultimately inappropriate
and wrongheaded to think of the underlying reality in feminine terms,
as so many are wont to do.

One consequence of this folly is to think of love (and the
intelligence of the heart) as originating from stereotypical humans.
Although it may be expressed by human consciousness, love does
not originate there. We egoistically appropriate it like we stake out
physical territory. But that does not make love our personal property.
We are mediators of the Logos, but can also stand in the way of its
flow. We can insert our own toxic consciousness in the place where it
is supposed to operate. And that is what a terrible mother does after
she conceives. Her toxic body or imbalanced, hyperagitated
consciousness interferes with the constellating consciousness of her
fetus and infant. Her narcissism is, however, not the outcome of a
healthy Self-image. Rather it is the result of self-hate. Her
syndromes have an interesting if predictable history. They took shape
during her time in her mother's womb. As I said, pathology has
a long etiology. And I emphasized in the Introduction, if we go back
far enough in the cycle of dysfunction, of hand-me-down trauma, we end
up back at a time in history when the effects of worldwide cataclysm
shook human consciousness to its roots. Natural havoc scarred and
destabilized consciousness on all levels. As I stress throughout this
work, It is this psychosomatic state of fragmentation that underlies
all future experiences of trauma. Knowing this fact opens the door to
the long process of healing. Denying it ensures that no deep lasting
healing takes place for man or world.

Our psychology in turn shapes our biology, in ways detailed by
Reich, Lowen and Janov. We end up with our basic temperament and
personality, as well as the self-sedating chemical gates preventing
trauma and pain from rising from the depths to worry our frontal
cortex.

Partly self-sedated in this way, we hasten to adjust to the
solar world where we can get on with being engaged, infatuated,
enthralled and entertained, distracting ourselves from facing our
innermost feelings. Until these feelings are unlocked and processed
correctly, we may gain the world but not find ourselves able to
recommune with the Logos. We are able to commune with ersatz versions
of it, our gods, idols, causes and imperfect humans we all too often
exalt above us.

...without cultural sanction, most or all of our religious
beliefs and rituals would fall into the domain of mental disturbance
– John F. Schumaker (Corruption of Reality)

The world consists of imaginary people, claiming imaginary
virtues and suffering from imaginary happiness – Vernon Howard

In this way ancient and modern trauma work together to undermine
not only our own sanity and health, but that of the world at large. As
I emphasized in the Introduction, present experiences of trauma
bioenergetically stir and even awaken memories, within our
right-hemisphere, of previous experiences of trauma.

This vicious cycle is the reason for most of the pathological
tendencies we see and experience. It is the reason why it is so
difficult to break habits and change deviant behavior. It is a fact
that must not be denied or minimized. It is, after all, the reason why
women becomes terrible mothers and men become tyrannous fathers. But
as I said in the Introduction, it falls to the traumatized victim to
do something about their state of being in the present.

To abnegate this duty means to allow other forces to take over the
process of social hygiene. This endorsement of the ever-intruding
establishment forces and of increased pharmaceutical-conglomerate
monopolization merely adds to the dehumanization of future generations
condemned to live mediocre, conformist, tranquilized but anxiety-free
lives. We say no, this is not right. We should experience
anxiety, pain and sorrow if our inner house is in disarray. We should
not feel alright about being emotionally defiled and mentally
deranged. We should not accept pseudo-love and pseudo-security while
we refuse to dig down to the roots of being. We should not work on
keeping up the mask while the Imperial Self lies chained in a psychic
dungeon.

As I said, awakening parts of our identity cast into Shadow is a wide,
wild work. It is all-inclusive and touches every aspect of our being.
It works on all four levels – energetic, emotional, intellectual
and social. It is not a process that works on one level to the
detriment of others, creating more imbalance. It is a process
that attunes us to the physical world and cosmos in a healthy way, not
as chivalric males and malignant father-figures envision it, but as
sages, mystics, shaman, poets and artists are wont to do. And it is
through art, poetry, music and performance that we begin opening the
doors of the underworld to let our true feelings emerge without
censorship. Getting back to nature and to a closer rapport with
animals is also a vital means of reinstituting lost homeostasis.

The deepest love arises, as I explained, from the reunification of all
psychosomatic hemispheres. From this foundation we re-enter the world
heroically rather than disrupting influences. We are masculine
and constructive ones. We speak the archetypal language and are able
to provide signposts for other traumatized people not so endowed and
empowered with Self-love.

When love is experienced in this deep authentic way, we clearly
understand that we are not love's origin. We realize without a shadow
of doubt that we as humans merely channel the energy which one part of
us wishes to seize and copyright. This caging of love is itself the
result of trauma in the uterine condition. We cling to what we mistake
as human love because we lost our connection to the real thing. Our
communication with the Logos was eclipsed by our terrible mother's
agitated narcissistic self-conversation, and after birth her
controlling voice became even more authoritarian and interrogative.

As a result both our Will to Meaning and Will to Power were
severely obstructed and misdirected. We became neurotic and ill at
ease. We might have covered up inner distress with a smile, and been
the "perfect" son or daughter, but inwardly we endured untold
suffering without knowing why.

These hidden emotions boil like lava far beneath the surface,
but rise during dreams and moments when the world's pressures reach a
critical level. They are what took the place of our holistic
Self-image. Living in the solar world allows us to find more concrete
slabs to cover over the abysmal gateway by which unpleasant and
ego-paralyzing emotions enter. It also affords us a way of forgetting
what happened to us in the past, and a hundred ways of displacing and
compensating for our cocktail of "negative" but quite legitimate
feelings. We attempt to fall into lockstep with the ways of other
similarly dissociated people who fall into the four subtypes
delineated in Chapter Nine – those completely dissociated and
unaware that they suffered trauma, those who know it but choose to
remain indifferent to it, those who choose ineffectual ways of dealing
with it, and those who discern and employ authentic ways to truly heal
it. This last type is authentic and also masculinized. Men and women
of this sort are not able to rely on anyone but themselves to reach
their goals. Indeed, they must reject society's standardized paradigms
which only serve to further infantilize and dehumanize individuals,
thereby historically and personally perpetuating the cycle of
dysfunction. The masculinized person dedicates himself to exorcising
his legitimate suffering and forming a society that actively
encourages Shadow Work.

A society of heroic, masculinized men and women does not blindly
replay the uterine and post-natal travesty over and over again. It
does not raise children oppressively and judgmentally, and use them as
psychological crutches and temporary playthings. They do not
undernourish or overly smother them either. Their attention toward
children is loving but freedom-creating. The love that knows no
freedom is false love, the kind our world abounds with. Its
source is the malignant or feminized male and female, and a better
society does not need their repressive ways.

Our western culture seems to be distinguished by the frequency,
if not by the very existence, of the psychic disorders which we call
neuroses and psychoses – Erich Neumann

Freud differed from Jung and Neumann in his estimation of the origin
and nature of the so-called "unconscious" (a term coined by the German
philosopher F. W. J. Schelling). For Freud it was simply the
metaphorical "place" into which one repressed aspects of their
personality that did not conform to parental and social expectations
and norms. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud lamented
the fact that civilization has an oppressive role on the human psyche,
but he could not help believing that it was essential when all is said
and done. This was because his personal view of man's underlying
nature was pessimistic and bleak. Jung, on the other hand, had a more
beneficent view both of the unconscious and human nature. This was
also the stance of William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and other poets and artists of their kind. Men of elevated
sort believe that if there are unwholesome aspects to the unconscious,
they derive not from our core but from the world, from society. They
are right.

...our Western and Christian social institutions define man in
a way that is not only paradoxical but contradictory. Man is seen as
an embodied conflict between reason and instinct, spirit and nature,
such that to be healthy or to be saved he must always mistrust
himself. Jung does not show this contradiction...because he holds
that the unconscious is at root creative and intelligent, and
ultimately trustworthy – Alan Watts

Jung himself perceptively stressed that the content of the unconscious
does not appear without distortion. But the distorting force or
presence is, he said, none other than the conscious face peering into
it. The unconscious realm is, in this sense, a specular realm
reflecting back and responding to the psychosomatic condition of the
conscious ego attempting to negotiate its territory. Realizing this
leads to a profound change of perspective for a seeker. It means that
dealing with psychic content is one thing, and that the way we
deal with it is another. It is not the goal to which we head or
outcome we fantasize about that matters, but the manner in which we
walk the road toward our desires that is of crucial importance. This
implies personalism, the very factor compromised by the crowd.
We see then that intention becomes a vital factor determining where
our road of self-discovery leads. If our need to heal is born out of
the desire to return to the world as is, or more effectively readjust
to the status quo, we will not succeed in getting too far. One
pestilence will replace another. However, if we set out toward our
goal because we intend to radically cleanse and upgrade our way
of seeing, all will be well. The revisioning and reconstitution will
take place as desired.

Individuation is the natural process by which a tree becomes a
tree and a human becomes a human – Carl Gustav Jung

Along the way toward Self-realization the seeker is bound to encounter
and replay many "mythic" scenarios. This is because our personal lives
– or monomyth – intersects with another underlying process
which encapsulates and preserves life-experiences not of a single
individual but of every human who lived in the past, regardless
of their class, religion or culture. The stages that generally
characterize the mythic, transpersonal, transcultural circle, as
delineated by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Edward Edinger and other
writers, include the moments of birth, puberty, graduation, career
experience, business success or failure, marriage, birthing,
retirement, illness, loss, parent passing, and personal death. There
are other substages which taken together mark seventeen stages in all,
as specifically delineated by Joseph Campbell in his book Hero
with a Thousand Faces. The stages are fairly consistent regardless of
what cultural background one comes from.

The interesting thing is that a seeker can replay these stages
ontogenetically without any idea that he walks in the footprints of
millions of others who have gone before. He can so insulate himself
within his idealized self and ego-conception that it never dawns on
him that he is not as separate and alienated as he feels and imagines.
The unreflective seeker goes about his business largely unaware of how
recent, historically speaking, his mental capacities for
Self-reflection and introspection are.

Our ancestors did not introspect the way moderns do. In fact some
ethnologists believe that the ancients were more in touch with their
raw feelings than modern man. That we have become more stable and
rational indicates to some philosophers that nature must be regarded
as unfolding in a teleological manner. This means that nature's
evolution, which includes the appearance of humanity, is purposeful.
It is, however, a purpose that is not clearly discernible by human
minds. The point is, again, that it is not merely existing that
matters, but the way one lives and acts that does. As I show in
previous chapters, it is this intentionality, like one's free will,
that gets subverted by trauma at the hands of the terrible mother, and
later by society which works as her ally.

Once a seeker becomes aware of the mythic dimension that
undergird and parallel his monomythic traversal, and once he is more
concerned with each step he takes than with the goal, he dramatically
changes his fate and upgrades his insight into what is happening to
him internally and externally. He realizes that despite the vagaries
of his journey and the ups and downs he experiences, he has ever been
satelliting around his own core nature or Imperial Self.

After passing through all the phases of world-experience and
self-experience, the individual reaches consciousness of his true
meaning. He knows himself as the beginning, middle, and end of the
self-development of the psyche, which manifests itself first as the
ego and is then experienced by this ego as the self – Erich
Neumann

The less aware and conscientious seeker concerns himself only
with his own path with no wider vision. The trouble he runs into is
excessive intellectualization, abstraction and alienation. This is the
fate that awaits most seekers who adopt an "Eastern" perspective on
Self-realization. The accent in most Eastern mystical traditions is
ascetic withdrawal from the world, which in extreme instances turns to
a morbid denial of the physical body. Jung rightly warned his readers
of this extremist mentality. In clear, strong language he reminds us
of the body's role:

The body is, of course, also a concretization, or a function of
that unknown thing which produces the psyche as well as the body; the
difference we make between the psyche and the body is artificial. It
is done for the sake of a better understanding. In reality, there is
nothing but a living body. That is the fact; and psyche is as much a
living body as body is living psyche

Here he speaks obliquely of the Logos, the all-encompassing
essence or supreme archetype which brings all things into being and
gives rise to human consciousness. The Imperial Self is, as I have
said, the embodiment of the Logos which also serves as the
centroverting force throughout the natal and post-natal periods.
Jung's reference about the importance of the body reminds us of the
supreme teacher in this regard, the great Wilhelm Reich. He was not a
Jungian or strict Freudian, but his ideas on the psyche and its
divisions radically reframe the central ideas of both contemporaries.
For Reich the body was primary. Its energy creates mind, while one's
bioenergetic imbalance determines psychic dysfunction and pathology.
The neurotic personality type must look to his tendency to somatically
"armor" himself against life and other people.

Of course we know where this tendency originates. It began after the
intrusion of the terrible mother, which the fetus and infant attempted
to defy by way of enhanced aggressiveness. It began in the womb
minutes before the fetus took birth, as it sensed the conditions of
its mother's body. If she was chemically drugged by her doctors and
nurses, her body's laxity massively traumatized her fetus. If she was
in a non-anxious, non-anaesthetized state, the fetus had less to
prevent its easy entrance into the adult world. Yes, body matters. The
fetus had to choose to either fight to pass through a lax birth
canal, or give up the struggle for life full of hopelessness and
confusion. It either suffocated and remained where it was, trapped, or
summoned the will to exit and take its first breath. It grew up to
become either a sympath or parasympath, as Arthur Janov terms it. This
typology denotes not just the orientation of minds but of bodies.

...the greatest oversight of orthodox psychology is, in Reich's
view, the dismissal of the human body as an extension of the
psyche...It is the human body that stands closest to the world of
experience and stimuli. It is the body that houses the mind, not the
other way around – Alexander Lowen

...Just as there is a "wisdom of the body" which often has a
better sense of health than medical science, so too there may be a
"wisdom of the id" that knows what sanity is better than any school
of psychiatry whose standard of normality is essentially a defense of
misconceived social necessity – Theodore Roszak

This is why the Eastern conception of Self-realization is
wrongheaded and problematic, especially for Westerners. The ascetic
denial of the body and physical world does not lead to enlightenment
but further pathology. Hemispheres of being are not correctly
integrated but further separated. One ends up being phenomenologically
absent, and dismissive of the body which constitutes the Imperial Self
as well as of the world in which it expresses and "knows" itself. A
greater metaphysical and epistemological folly cannot be imagined.

...the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to
be expunged – William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell)

As William Blake, Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Wilhelm Reich, Arthur Janov, and
other perceptive sages point out, as false mystical ideas permeate
Western culture the body's intelligence and role becomes obscured. In
Chapter Ten I addressed why these spurious ideas take hold. They are
accepted by the child-hero as he attains his place in the solar world
of feminized and chivalric males. They are part of his "armor" against
the terrible mother and her world. They are hyper-masculinized
concepts which also entail a skewed image of the feminine. Once the
"mysteria" is adopted, the seeker sets off to find himself in the wrong
way. This accounts for why so many people end up insane after dabbling
in this or that "mystical" tradition. They found the world-denying,
body-debasing ideology conducive because for their solar types the two
are already partly perversely denigrated and controlled. Taking the
malignancy to the next absurd level poses no special problem. For such
types reality is not seen rationally and straight. Anima rates
ontologically higher than Animus, and the head rates higher than the
heart and body.

All along, the seeker does not realize his mistake. It is his thinking
which constitutes the cage of illusion he strives to escape. His ideas
about reality serve as his "mind-forged manacles," as Blake termed it.
He does not realize that the trauma that set him to divide his being
into so many disparate parts continues to defile his consciousness,
perpetuating the process of psychosomatic apartheid until everything
he sets his infirm mind to ends up as divided and polarized as he
himself is within. If it were not for the few masculinized creative
and perceptive men and women who still exist in his demented perverse
world, the mysteria-infected human would long ago have annihilated
himself and his kind. Indeed, despite their sane presence he may still
get his way.

Such men never come to realize that they and the universe around them
are in a relationship. They do not ponder how they affect the
world around them, or how the world affects them. They just get on
with what they think of as "living." This is why their lives are all
too often flat, shallow and mediocre. These types are out of touch
with their innermost feelings, and with the many complexions of the
reality of which they are, for all their obliviousness, a part.

Wiser men and women acknowledges the relationship that exists between
them and the universe, and remain open to instruction from nature.
Their being is receptive to intimations that cannot be expressed
clearly in ordinary speech, only in artforms such as poetry, music and
painting, etc. The creative type also realizes that the way he
processes what nature tells him is unique to himself, and that what he
does as a result of his guidance might bring him into conflict with
everyone he knows and encounters. But that is okay, because the
creative man knows that to go along with the crowd is to deny the call
of his Imperial Self which remains in deep symbiotic connection with
the Logos. He also knows that freedom plays a major part in his
relationship with the universe and the natural things within it. And
he sees the vital implications of this freedom. It is not something he
has been awarded by other humans. It is not something installed in
childhood. It is not something he even controls or always uses for
positive purposes, but he is free in ways that other entities are not.
In fact, he comes to recognize that while the entire cosmos around him
operates according to fixed rules or laws, he as a human being is
endowed by nature with the choice to act differently than other people
want him to act, and even as he himself is wont to act on most
occasions. He has, as I said in the Introduction, the freedom to make
bad situations better or good situations worse. He can choose to
change radically as a person and turn away from the world to become an
ascetic.

Alternatively, he can turn to the natural world and enhance his
phenomenological comportment toward it. The latter choice makes more
sense to a truly wise man because he cannot escape the wonder about
his freedom. Nature has left plenty of room for each one of us to not
only negotiate the things of the world but to draw whatever
conclusions we want about them. Our capacities for wonder,
imagination, fantasy and even delusion are almost limitless. We are
free to remake the world we experience in our heads every day if we so
desire. We are in total charge of our way of seeing, as Georg
Groddeck put it.

What he meant is that we are able to change the nature of our
conscious and unconscious selves when we realize that the latter is
just a metaphor rather than an actual location in the head. That's
right, there is no place within us called "ego," no place called "id,"
and no place called the "unconscious." Remembering this prevents us
becoming enmeshed in ideas about ideas and tangled in concepts meant
to help us clearly understand the mysteries of human nature.

...introspection is a latecomer among the powers that man
gradually acquired through the thousands of years during which the
first glimmering light of consciousness was being evolved –
Mary Esther Harding

...the further back we go in human history, the rarer
individuality becomes and the more undeveloped it is...All the
social, religious, and historical evidence points to the late birth
of the individual from the collective and from the unconscious
– Erich Neumann

...the unconscious state is the original, basic, psychic
situation that is everywhere the rule – ibid

Georg Groddeck (1866-1934) was one of the
world's most perceptive psychoanalysts and healers.

To escape entrapment in words and definitions we do as Groddeck
suggested, realizing that everything concerning consciousness and its
modes boils down to a way of seeing. That which we prefer not
to see, for whatever reason, becomes the "unconscious," while that
which we choose to see is "conscious." And the formula applies to
everything – the universe around us, other people and even
ourselves.

This explains the so-called Shadow Self. This catchphrase simply
alludes to the aspects and voices of our Selves repressed, denied, and
cast into shadow, as it were. Earlier I explained how this process of
Self-censorship begins. It is due to our avoidance of anxiety and the
pain that arises if and when we introspect and stir memories of fetal
and infantile trauma contained in the right hemisphere of the brain.
This hemisphere is preoccupied with feeling not logical thought. As I
said, consciousness is nothing more than feeling.

Reich said that our willful blindness is most egregious when it
comes to the workings of our physical bodies and bioenergy. How right
he was. I have discussed why we dissociate when it comes to our bodies
throughout this book. But by following Reich's point and Groddeck's
words, we see that we dissociate perpetually, turning the light of
awareness this way and that as it suits us. Sometimes the beam of
awareness is narrowed and sometimes widened. Usually we flit between
extremes of focus. Nature demands we do so. The narrow beam can be
likened to the function of Freud's superego, while the wider beam is
that of the ego. The beam focuses inward by way of the right-brain,
and outward by way of the left-brain and frontal lobes. When we suffer
severe trauma, the right-brain's focus remains mostly internalized.
When we recover, the light turns back toward the world. This is why we
cannot afford to turn away from the body and nature. Nature works to
keep us from imploding as it were.

On the canvas of nature we are able to discern the mysteries of mind
but in a way that is more objective and impersonal. We also learn
secrets about ourselves that no amount of introspection can discern.
As said earlier, in its best context the solar world affords us the
chance of escaping the engulfing power of the terrible mother and
continuing the centroverting process she tried to subvert. It allows
us to masculinize ourselves so we are able to take over the reins of
our will and sanitize our way of seeing. It is this level of
personalism that threatens the terrible mother. Of course once we set
about freeing ourselves and taking charge of our will we do not feel
like having slaves below us. Our awareness of the specialness of
freedom ensures that we wish others to revere it also and be minutely
aware of its presence. More importantly we see that it is because of
freedom that we become who we are, attain what we desire, and form new
healthier conceptions of ourselves.

Centroversion persistently strives to ensure that the ego shall
not remain an organ of the unconscious, but shall become more and
more the representative of wholeness. That is to say, the ego fights
against the unconscious tendency that seeks to master it, and instead
of allowing itself to be possessed, learns to keep its independence
in relation to both inside and outside – Erich Neumann

In the womb you literally fought to be born. You had the choice to
give up, die, or be dragged out into the world to greet it
apathetically. If you are here reading this you can take it that your
body made the decision to struggle through your mother's birth canal.
Since that moment you have not only been struggling to remain alive,
but have been doing so because you are free to do so. In fact you are
free to do differently. And that is the heart of what it means
to be human and "transcendent" as ontologists term it.

Attaining the solar world also meant that time became an essential
component of life. We think in terms of past, presents and futures,
and of befores and afters. We certainly are the only beings able to
contemplate our death, and are free to enhance the quality of
our lives because of our realization of human finitude. As humans we
are free to enhance the quality of our lives. Upon making such
a decision we experience a radical change of attitude toward ourselves
and the world. We take, so to speak, the steering wheel more firmly in
our hands and begin noticing the landscape much more intently.

Instead of remaining at a hedonic level of being we rise up to a
pneumatic and contemplative level. We become more mindful of the world
and our place in it. Ultimately we are not so compromised and
overpowered by what other people think, say and do. We give them the freedom
to be whatever they wish to be, but take care not to narrow our way of
seeing because they refuse to widen theirs.

After deep contemplation on the matter of human freedom and
transcendence, we come to see that our sense of free will is really a
bit of an illusion, but not in a bad way. As humans we have definite
but necessary blind spots about our place in the cosmos. This is
obvious to neurologists who know that the frontal lobes only register
and process a small part of the information passing in and out of the
brain and body, maybe less than thirty percent of it all. Thus, we are
usually not conscious of the way our bodies effect our minds or the
way perception nucleates duality. We are not conscious of the way
nature's processes subtly move under our feet, as it were, and all
about us, or how we, like boats on waves subtly adjust to its
imperceptible nudges second by second. What we call free will is
simply an idea of autonomy born out of our paltry understanding of
nature's ways. When it comes to every other life-form around us, the
birds on the wing and microscopic organisms in the sea, we have less
of a problem acknowledging their utter dependence on the innumerable
natural forces pulsing around them. Only a sensitized way of seeing
gives us a true picture of the subtle interaction between nature's
consciousness and our own. And only when our insight has reached the
highest level do we realize that what we take for human freedom is a
bestowal of nature.

As Hegel and Schelling knew, our movement is nature's movement, and
the "dance" of interactivity in all its steps and swirls is the
movement of Geist or Spirit. In the human world we tend to represent
this rapport with nature by words such as God, but what we really
refer to is our communion with nature and the Logos, the latter being
the "order" that exists in everything and perfectly arranges and
coordinates the "furniture" of the universe. It gives us the freedom
to ignore or acknowledge its presence and action, a fact that is
remarkable in itself. As our bodies perfectly function without
conscious monitoring and attention, so does the universe go about its
business without humans being aware of it. So when we speak of free
will we take a bit of a liberty. We imply that we are separate from
nature's forces and ordinances. Most people live and die thinking
this. Most people prefer to think of a God dwelling somewhere outside
the known universe, positing him as the first cause of everything
including time. But we now know how such beliefs came about.

Psychoanalysis starts from the notion that a child is born in a
state akin to madness in which it follows only the pleasure principle
and adapts itself to reality and the principle of reality only under
pressure of the unpleasantness coming to it from the environment.
This psychoanalytic conception of the development of the sense of
reality should be replaced by another more in keeping with the facts
of ethnology. No more than the animal does the child enter the world
as a tabula rasa; rather, it has at its disposal a system of
unconscious, instinctive and archetypal modes of reaction which are
released by its environment and are attuned to it – Erich
Neumann

The hedonic, non-contemplative, unheroic man basically regards the
universe as a mechanism and foreign substance. He is indifferent to
his relationship with nature because he is convinced that nature is
indifferent toward him. On the surface this attitude can appear
correct. But as said, the more we become conscious of what nature
actually is and does, the less acceptable such a stance becomes. To
begin recognizing one's intimate connection with nature one is bound
to vacate the city. As long as we are deafened by the cacophony around
us, of people and things, we will not be able to sensitively register
the subtly instructing ways of nature. City life is, in this sense, a
form of psychic and physical entrapment. What we have access to, and
plug into, is not nature but the collective consciousness of the
Crowd. As a result we become expertly trained in the means of avoiding
reality. Since malignant types dominate the man-made world, we must
encounter, negotiate and eventually embody their perverse way
of seeing. These types are probably to be found in our own families
and among our closest associates. We work and play with them, compete
against them, and even marry them. In many cases we were born from
them. The chances of us positively affecting these types is extremely
low, whereas we are very susceptible to their defiling influence. As I
said, it is their world we live in. But it is our universe. And
our relationship with the natural world of entities and beings carries
on whether we care to acknowledge it or not. Nature never divorces us.
It is we who, thanks to the influence of pathological types, divorce
and run from it.

Lack of knowledge about the evolution of the organic from the
"inorganic," coupled with misleading myths about life coming "into"
this world from somewhere "outside," has made it difficult for us to
see that the biosphere arises, or goes with, a certain degree of
geological and astronomical evolution, as Douglas E. Harding has
pointed out, we tend to think of this planet as a life-infested rock,
which is as absurd as thinking the body as a cell-infested skeleton.
Surely, all forms of life, including man, must be understood as
"symptoms" of the earth, the solar system and the galaxy – in
which case we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is
intelligent – Alan Watts (The Book)

The id is that very proto-human psychic core that our evolution
has spent millions of years molding to fit the planetary environment.
Its seeming unruliness deserves a deeper understanding, if only
because it grows from a long evolutionary history. In the course of
that history its dominant characteristics must have been selected for
some good reason – Theodore Roszak (Voice of the Earth)

...the id conserves from its long maturing process...our
treasury of ecological intelligence. Its intractability stems from
its deeply ingrained resistance to all social forms that endanger the
harmony of the human and the natural; its untamed "selfishness"
represents a bond between psyche and cosmos whose distant origins
reach back to the initial conditions of the Big Bang – ibid

As Roszak says, nature has a purpose and reason for what it
brings forth. According to Friedrich von Schelling, humans are that
reason. Our thinking and doing are the intention of nature. However
because nature's origin and process predates humanity's existence, and
because most of nature's forces are, like those of our bodies,
extremely subtle, we harbor all sorts of nonsensical ideas about
nature and humanity's place in the universe. We easily entertain the
most preposterous ideas, while simple rational ones are cast aside. We
envision a creator existing outside the visible universe but resist
attributing God's supposed creative power to nature itself. Why?
Because our gods are anthropomorphic or human in shape and form. And
for malignant types, as we have seen, they must be. However, for the
person reconnected with Logos, no such self-deception is necessary.

The ways of nature are so marvelously intricate and spectacular
that thoughts need not dwell on the possibility of supersensible
realms. All that one wants and needs is here before one's eyes and
fingertips, to be engaged with purely and reverently. The more
sensitive our approach the more sensitively we are greeted and
informed. It is a communion that does not act on intellect alone but
on all levels of being simultaneously. Long exposure to nature's
instruction serves to awaken what lies embalmed within. That is, we
are able to resurrect repressed feelings of what it was like to come
into the world and be abused from the off, to have our rights and
sovereignty defiled and peace disturbed, and to be forced to identify
with the objects of our legitimate distaste and hate. Those who sought
to undermine our will were free to do so. But those of us who seek to
reestablish our sovereignty are also free to do so. Freedom is not the
culprit, but the savior of humanity. One day we will remember to build
an altar to it, and shudder at what we would be if freedom ceased
making an appearance.

Breaking free of entrapment in words and definitions is achieved
when one becomes an Artist. When one becomes a serious dedicated
painter, poet, musician, potter, sculptor, calligrapher or performer,
one shifts the center of psychic gravity from the frontal cortex back
to the right-brain and lower centers of the old brain. And this is
correct for those who wish to deal with deeply repressed memories and
traumas. It is also the means whereby we enter into deeper
communication with the natural order. This is because, as said, it is
by way of images or symbols that the Logos (nature) informs and
instructs consciousness. This was the case in the womb, and at every
subsequent stage of development. The eclipsing of the flow of Logos
impaired psychic development in the womb and also accounts for why the
world is full of symbolically illiterate people.

The Artist is the exception. He works not with words but with symbols,
since this is the manner in which the cosmos or universal order
speaks. The Artist understands that meaningfulness is not merely to be
attributed to the human world alone. It is not something he himself
alone experiences or that others around him experience. Meaning is an
inherent component of the world in which humans exist. When we say
"...this has meaning," we imply that meaning is not confined to particular
situations or beings. When life becomes meaningless it is not the
world that loses meaning, but we who do so.

Meaninglessness is a form of emptiness. So we ask what is emptiness?
How does it come about? Do we feel empty because we try to fill
ourselves without something that won't reduce in magnitude to fit our
narrow confines? This is certainly what happens when we fail to
realize what the Artist knows. He knows that when symbolic awareness
awakens one transcends the limits of ego-life. Unlike the common
"intellectual," one is not knowing more in order to fill a
bucket, but experiencing more in order to have deeper understanding
about oneself. And this is a process that has no ending. Endings and
final rewards are something craved by malignant types unable to draw
on deeper resources of bioenergy. Addicted to the approval and acclaim
of others, their visions and achievements must be short-termed. Their
relatively short attention spans and limited life-force is not
sufficient to attain the creative heights that fully express the
Imperial Self.

And so for malignant types there is always the threat of
"creative block" and inner emptiness. The Artist is never banjaxed in
this way because he does not hold onto the symbolically transmitted
gnosis that flows through his body and mind. He lets it go, and waits
for the next lesson, as it were. He does not violate the law of
freedom, and because of his integrity in this regard he remains free
of mental and physical control.

When you understand that other powers direct what you are
doing, there is no pride when the world applauds you, and no shame
when the world scorns you – Leonard Cohen

I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring
forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I
am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity – Igor
Stravinsky

The Artist alone is able to improve himself because his mirror
is the cosmos itself. By studying and marveling the ways of the living
universe he knows all too well where he is mentally and emotionally
blocked or lacking. With nature as his foremost instructor he ascends
to greater heights of Self-awareness and understanding. With humankind
as his instructor he succeeds only in falling into lockstep with those
psychically crippled and blind. His work serves only to reinforce the
pathogenic society which enslaves him.

Don't be an art critic, but paint, there lies salvation
– Paul Cezanne

Unlike the majority of humans, the Artist is not wholly victimized by
psychological ambivalence. He does not say one thing and feel another.
He does not pretend he loves what he subconsciously despises. He may
experience ambivalence but does so consciously rather than
unconsciously. He may not intellectually understand what is happening,
but he works with feelings and captures the interplay of his
thoughts and emotions in his artwork. His personal creations represent
every temperament and mood. In his symphony there are slow dirges,
jaunty scherzandos and everything between. His work is therapeutic and
cathartic, both for himself and his audience. As long as he gives his
muse plenty of room to come forth and express itself, it will allow
him the freedom to learn the symbolic language and change the world
the right way.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the
artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the
world – Edward Hopper

The Artist works away and puts together his canvases, poems, plays and
songs. All the while he realizes that his signature below is the mark
of his ego rather than his Self. As a Self he is secure in his
insecurity, that is, he is aware of nature's inexorable power. He
knows that for all our hubris, nature can in a single hour obliterate
the works of every human who has ever lived. Does this make him
tremble or smile? Does he become neurotic or wise? If he is wise he
continues doing what he does but in a completely different way
than his cowering fellows. He knows that every stroke he paints and
every word he writes can be wiped out forever by the very force which
inspires his mind and heart. He is not petrified by this knowledge,
just more present and grateful about the work he does. His work is not
marred by neurotically fearful thoughts but enhanced by the inclusion
of his expressions of gratitude. If he is incensed, it is not because
of nature's destructive powers but humankind's penchant for mindless
forgetfulness and destructiveness. This is what he finds truly
terrifying. It is what his work seeks to correct.

To be an artist is to believe in life – Henry Moore

As the Artist ascends to higher levels of Self-awareness he
realizes that destruction is but one form in which nature expresses
itself. It is also a legitimate principle of the psyche, a necessary
and healthy means by which we express ourselves from time to time.
Picasso said that art was the means by which we clean off from our
being the dust of the world. He was right. But high art does more than
blow away some dust. It puts us directly in touch with the Logos. And
part of the operation of the Logos involves destruction. That which is
false or unjust must not be left to stand. It must be destroyed and
replaced with something more rational. The person who contemplates
their mortality might be inclined to live more vividly. Similarly the
Artist who contemplates the fragility of existence has a heightened
sensitivity to the world within and the world without. Time becomes
his teacher and friend. Under its instruction he sets about preserving
what his forebears created, all that is good and pure, and at the same
time works with the good of tomorrow's generations in mind. He becomes
nature's agent, and in this capacity he is not paralyzed with fear
over his finitude or the planet's fate. He takes care of the work at
hand and from it learns what is of true importance and value. Length
of days is unimportant because his concern is solely on the vital
symbolic flow between himself and nature. As far as he is concerned,
the termination of this communion is the end of the world.

Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God
– Rembrandt

CHAPTER TWELVE

Many a False Path

Deprivation of parental attention, guidance, and compassionate
concern can be as devastating to a child as physical abuse...The
extensive empirical research inspired by Attachment Theory indicates
that not having caretakers emotionally available impedes the security
and well-being necessary for a child's constructive sense of personal
identity – Carl Goldberg

Most people believe life is meaningful because we make it so. That is,
we are the ones projecting meaning onto experiences. This is certainly
the case from a practical perspective, but we rarely comprehend what
is happening to make experiences meaningful.

When we subjectively decide that an experience means something to us,
we do so without realizing that every experience has meaning whether
we believe it or not. A deeper law is that in order to experience
meaning we must inhabit and engage a world that is already meaningful,
or as said in the previous chapter, purposeful.

Because of this inherent meaningfulness in the universe we get to have
subjective experiences of meaning. We then begin a process of
self-deception and fool ourselves into thinking that meaning is of
human design and invention. What this means is that in pathological
cases, when a man or women loses a sense of meaningfulness in regards
their life, meaning is not lost, only eclipsed. We might even hear
ourselves say "...I was lost, but found meaning again." That's right,
I found it again because it is there all the time, outside me.
I possess the switch which slides the doors shut between myself and
meaningfulness, but the latter is not strictly and only an attribute
of my consciousness. It infuses everything, and I participate
in it. When and if that participation weakens or ends, my life is
reduced to ashes. Therefore if I want to fill my life with meaning, I
must stay alert and work it. I must enhance my awareness and
receptivity not only of what goes on within me, but of the world
without. This task is made more difficult if I am weighed down by
inner pangs of pain from childhood trauma. It is hindered by my
failure to find out more about the psyche. Then I say, wait a minute!
If I investigate the mysteries of mind, am I not using a mind to do
so? If I explore consciousness, am I not doing so by way of
consciousness? And is this not a paradox?

The answer to the problem is that there are two kinds of "thought"
operating simultaneously. There is consciousness and awareness.
Consciousness we all have and know about. It functions once we wake in
the morning and helps us negotiate the world as subjects. It arises
due to the many complex functions of our body and three brains.
Awareness, on the other hand, is a supervening form of cognition by
which we are able to monitor or judge what consciousness is doing.
Consciousness is in a mood while awareness notes the kind of mood
experienced. There are, then, two voices within our heads. However,
discerning which is which is complicated by the existence of the
superego's voice. As we said, the superego is the moral center of the
ego whereas conscience speaks from a deeper core. Conscience is akin
to the awareness we are speaking about here.

So even though in infancy the voice of our Imperial Self was
eclipsed and drowned by the world's racket, it does not disappear. The
quieter we are the louder its voice sounds. Consciousness can go
wrong, as it often does, but it is our awareness that knows something
is wrong and which seeks to put it right. In other words consciousness
is unable to change itself, and must rely on the more flexible and
capable awareness to effect change and bring about the reintegration
and upgrading of all working parts. Awareness is therefore the
emanation of the centroverting Logos as it manifests in the solar
world. Its action is quiet but highly active and effective.

The awareness we enjoy came about after we attained the solar
phase of development. We became fully Self-aware as we became
world-aware. Awareness is therefore our connection with nature. It is
nature's bestowal. To abstract from the natural world, from the
universe, is not to enhance awareness but to dull and even suspend it.

The traditions that insist we must ascetically deny body and world
sell us techniques of self-hypnosis, not enlightenment. And we
certainly do not need more self-hypnosis. We are already experts at
it. We repress the Shadow Self and, as a result, walk around in a
psychically dissociated state. What we need is enhanced awareness and
sensitivity. And since this faculty is inculcated by way of the world,
we enhance awareness by deepening our connection with the world, not
removing consciousness and awareness from it. This entails being
phenomenologically present. It means Being in the World, as the
great Martin Heidegger termed it. He knew that it takes a world to
bring anything to being, and that we do not and never have
existed and functioned within the world as subjects in relation to
objects.

The world is not separate from the person beholding and moving
in it. This traditional Cartesian view is utterly misbegotten. Like
Materialism, it is the symptom of our mechanistic relationship with
our own being, the domination of the left-brain and suppression of
legitimate feeling.

My question throughout this book is why man and world are
regarded as separate realities? Why is awareness confused with
consciousness? Why is the role of nature largely ignored and
misunderstood? Why is the body's intelligence abnegated in favor of
the mind?

As we have seen, these problems have their roots in the original
psychic fragmentation and despoliation experienced in the womb and
thereafter. The trauma we experienced was not merely emotional but physical.
Our chemical balance was disrupted and altered. Our nerves were shot
through with anxiety. Our blood pressure and heart-rate were
disturbed. Our frontal lobes were flooded and bypassed. Our
neurotransmitters were hyperactivated and our neurons killed off in
their thousands. Consequently, the body of the terrible mother was
transformed into an object of hatred and deemed a threat to life.
Eventually, after we became Self-aware, around the age of two, we
inherited a subconscious antipathy to our own bodies. This
dislike of the body is often compensated for after the onset of
secondary narcissism, which in turn gives rise to exhibitionism and
obsession with the body's physical appearance.

This syndrome has reached pandemic proportions in western
societies, and for good reason. It is an obvious symptom of underlying
body- and self-hate. But the penchant for autophobia is, as we now
know, rooted in our legitimate revulsion at the body of our terrible
mother. Ironically, it is this antipathy that gives rise to the
secondary compensatory centroversion which propels us upward toward
the solar world, but which can also undermine healthy body-mind
synergy. Remember that the upward ascent to the solar world is in part
a means of escape. Our Will to Meaning seeks expression, which only
happens when it frees itself from the Stygian abyss of the terrible
mother.

Problematically, it is this revulsion that also underlies our
denigration of "Mother Nature." Our capacity for bonding with the
natural order is inhibited by memories of our condition in the womb
and inhuman treatment at the hands of the terrible mother after birth.
This accounts for the reason why phobias exist and why we tend to be
suspicious of and threatened by natural phenomena.

As children we lay scared stiff of the dark, the wind's howl,
nodding trees and heaving sea. We were terrified of insects and
certain animals, and couldn't wait until the "bad" weather passed so
we could head out in the sun to play. Our extroversion and
hyperactivity also serves as a way to escape the memory of uterine
lassitude and anxiety. We are, as Heidegger noted, future-oriented
beings. Everything we do now has a purpose based on an idea of what we
want to achieve and be tomorrow. Everything done in the present is for
the sake of our vision of the future. The present is the time-space in
which we build our futures. The past is where we first conceived of
what we want to be tomorrow. The past is the time before we achieve
our objectives, and the future is the time when we achieve them.

The important question is why we want to become this or that in the
future. What motivates our desire to be other than we are? Again, the
answer is to be found in our early psychic dislocation. The
traumatized child is not concerned with the way he does things, only
the end result. In fact he is generally obsessed with achievement. The
healthy child is okay as he is. His pace is therefore slower. He pays
attention to the way he does things, and raises children who
are aware on this level. He and they are not hurrying toward the
future just for the sake of hurrying, or for the sake of attaining a
preposterous pseudo self-image of specialness, superiority and
control.

...the destructive personality begins in childhood as a state
of extreme vulnerability to mistreatment by early caretakers,
proceeds to feelings of impacted self-hatred and then to
self-protection by an indifference to other people, followed by
attempts to feel better about one's self by acting as if one is a
superior person, and finally to a transformation of the shamed
person's self-contemptuous personality to that of perpetrator of
outrage against others in order to demonstrate one's superiority
– Carl Goldberg

Neumann regards this hasty attempt to overcome the challenges of the
solar world and achieve an image of success as the outcome of our
identification with the solar father. But as already noted, the solar
world is dominated by malignant male and female types. Healthy
masculinized types are less in number and must struggle for every
smidgen of success they achieve. We have also seen that in most cases
society works as the terrible mother's ally. This is especially the
case in the formation of the ego-ideal and superego.

What chance then does a traumatized child have of opening the doors of
awareness to a deeper connectivity with nature? How does he become
authentically heroic? Neumann perceptively points out that
archetypally speaking we bear within ourselves not one but two
images of the father. He writes:

...mythology represents the hero as having two fathers: a
personal father who does not count or is the father of the carnal
lower man, of the mortal part; and a heavenly father who is the
father of the heroic part, of the higher man, who is "extraordinary"
and immortal – Erich Neumann

What does this mean? Perhaps we can agree that the malignant
father – Freud's totemic father – who supposedly stands as
the world-builder and conqueror, is Neumann's lower man. In this case
the higher "extraordinary" man is one's own Imperial Self or Animus
which forms the true foundation of consciousness. It is not fully
realized or made manifest until one passes through the challenges of
the lunar and solar worlds and demolishes the false idols
impersonating the Imperial Self. This is the ascent and conflict
experienced by the ego or child-hero. The superego counsels one
strategy and campaign of attack, but its objective is not the
restoration of the Imperial Self. This is because the superego has
been formed by the will of the terrible mother as well as by society.
The conscience suggests alternative approaches which do restore the
Imperial Self to its rightful place inwardly and outwardly. As I said,
quietening the racket of the frontal lobes and the world enables us to
discern the voice and guidance of conscience. Its counsel is always
consistent with the natural order, and never violates it. It always
sets us on the right path. The counsel of the superego adjusts us to
the social world, and often flies in the face of the natural order and
true will. Hence the state of the world.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Origin of the Death Instinct

Most of the symptoms that are given by mainstream psychologists
and psychiatrists for people are themselves but side-effects of
deeper psychic issues. So when we hear terms like "Depression" or
"Split-Personality" or "Obsessive-Compulsive" etc., we think that
this explains something, when it only partially diagnoses the
situation. A greater existential condition exists below these
comfortably vague technical phrases – Erich Fromm

Do we mourn for ourselves after we realize how our identity was
molested by childhood abuse and prenatal violence? Of course not.

We do not mourn for ourselves because we dissociated from the
pain we experienced before and up to the Oedipal stages. We do not
mourn because even if we are half-aware of the assault that took place
on our being, we are programmed by the superego to never attribute
blame where it is due. It is not "right" to accuse and penalize a
parent. That's the fourth commandment obeyed by one and all,
especially by those who have suffered most under parental tyranny.

Better to drown in subconscious guilt over something we
supposedly did as infants to deserve the torrent of abuse, neglect or
ridicule. We do not mourn because we convince ourselves that other
people have suffered trauma as well as ourselves, and they don't lose
their rag over it. It is antisocial to break windows and steal, but
also antisocial to express deep-set feelings about one's traumatic
upbringing. We do not mourn because the world is full of distractions
and we mustn't live in the past. We get on with our play, studies,
labor and marriages without dwelling on crimes perpetrated before we
were wholly Self-aware. And our self-deception might work well except
for the more truthful dynamics of our bodies and brains.

Despite the dissociation caused by the frontal cortex and
superego, and prohibitions against deep feeling levied by society, our
bodies and minds find ways of exorcising the memory of trauma. This
process brings about moodiness, physical illness, mental incompetence,
moral deviance and even psychic derangement. However, as a few
perceptive thinkers noted, our physical and psychological discomfiture
occasionally spurs us to ask deeper questions about the health of the
world. Dealing with personal sickness can awaken a desire to cure the
greater problems we see around us. It can lead us to realize the
underlying and unseen connections that exist between personal crises
and those suffered by humankind as a whole.

At the root of personal trauma lies the memory of ancestral
trauma which first dislocated our forebears from the order of nature.
We have repressed these racial memories, thereby creating the
so-called "unconscious." After dividing our minds so, we are able to
also repress memories of subsequent unpleasant experiences into the
same dark dungeon. It is a travesty that perpetually occurs personally
and socially. History, therefore, not only marks the trail of
humankind as conscious beings deliberately forming and attaining
desired goals, but of humankind as dissociated and self-divided. But
what does it matter, we retort. Whether one person or a million people
suffered past trauma, we must resolve and get on with what we are
doing. Productivity must be of an external type, and art must express
what is happening socially and politically. By improving social
conditions we abolish suffering of all kinds. It is poverty that
causes children to be harmed and traumatized. It is material lack and
other legitimate frustrations that forces parents to punish or neglect
their children. And no doubt this is true to an extent. But as I show
throughout this book, the seeds of violence, both domestic and social,
lie in the ancient past and our penchant for repressing race-memories
of ancient cataclysm.

A vicious cycle has thereby been set in motion. Our personal
consciousness grows out of and sits over collectively repressed
memories of ancient trauma, and yet our individually experienced
trauma stirs the earlier to life. The means by which we escape memory
of one becomes the means by which we awaken memory of the other. As
far as our consciousness is concerned, to disown one is to attract the
other. The solution? As a result of our profoundly dissociated state
we seek refuge in our new, less disagreeable surrounds, and take
comfort as docile members of the Crowd.

...the sick individual finds himself at home with all other
similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind
of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not
experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic
person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same
deformation – Erich Fromm

Yes, we conform to the norms and standards of the crowd and
embody its values. These values in turn shape our ego-ideal or image
of ourselves. We are now able to judge other people in the world
around us. We become active members of the crowd and have no problem
penalizing and silencing anyone who contradicts the edicts of the
many. Such individualists are ostracized and vilified.

This process of suppression is the direct cause of our own acts of repression.
It is the symptom of our identification with the malignant uroboric
father. As authoritarian personality types we soon learn to cover up
our sado-masochism with smiles and talk of liberty and justice for
all. We set about looking and acting like ordinary well-adjusted
people absorbed in the work of finding the right partners and starting
families. As we go about this business we have no idea that we are
merely setting up situations where we get to experience and exorcise
our own childhood trauma. What is it like to be master? What is it
like to be in control over every biological and psychological activity
of a dependent? What is it like to be exclusively needed and relied
upon for weeks, months and years? What is it like to lord it over a
submissive, dependent human being? And so on. This and more
constitutes overt adultism, a cycle of dysfunction in which
everyone is involved, parents, children and society alike. The
superego and ego-ideal are the psychic machinery keeping the cycle
going, and society's parameters the external means by which this
particular form of exploitation is maintained and furthered in the
vast majority of traditional societies and homes. In short, the
necrophilous home and society become the shelter for selfless
men and women who will, as Jung said, do anything no matter how absurd
than face the condition of their souls.

Is there a way of breaking the cycle of dysfunction? Yes, there is. As
I said at the outset, the cycle begins and ends with the mother. We
have shown that each stereotypical mother, like the archetypal mother,
is dual aspected. She can be either a caring dragon mother or terrible
dragon mother. Most Jungians believe it is her physical capacity as a
breast-feeder and nurturer that determines her image. However, as I
show, a woman is already so defined before she conceives. Her
relationship with her own dragon mother decides whether she becomes a
malignant or non-malignant type. Before she conceives she may already
be a feminized or terrible female, full of subconscious self-hate. In
this case it is her own disposition and intent that makes her a
terrible dragon mother. After she conceives it is her often
self-depreciating self-conversation which interferes with the
psychosomatic development of her fetus and infant. This act
constitutes a violation of her infant's Self-image which uses the
mother's body and consciousness as a kind of canvas or sounding board.
The infant has no way of knowing what kind of neurotic content comes
back along the signal he sends out, and how his authentic Self-image
– forged by the Will to Meaning (Logos) – is warped by it.

The person tied to mother by malignant incestuous bonds remains
narcissistic, cold, unresponsive; he is drawn to her as iron is drawn
to a magnet; she is the ocean in which he wants to drown, the ground
in which he wants to be buried...if there is no way of being related
to mother or her substitute by warm, enjoyable bonds, the relatedness
to her and to the whole world must become one of final union with
death – Erich Fromm

Fromm was also aware of the self-deception of mothers who
convince themselves and everyone else around that their intentions are
wholesome and true. He writes:

If she is herself a cold, rejecting, necrophilous person, she
would make it difficult for the infant to develop a warm,
affectionate relationship to her...It is sometimes also difficult to
discern the fundamental coldness of the mother toward the child when
it is overlaid by the conventional features of a sweet and loving
mother

A child's refuge from this barrage of incestuous necrophilous energy
is lack of feeling. He or she decides to feel nothing of what
happens to them, and to ignore the hypocrisy, insincerity,
double-standards, immaturity and violence typical of its parents.
Eventually the child also suppresses its legitimate feelings of
hostility and anger toward its parents. It is this act which sets the
foundation of the moral center or superego. It is this act that
coerces a child to fall into lockstep with the wishes of the parents.
This conformity sets the foundation of the ego-ideal or image of
oneself. If rewards are forthcoming for this act of submission, as
they often are, the child becomes addicted to winning them and
maintaining his persona or pseudo-self. He becomes a willing part of a
society made up of people in a similar existential mess as himself.
Collectively, types such as this throw up authority figures to lead
them and reinforce the status quo physically and psychologically. A
chosen leader is bound to be not only an authoritarian type but a
malignant type as I define it. He (or she) is not a champion of
Self-determination and freedom. But the morbid image he presents of
these virtues is wholeheartedly accepted by the vast majority of his
docile followers. Ironically the most devious among society's leaders
galvanize their power by exciting subconscious memories of ancestral
and personal trauma. They know what the ordinary person is never
supposed to know, that so much of what constitutes their life is not a
longing for freedom but a desire to be free of freedom. The docile
type achieves their desired end by viewing their role in terms of the
religion or class to which they belong, the family background from
which they come and the socially-approved political ideas they
espouse. For them freedom lies not in authentic Self-expression, but
the act of conforming to the consensus trance.

The analyst finds many patients incapable of criticizing their
parents at all; others, who, while criticizing their parents in some
respects, stop short of criticizing them with regard to those
qualities they themselves have suffered from; still others feel
guilty and anxious when they express pertinent criticism or rage
against one of their parents – Erich Fromm

Not only does the child repress legitimate feelings of antipathy
toward its parents, it also dissociates from its need for care. For
all its cries the child did not succeed in receiving parental approval
and care. Therefore at a given point its needs and cries cease. The
natural is suppressed and should such a desire for care arise later
toward people outside the family unit, it is also curtailed and
disowned. The child says silently to itself "...If my parents couldn't
love me then who else will?" The child grows to adulthood, entering
and exiting relationships with this mantra playing endlessly in his
mind. It never occurs to him that he has the freedom to cultivate
Self-love and in that state move to bond with others in the world. He
never says to himself "...Okay, I don't need your care after all,
because I love myself." And the Self-love we are talking about is not
the same as the self-approbation characteristic of malignant
narcissists. The latter is a façade brought about by way of the
superego and ego-ideal. It is a condition of self-worth while one
operates as a pseudo-self. It is not a true expression of the
conscience and Imperial Self. However, in a world of similarly
self-deceived sado-masochistic people it works just fine.

The annihilation of the individual self and the attempt to
overcome thereby the unbearable feeling of powerlessness are only one
side of the masochistic striving. The other side is the attempt to
become a part of a bigger and more powerful whole outside of oneself,
to submerge and participate in it. This power can be a person, an
institution, God, the nation, conscience, or a psychic compulsion
– Erich Fromm

Human destructiveness has been pondered by many astute thinkers.
Freud himself attempted to explain it by way of his Thanatos Theory.
He spoke of a "Death Instinct," but erroneously believed it was a
biological principle to be found in all sentient life-forms. Although
he had interesting things to say about humankind's penchant for
violence and destructiveness, he failed to see that it is the parental
and social settings in which a child grows up that cause
sado-masochistic tendencies and ultimately incline a person toward
habitually necrophilous behavior. The stagnancy of energy, lack of
interest in life and creativity, unproductiveness and mediocrity which
beset so many people is not the consequence of their genetic and
biological programming but of parental and social conditioning. The
great Otto Rank acknowledged this and correctly rectified Freud's
Thanatos concept. He, like several humanist and existential
philosophers and psychologists who came later, realized that our Death
Instinct or drive manifests itself in the very repression addressed
throughout this book. Repression is a form of violence against the
Self. Rank and his followers also realized that man's blind conformity
to social norms and lack of differentiation from crowd-consciousness
also serves to deaden creativity and productivity. They understood
that the robotic organization man, behind his cubicle or on his
cell-phone, slaving for some faceless corporation, fully embodies the
Death Instinct.

Anna Freud (1895-1982) updated her
father's ideas and correctly presented the broken society as the
origin of pathology. She understood that the individual's existential
problems lie in the constitution of his superego and ego-ideal rather
than of his id or unconscious.

Reich's armoring is also a manifestation of the Thanatos
principle. Our identification with the malignant father-figure means
living up to an inflated image of masculinity which in turn warps the
natural feminine energy within us. In other words the hyperactivity of
the frontal lobes and sympathetic system inhibits the parasympathetic
system that not only quietens anxiety and hypertension but attracts us
to serene and restful natural locations. When this system is banjaxed
it cannot prevent us from becoming addicted to hyper-extroverted
activity in sterile urban settings. It cannot countermand the violent
impulses which manifest in dangerous sports, violent video-games,
business competitiveness, gang-related crime and ultimately war.

As I show throughout this book, violence of all kinds is not
confined to the world of men, and the idea that this is the case is
absolutely spurious and wrongheaded. I show that violent men are, for
the most part, born and raised by violent women:

That male aggression is basically different from
destructiveness or cruelty is confirmed by the fact that there is no
evidence whatsoever that would lead to the assumption that women are
less destructive or cruel than men – Erich Fromm

Sad to say, as things stand, corrupt and destructive women are
rarely ever penalized and punished. Indeed, for the most part, men
remained incapable of acknowledging the criminal history of womankind.
Their irrational deification of women renders them incapable of
setting things aright. They prefer being emotionally crippled and
sexually enthralled by every seductive woman crossing their paths. As
I have stressed many times, it is for women to step up to the plate
and set things aright.

Regrettably, women's interest in their own psychology is a very
recent phenomenon. It dates to about the 1930s, and has progressed at
a snail's pace ever since. This is most revealing, although the
reasons should now be obvious. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it
is women who must gain greater insight into their psyches. They must
accept that their understanding and behavior determines social and
personal evolution.

A terrible mother is on some level aware of her crimes against
her child. She may not feel guilt or shame over her actions, but she
knows that her child probably subconsciously despises her, body and
soul. She knows her child harbors considerable anger over what has
happened to him at her hands. She knows that legitimate emotions boil
beneath the surface, leading to her child's autism, insecurity,
petulance, tantrums, anxiety, marital crises, alcoholism, moodswings,
phobias, depression, delinquency and criminality. Rather than have
these underlying emotions erupt toward her, she prefers they are
expatiated in other ways. And so we see why most women have been so
loath to rise up against world wars and other genocides that have
occurred on this planet throughout the centuries. The malignant female
does not hanker to escape city life or get back to nature. She makes
do with a goldfish, caged cockatiel or cat. She is not interested in
letting her inner violence be broadcast to the world, and so she
prefers to avoid expressing political ideas, although she is quick to
associate herself with popular movements that insist on conformity and
suppression of individuality.

As I point out in my article Malignant Feminization and the
Modern World, toxic women are hellbent on seeing societies regress to
lunar and autistic levels. We see the evidence for this everywhere we
look today.

Women of this kind fill the churches, schools, colleges and
universities. They make up the bulk of social workers and nurses, and
are now able to rise to more exalted and powerful positions in
corporate and political bureaucracies. They are no longer an unseen
force behind the male-dominated thrones of the world. However, we are
wrong to expect positive changes in the state of the world because of
their presence. Things will either remain as they are or get steadily
worse. This is because the main role of malignant women is still birth
and child-rearing. The sociopolitical forces that women play a
dominant role creating, work on the children they rear. Malignant
women are therefore disingenuous if and when they blame "society" for
maladjusting the children they give birth to. They habitually and
assiduously avoid addressing their own responsibility in the process
of turning their offspring into dehumanized bureaucratic adults.
Sadly, there is no reason why this situation should change any time
soon. Indeed, it is a problem that is bound to remain at the bottom of
the world's to-do list. The more women in power, the more we are
likely to see every other conceivable cause given priority over the
problem of the female psyche.

I have chalked out the ways in which a malignant mother undermines her
child's sovereignty, but must emphasize at this point that by breaking
the spirit of her child, and by leaving him no option but to submit to
her will, she condemns him to identify with the object of his
hate.

This identification becomes the seed of many pathological syndromes
and complexes. It sets him up as a docile body, bowing before every
imperious authority telling him what do and believe. By crushing his
capacity for Self-expression and forcing him to numb himself to
legitimate feelings, he is condemned to express himself
passive-aggressively. His violence, although for the most part
introjected, rises to the surface now and then. He half wants it to
since it is the only time he actually feels at all.

His identification with the terrible mother also makes him
psychologically necrophilious. This is used by his equally
necrophilious political leaders who know he's only too willing to
sacrifice himself for their "holy causes," of which there is no end.
He is only too eager to sign up, suit up, and express his anger on the
field of battle. He's eager to do it at the local pub or in front of
the big screen TV during the game. He orders his wife about, and yells
at the kids. If he is fortunate he gets to harass poor subordinates at
work, or on the football field, school yard or parade ground. He
certainly hungers to harass anyone who impedes or contradicts the
flawless leaders he has put in place. They know they can call on him
anytime to annihilate enemies in far off lands. He has learned how to
destroy what he thinks is about to crush him.

None of this violence and destructiveness is hard to understand.
If the company of a gang or crusading thugocracy has replaced his
troublesome bond with his terrible mother, his attitude toward his
participation with them is as ambivalent as it is with her and her
symbols. Power replaces love and punishment is preferred over
rejection. He is forever tossed between repulsion and attraction,
identification and antipathy. If an enemy challenges the group with
which he has identified, they are despised and soon annihilated. If
members within the group vilify him for some reason, he seeks their
downfall. If his chosen sect offers him an inflated mother-image to
venerate, he is overjoyed. Now he can carry the images of Mother Mary
or the Lady of Guadalupe in his heart, and ask them for the protection
and care denied by his earthly mother. If his sect repudiates and
renounces body and world, he is elated. He is now able to condemn the
world as evil. Nature and the world are to blame for his sorrows, not
his parents.

Even if he does find his parents wanting, he does his duty and
forgives them. As said, his identification prevents him seeing the
reasons for his inner discombobulation, low self-esteem and emotional
insecurity.

After all, he says, who is he to cast a stone? His parents are
well-liked and active in the community. They are always showering
nephews and nieces with gifts, praise and advice. Sure they made
mistakes here and there, but they are made of the same humble stuff as
everyone else. Blame poverty and oppressive social forces.

And if I want, he says, I can replace my imperfect parents by
the Guru or God.

And who are we to judge? If his sect offers him techniques for
self-hypnosis by which he can not only enter a sublime trance but
attain some chimera of enlightenment described by the sect's boss hog,
he is ecstatic. If his sect mortifies the flesh, he sets about
mortifying his flesh. He'll whip himself until he bleeds because this
is, after all, the physical outplaying of what he psychically suffered
during preconscious periods of development. If his fellows believe
that attaining enlightenment entails a life of selfless labor in the
name of God, he willingly signs on, picks up his trowel and does as he
is expected to do, taking great pride in the bricks he makes and sets
in place to form the rotten hierarchy under which he and others
altruistically slave. And if his fellows believe that only by forcibly
converting or massacring their enemies will they win their places
beside God, he sets about sharpening his sword or loading his cannon.

This type of man subconsciously believes he is re-establishing
the lost relationship with his terrible mother. In any case the only
"peace" he finds is in the anticlimactic exhaustion that follows his
competitive, violent exertions. But this brief repose in the feminine
bower does not feel warm and nurturing, but cold and empty. That is
why he never remains in the state for long. His fate lies elsewhere.
He is the world-builder plagued by worry about how limited his time is
to achieve his many goals. As a result of this anxiety about time, he
decides to team up with other malignant types in order to hasten the
process of getting things done. He unites his will with that of like
minds and finds that he now has the might and right to forge ahead
toward his objectives, be they material or intellectual. Again, we see
how the endemic collectivism of the solar world comes about.

Historically, the perpetrators of evil in all its forms have had
little to deter their antisocial exploits. Critics of society, like
psychologists, are few and their disciplines relatively new. They are
bound to study humans by way of what they do in the world and the way
they conduct themselves in relationships. But during the centuries
before Freud and the advent of psychological analysis and insight,
evil people acted despicably without needing to ponder the underlying
causes for their deeds. Indeed evil people today often have little
capacity for Self-observation and empathy.

The point is that we now do know how to monitor and analyze our
personal behavior, as well as understand the motives behind what other
people think and do. This knowledge and ability has profound relevance
for the future of humanity. As I mentioned in the Introduction, it is
essential that more people become psychologically aware and
contemplative. This does not mean they must change what they do on a
day-to-day basis. It means only that their way of doing things
changes. And that is a big step forward in itself.

As Immanuel Kant knew, if a person gets everything he or she
desires by the end of their lives, but came about it immorally, they
will not be able to experience authentic happiness. This holds even if
they were able to win the approval of their fellows. The immoral
person may be rich and secure externally, but they are divided within
their being. This is why, for thinkers such as Kant, morality is
vital. And we agree wholeheartedly with him. Living a moral life
does help one to find legitimate contentment. But there is no way of
living morally if our center of morality has been formed by a terrible
mother and the society which acts as her ally. Our identification with
her dictates and wishes causes a deep scission within ourselves. The
rift widens after we are born and forced to obey her commands. She
wields considerable power, and calls the father and representatives of
society to her side if she finds her control challenged. Only when she
senses that one's will is crushed and that there is no longer a
Self-defining, Self-motivated person before her, does she offer forth
what she takes for approval and care.

We see from this that our desire to live morally is compromised
by the relentless undermining of identity and will. And if happiness
is not to be found by way of moral activity, we seek it wherever we
can, finding it only spasmodically in fleeting sensual experiences. We
soon become addicted to our banal pastimes since only through them do
we find a measure of contentment. These shallow escapes are
increasingly endorsed and supplied by society, which has given rise to
an all-pervasive "entertainment" industry growing larger every day. As
we become increasingly addicted to this mode of stimulation we become
more and more will-less and compliant. And so another vicious cycle of
dysfunction is set in motion. We forsake lasting happiness for
momentary insubstantial euphoria, and eventually even the ersatz moral
center atrophies. Even the superego ceases functioning properly.
Conscience does not take its place, but remains occluded.

So what does happen? The whole of society decides to lower the
bar when it comes to establishing what is right and wrong. And that is
where we find ourselves today. More dishonesty, fraud and blame, more
entitlement and narcissism, more extroversion, superficiality,
deviance, perversion and mitigation for moral infraction; more civil
unrest and skyrocketing levels of microagression and heinous crime.

Individuals who have had birth trauma and later emotional
deprivation both were found to be six times as prone to commit
violent crime as those who did not have similar traumatic experiences
– Arthur Janov

My clinical experience has shown that beneath the vicious
persona of violent and destructive people is a great deal of
inarticulate hurt with the fear of still further emotional injury
– Carl Goldberg

The remedy to this pestilence is more heroism and Self-esteem.
This entails strengthening the voice of conscience over and above the
bark of the superego, which means improved education. This is not the
place to expound the merits of Steiner (Waldorf) or Krishnamurti
schooling in comparison to that offered by the state apparatus, but I
do say that the home environment is the place where a child's
conscience first gets to express itself, if it can. When parents
reinforce its expression, all is well. When they are threatened by it,
and when they seek to silence it, there is hell to pay. There is no
improvement existentially or socially. There is no happiness for work
well done, only duty and enslavement to the will of one's elders.
There is no justice or equity, only adultism and exploitation. There
is plenty of activity, but little to no productivity. There is plenty
of conformity but no Self-awareness.

Crucially, the person whose Will to Meaning is obstructed finds
themselves unable to recognize reality. They eventually end up
despising reality, and are no longer instructed by the Natural Order.
They are bound to fill their psychic abscess with the instruction of
authorities deeply threatened by independence and freedom. Once the
natural ceases to be an object of care, docile urbanized men and women
are destined to become either neurotic or psychotic.

As malignant mothers come to dominate society, and as the men
they cruelly raise selflessly concentrate their energies building
regressive societies that breed an increasing number of narcissistic
girls and adult women, the weeds of pathology take firmer hold, never
to be uprooted.

...the Great Mother goddess of Crete, the Demeter of the
Greeks, is, as mistress of the underworld, also a goddess of death.
The dead, named by Plutarch "demetrioi," are her property –
Erich Neumann

APPENDIX ONE

The Uroboros

The uroboros or snake biting its own tail is an ancient motif
that, for mythicists, Jungians, and some other psychologists,
personifies the Great Mother and her stereotypical representatives.

Of course the average mother does not consciously see herself as
a representative of an archetype first formed and venerated throughout
humanity's primeval past, but this does not matter. She unconsciously
replays many key archetypal dramas and scenarios associated with the
antetype whether she realizes it or not. In other words, she does as
all women do in a culture without conscious awareness of the origin of
the tendencies she experiences and acts out. Her identification with
the "terrible" aspects of the great Gorgonic or devouring mother
perpetuate the cycle of dysfunction that has profoundly negative
consequences for the culture of which she and her family are a part.

Symbolically the mandala serves much the same purpose as the
serpentine uroboris, enclosing a microcosmic space which separates the
fetus from the universal transpersonal essence. In many mandalas we
see what appear to be demonic figures, especially outside the circle.
This is also the case in some Native American sand-paintings. These
forms, whether they are seen outside or inside the central space of
the mandala, represent the threatening aspects experienced by the
fetus in utero. Since anxiety is the primary emotion experienced in
utero and at the moment of birth, our conceptions and perceptions are
always tinged with a certain level of anxiety. The mind of neurotics
is, however, more than tinged with anxiety. It is often overwhelmed by
it.

When paranoics and schizophrenics tell of belittling voices
coming from the "walls," or when they speak of being attacked by
death-rays and magical beams, we understand that they are recalling,
in garbled form, memories of their disturbed time in utero, when they
felt poisoned, enervated, shocked, or in some other way systemically
unnerved. When schizophrenics speak of feeling spiders or ants
crawling over them, we understand that their "delusions" actually
reproduce experiences in utero. They are relating how alien they feel
in their own skin, and how everything around them causes physical and
psychic pain. In these cases their skin represents the embryonic bag
(placenta) in which psychosomatic pain was first experienced.

As Otto Rank brilliantly pointed out, the entire universe is, to
most schizophrenics and paranoics, nothing less than an external
imprisoning womb, as frightening, hateful and devouring as the
original. Schizophrenics and paranoics, like other neurotics, are
malignant types unable to function effectively as one of the four
ubiquitous malignant types described in the Chapter Three. Rank also
shows how our concept of hell – the subterranean abode in which
sinners burn and suffer eternal punishment – is also based on
the conditions experienced in utero.

APPENDIX TWO

Otto Rank and Psychoanalysis

All too many people do not live their own lives, and generally
they know next to nothing about their real natures. They make
convulsive efforts to "adapt," not to stand out in any way, to do
exactly what the opinions, rules, regulations and habits of the
environment demand as being "right." They are slaves of "what people
think," "what people do" – Jolande Jacobi (The Way of
Individuation)

Otto Rank believed that everything we do, and have done
throughout history, is based on our underlying desire to return to the
womb. What if this was correct?

Since this is physically impossible, we set out to find or
create a womb-like state or existence by which to replicate the end we
subliminally seek. We wish for a simulacra of the womb to which we
cannot physically return, and our ways of finding one are, according
to Rank, ingenious and manifold.

Art, science, philosophy and psychology are not excluded as
means by which we achieve the desired end. However, there is a
complication. Since anxiety was experienced in the womb, and since
anxiety is the basic mood tinging all later conceptions and
perceptions of Self, other and world, it inhibits the desire to return
to the primal condition. This means that our desire for the
restoration of the original symbiosis is ambivalent.

People can be divided into those who simply wish for a return to
the serene uroboric repose, and those who deeply fear as well as
desire such a return. Both desires give rise to the common forms of
neuroses. If anxiety over not finding a womb-like state overwhelms the
ego, one displays depressive and catatonic tendencies, as well as
guilt and masochism. If anxiety arises because of the fear of return,
schizophrenic and paranoid tendencies are displayed, as well as manic
and obsessive-compulsive trends. With this in mind we are able to
precisely diagnose the world's foremost problems.

Regardless of what manifold shapes it takes, human endeavor
suffers perplexing problems on two main fronts. There is anxiety in
our attempts to locate a simulacra of uroboric repose, and anxiety
from entering it. The result is ongoing confusion, anger and conflict.
Are we now able to understand the underlying reasons for the constant
foment in our world? Now do we understand why peace and happiness are
so absent for all our efforts and high-sounding words?

Rank understood that ancient man did not introspect. His desire
to actualize the uroboric condition led to expressions characteristic
of ancient man, such as we read and study in mythology, anthropology
and ethnology. Ancient man's fear of the dark, reverence for water,
ritualistic sojourn in underground caves, deification of the great
mother goddess, rites of castration, supplication to the terrible
goddess, and so on, revealed to Rank ancient man's preoccupation with
the regressive desire and fear of it.

Later, as modern cultures became established, man developed the
capacity for introspection. The inward-looking capacity led, in the
twentieth century, to the advent of psychoanalysis and
depth-psychology.

These are, according to Rank, the means by which modern man
creates simulacras of the original womb-like state. As far as he was
concerned, Freud merely responded to the unconscious desires of
western culture to achieve the secret end when he set about the
studies that led to the creation of psychoanalysis. Of course Freud
was, according to Rank, unaware of the reasons for his interest in the
human psyche, and why he was ultimately driven toward founding his
school.

The great psychologist and thinker Otto
Rank (1884-1939)

Generally speaking, when a patient enters Freudian and Jungian
analysis, they know full well that they will be talking interminably
about their childhood and troubled relationship with their
parents. They may be hypnotized by the therapist and asked to recline
on a couch. The therapy room may have soft lighting and be restful and
calm. The therapist ends up being a representative of the parents in
both their permissive and punitive aspects. All this is acknowledged
intellectually by most therapists, but Rank sees the therapist as one
who unwittingly participates in a mutual fantasy with the client. He
too wishes to reproduce the prenatal situation for himself, and his
occupation and skill permit him to approach the desired end. Indeed,
so effective is psychoanalysis in this regard that people might even
be inclined to concoct and simulate all kinds of neurotic tendencies
to avail themselves of therapy although not for reasons consciously
comprehended by them or the therapist. Indeed a professional
psychotherapist might even concoct plausible theories and paradigms
that serve the regressive urge.

Carl Jung's "Collective Unconscious" is, according to Rank, such
a metaphorical device. It is simply a mentalized simulacra for the
womb-like state. The Anima and Animus "archetypes" merely reproduce
the infant's mother and father, in both their good and bad aspects.

Given Rank's profound insights into the way we artfully, if
subconsciously, recreate the primal condition, we see that as far as
psychoanalysis goes, the only legitimate schools include, first and
foremost, those created by Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, Arthur
Janov and Ludwig Binswanger. Those founded by humanists and
existentialists are also less spurious. These include the methods or
schools created by Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Viktor Frankl, Carl
Rogers, Nathaniel Branden, and others of their kind. The
existentialist school of Ludwig Binswanger is of especial interest
because it is based on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

In this school the emphasis is not placed exclusively on dreams,
fantasies, regressive urges, Oedipal stages, abuse, or parental
dysfunction, although these are certainly accepted as important
aspects in the development of personality. The emphasis is certainly
not placed on a supposed "unconscious" populated by "archetypes." It
is on the patient's current feelings and actual interactions with the
world. What is he feeling now? What troubles him about himself?
What troubles him in his present relationships? With whom is he
spending time? What does he do of a day? What are his interests? Is he
grounded and aware of his body, or does he spend too much time
unproductively thinking and feeling? What is he involved in creating?
How much time does he spend alone or in nature? How much of his time
is taken up in superficial pastimes and domestic or professional
duties? In the company of other people, how does he usually come
across? Is he forthright, aggressive or submissive? And most
importantly, is he plagued and paralyzed by shame at his choice to
avoid living authentically and productively? For Binswanger, a human
being is really three people in one. This is because he occupies three
time-spaces or realities. He inhabits and experiences the Eigenwelt
(or Self-World) of his own thoughts, feelings, desires and troubles;
the Mitwelt (or With-World) of relationships with other people;
and the Umwelt (or Around-World) of nature, elements and
animals. How he acts in each of these worlds is taken into
consideration and analyzed. If he displays neurotic patterns, the
analyst tries to find out where they are oriented and where they
originated. Are they due to his dysfunctional relationship with
himself, other people, or the world in general? Or is he suffering
problems in all three areas? In this scheme there is nothing abstract
or hypothetical. It is purely phenomenological, and in accord
with the teachings of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger regards man as a
Being in the World, a being made by the world. Everything man
is and embodies, whether it is senses, emotions, intellect, dreams or
unconscious, also inhabit the world which is primary and
all-encompassing.

The existentialist school therefore places the emphasis on man and his
world, noting that as far as most neurotic people are concerned, the
world as it is plays little part in their existence. The
schizophrenic, for example, endures an exceptionally emaciated
existence. He not only withdraws from people, which is understandable
to a degree, but also shuts out the nonhuman natural world to boot.
Heideggereans and existential psychologists regard man as a cultural and
natural being, and encourage individuals to step beyond their limited
domestic and professional roles in which they experience defeats,
failures, criticism, rivalries, hang-ups, phobias, obsessional
thoughts, and so on. It is in our roles that we judge our competence
and that of others. We compare and contrast, compete, dominate, feel
guilty for dominating or being dominated, guilty for not standing up
for ourselves, and so on. The more we become absorbed in the role the
more anxiety plagues our minds. Once we step beyond our roles we treat
ourselves more sensitively and affectionately, and change the nature
of our relationships with others. We see that their dysfunctional acts
are based on the same underlying quandaries we once experienced, and
are less likely to get upset when and if they act inappropriately
toward us. An existential psychologist wants us to see what needs
prioritizing in order to develop Self-esteem. They want us to learn
how to turn weaknesses into strengths. For that to occur we need not
incessantly dwell on the past or on parental mistreatment. We step out
of our parent's shadow and the confining roles they expect us to play.
This divorce constitutes an act of Self-love. It removes the
shame and anxiety of living inauthentically and leads to a greater
sense of Self-esteem. Indeed, anxiety is the means by which we become
authentic. It goads us to live deeply and purely. If anxiety did not
arise within us, say existentialist psychologists, we would continue
robotically conforming to the world and ways of Das Man. As far
as they are concerned anxiety is a legitimate mood and must not
be anaesthetized and quelled. They look disfavorably on the man and
the society that works to medicate a man so he is unable to face his
anxiety and shame.

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can
temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but
anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries
it within – Rollo May

Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) was the
founder of the school of Existential Psychology. His ideas were
largerly based on the profound teachings of Otto Rank and Martin
Heidegger.

For existentialist psychologists a man must not be addicted to and
obsessed with the approval of other people. He must heighten awareness
of inanimate things and their effect on his life. He must be willing
to escape busy, sterile, urban environments and spend more time alone
in nature. He must become productive. He must work with his hands and
learn who he is and what he is capable of by interacting in simple
direct ways with the world of things. Through his productivity he
shifts his focus to the way he does things, which in turn opens
the way to individuation. He refocuses energy on himself in a
non-neurotic way and shifts the center of gravity to the present and
future rather than the past. If he works on planting and tending a
garden, he focuses on the end result and happiness he gets by working,
but most importantly he focuses on the work as it commences moment by
moment. He is so preoccupied creating that he becomes less inclined to
worry and stress about non-essentials. He is less likely to get upset
and discombobulated when other people do not give him approval. He is
able to free himself from enslavement to other people's opinions and
expectations. He works hard and appreciates taking rest. He notices
the beauty around him and how other people's expertize teaches him how
to improve his own work. Thus he learns the difference between envy
and admiration. He sees people admiring his work and how it inspires
them, and is encouraged to produce more and widen creative interests.
In the end he may begin teaching what he knows. By working well at
something he finds that he is not even mentally conscious of himself
or the time that passes. Nor is he overly concerned with the reasons
behind what he is doing. The doing is what matters most. It
brings him to life and teaches him what he needs to know about himself
and the world. Although he cares about what happened to him in the
past, he sees it from the right perspective. He knows it is wrong to
self-sadistically re-punish himself a thousand times by morbidly
dwelling on horrors of the past. He laments what happened, faces the
feelings his memories evoke, and places blame squarely where it is
due. He forgives himself and relocates himself steadfastly in the
present. There are plants, animals, projects as well as people that
need his immediate attention and care.

The attempt to win the approval of the very people who in fact
negate us as human beings becomes the driving force in our life
– Arno Gruen (Insanity of Normality)

For Reicheans the physical body is of supreme importance. It is
the non-hypothetical, all too real "unconscious Self." Alexander Lowen
focused almost exclusively on deconstructing body-armoring in the
manner explained and practiced by the great Wilhelm Reich. This simply
means turning the patient's attention to the body and the bioenergy.
It means restoring real feeling. It means getting the patient
out of their head and the pseudo-feelings that take the place of
authentic feelings. The Reichean approach is similar to that adopted
by the great Arthur Janov, whose intention was also to get a person
out of their heads and their ideas about their problems. The
body's innate intelligence is awakened and old underlying feelings of
fear, rage and abandonment gradually reawakened. In all these cases,
and for all these schools, the emphasis is on returning one to a
direct, productive consciousness of and interactivity with the body
and world of nature. In this sense these are emphatically pragmatic
rather than theoretical systems. They focus on homeostasis, balancing
the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems so negative thoughts and
feelings do not arise to paralyze one's being and break the connection
between Self and world.

From one perspective, this approach can be equated with what Jung
referred to as Shadow Work. Indeed the Reichean view of the Body
as Shadow is less abstract and decidedly more practical and effective
than Jung's nebulous concept. In our opinion a combination of the
techniques pioneered by Reich, Lowen and Janov, more than suffices in
combatting neurotic tendencies and restoring health on all levels.

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957)

Arthur Janov

APPENDIX THREE

Rights and Wrongs in Freud

Freud went further than anybody before him in directing
attention to the observation and analysis of the irrational and
unconscious forces which determine parts of human behavior. He and
his followers in modern psychology not only uncovered the irrational
and unconscious sector of man...s nature, the existence of which had
been neglected by modern rationalism; he also showed that these
irrational phenomena followed certain laws and therefore could be
understood rationally – Erich Fromm

FREUD WAS MORE CORRECT than Jung when it came to assessing the purpose
and meaning of dreams. For the most part dreams cryptically bespeak
and process our underlying need to return to the womb. They also
express and process the rage we feel toward the many blocks apparently
preventing the return. Since these obstacles are manifold, dream
symbolism is likewise plentiful as well as garbled. As the superego
develops and repression begins in earnest (at the onset of the Oedipal
stages), dreams tend to become increasingly vague and unreadable. The
mind attempts to cover a dream's true intent and meaning with all
sorts of fantastic coloring and attire, but this is not to say that
the "wardrobe" – the "collective content" as Jung calls it
– has important meaning in itself, regardless of how dramatic,
mysterious and archaic it appears. The mind certainly dredges up
antique motifs from the unconscious or race-memory, but does so for
relatively pragmatic reasons. It does so in service to the commands of
the superego which prevents taboo feelings, unrequited desires and
urges from worrying and impairing ego-function. In other words, we
habitually hide the true meaning of dreams from ourselves. To
begin deciphering a dream's camouflage and to make all sorts of
speculative and grandiose statements and theories about it is,
according to Freud and others of his school, mistaken and
counterproductive.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

This is where Jungians disagree. As far as they are concerned,
neurotic traits derive from other sources than the repression of the
regressive desire for reabsorption in the mother. However Jungians do
not satisfactorily explain why the dream content they are concerned
with, allegedly emitting from the deep unconscious, is garbled and
subject to repression. If we have nothing to fear we do not
dissimulate and hide. The meaning of a dream is repressed and
displaced because it represents feelings, desires and intents we are
consciously anxious about and ashamed of, and that we know incites
obstruction and punishment of various kinds. The threat of punishment
can only come, as Freudians emphasize, from environments the child
physically knows – those of home, school and adult world. The
superego has no need to waste energy suppressing thoughts, ideas,
images and fantasies that are not taboo.

...the child's interpretation of parental demands and
prohibitions becomes magnified so that the superego demands are often
more extreme and violent than the actual demands of the parents in
reality...The guilt and punishment which a child feels he deserves
and fears for some minor infraction is frequently many times more
intense and severe than that which his parents will administer
– Perceval Symonds (The Ego and the Self)

Otto Rank's opinion, as expressed in The Trauma of Birth, gives
us the impression that, as far as he was concerned, Jungians are wrong
to attribute to dreams meanings they do not have. The unconscious is
to be seen as an internalized womb, the mentalized simulacra of
the one to which we so ardently wish to return. Since it is a fiction
it can contain whatever one wishes it to contain. It can be anything
one wants it to be, and can do anything one wants it to do, no matter
how bizarre, awesome and marvelous. Moreover, if ancient man was not,
as we assume, capable of introspection, how did the so-called
archetypes of the Collective Unconscious arise? But even if their
existence is due to the phylogenetic processes described by Jung, the
position of Freud and Rank is not contradicted. If Rank is correct,
Jung's Shadow archetype is still the product of the repression of the
transgressive urge. It would be the outcome of the repressed thought
and feeling of every human from the beginning of history. The fact
it pertains to – the urge to return to the womb – still
stands true whether the urge exists within a single individual or an
entire culture. As far as Freud and Rank were concerned, every facet
of childhood neurosis derives from this desire for, or fear of,
uterine absorption. They saw neurotics cured after their regressive
syndromes and complexes were effectively and patiently addressed. Rank
was, in this regard, on strong ground since we see from Jung's own
autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, that one of
his early dreams, which occurred not long before he broke with Freud,
was one in which he entered a deep underground cave-like chamber with
ancient bric-a-brac scattered around and two skulls on the floor. For
Freud and Rank, this strange subterranean space is evidently a
simulacra for the womb and the return to it. As far as they would be
concerned, Jung was in error to exaggerate the significance of dreams
of this kind.

...even when the umbilical cord is cut there remains a deep
craving to undo the separation, to return to the womb or to find a
new situation of absolute protection and security – Erich
Fromm

Rank sanely realized that there is no cure for what cannot be
cured. The limits of psychoanalysis were obvious to him. The
psychoanalyst is, in Rank's eyes, for the most part a representative
of society attempting to get a "neurotic" person readjusted not to his
underlying nature or Will, but to society's pathogenic norms and
standards. These external pseudo-centroverting forces actually impede
the natural centroversion occurring perpetually within the biopsyche.
These forces (the conscience, Will or Logos) are pure and creative.
They fail to do their work because of the impositions of pathogenic
parents and society. In this sense psychoanalysis serves as a tool of
oppression. Rank was also an opponent of the idea that
one-size-fits-all. As a personalist he was not in favor of schools of
psychoanalysis, which, like the religions of old advocate formulaic
theories and practices to account for and correct the nuances and
problems of individual personalities. In this regard his polemical
ideas on the limitations of psychology and psychoanalysis are
consistent with the outlook of Martin Heidegger and the existentialist
psychologists. For such as these, a neurotic person's problem is his
willing collusion with those who tell him his thinking and behavior is
neurotic. The neurotic's opinion of himself is an introjection of
society's image of him, rather than an authentic schema. In this way,
according to Rank and the existentialists, a cycle of dysfunction is
set in motion. Parents and society become the exclusive determining
factors in forming and enforcing one's false self-image. With
the creative function of the Imperial Self thereby obstructed, one's
mind is thoroughly colonized, with the superego serving as the
implanted mental mechanism for maintaining social control over the
compliant ego. For Rank and the existentialists successful therapy
puts a halt to this process and restores one to oneself. For
them dreams are, therefore, often counter-productive. They are, for
the most part, regressive rather than progressive, expressing our
desire to return to the womb. In this sense dreams are not necessarily
positive expressions of the Will, as Rank termed the creative
centroverting force. In Jungian terms they echo the desire of all
humanity, past and present, to regress to uroboric sleep. This is why
their meaning is often scrambled and unclear to the dreamer. A
creative dream, on the other hand, expresses a person's honest desire
for or process of differentiation and individuation. High art is that
which consciously renders the content of such dreams. This progressive
spirit or Will was commented on at length by Kant, Schelling, Hegel,
Rand, and other philosophers, and exemplified by poets and artists
such as Rainer Maria Rilke and William Blake.

Arthur Janov and his school also have little time for the Jungian
approach to dream analysis. They too are unconcerned with the wardrobe
and decoration in which most dreams are cloaked, and which distracts
from the true import of dreams which lies in the feelings they
arouse in the dreamer. We must dwell on these feelings, for in that
lies a dream's main purpose. However, as Janov knew, the feelings
evoked during and after a dream quickly fade. This is due to the
suppressing effects of the superego. Like Wilhelm Reich, Janov
understood that repression deeply disaffects the soma or body. Taboo
feelings are trapped in the very cells, fibers, meridians, nerves and
musculature of one's body. In fact Janov's ideas help us understand
that the body and its bioenergy constitute the actual Shadow Self.
Therapy must therefore be directed to toning down the effects of the
censor or superego so feelings surface again to do their work and lead
us to improved psychic and physical health. For Janov, dreams
are only and always personal. He did not endorse Jung's
grandiose ideas about "collective" factors infusing one's dream life.
Crowds and nations are healed one person at a time.

For Reich, Lowen and Janov, the unconscious is indeed marvelous.
But it is not pictured as a necessarily dark attic, dungeon or
womb-metaphor. The so-called unconscious is the all too physical body
and the bioenergetic systems and subsystems that in total give rise to
the Self. When these systems are balanced man is healthy. When they
are imbalanced he is neurotic. As Nathaniel Branden and Erich Fromm
explain:

A child does not have a conceptual knowledge of his own needs
nor does he have sufficient knowledge to comprehend the behavior of
his parents. But at times his fear and pain may be experienced as
overwhelming and incapacitating. And so, in order to protect himself,
in order to remain able to function – in order to survive...he
often feels, wordlessly and helplessly, that he must escape from his
inner state, that contact with his emotions has become intolerable.
And so he denies his feelings. The fear and pain are not permitted to
be experienced, expressed and thus discharged; they are frozen into
his body, barricaded behind walls of muscular and physiological
tension, and a pattern of reaction is inaugurated that will tend to
recur again and again when he is threatened by a feeling he does not
wish to experience – (Taking Back the Disowned Self)

...one of the earliest suppressions of feelings concerns
hostility and dislike...the child starts with giving up the
expression of his feeling and eventually gives up the feeling
itself...he is taught to suppress the awareness of hostility and
insincerity in others...it does not take long for the child to reach
the "maturity" of the average adult and to lose the sense of
discrimination between a decent person and a scoundrel – (Escape
From Freedom)

So when we hear psychoanalysts, such as Freud, Jung and others,
speaking about bringing the content of the unconscious to
consciousness, we see that it simply means bringing repressed and
disowned feelings to the surface. These feelings are repressed and
banished not to some bottomless pit called the "unconscious" or
"Collective Unconscious," but to the physical organs, glands, nerves,
cells, blood, plasma, bio-chemistry and grey matter. For thinkers such
as Rank, Jung's Shadow archetype is a psychic simulacra of a physical
shadow, which was for early non-introspective man a "magical"
apparition. Its appearance led men to contemplate what they later
revisioned and rarified into the concept of a "soul." That all things
possess a shadow – rocks, trees, insects, mammals and clouds,
etc – meant to ancient man that all life is kindred. He surmised
that there is a homoplastic mysterium behind individual and collective
reality. Pagan man decided that this presence must be venerated, and
he diligently did so throughout the centuries. As time passed this
observation of and awe toward the shadow became the basis for our
familiar religious traditions and customs. Again we see the physical
or natural origins of metaphysical concepts. We also see the need for
a phenomenological comportment toward the world.

FREUD WAS RIGHT when he asserted and proved that a child is from the
outset a sexual entity, with erotic feelings and desires. What
he failed to grasp was that the sexual urge is but one part or aspect
of a wider power-struggle between child and parent. It is one dynamic
of the so-called Oedipus Stages, which terminate with the advent of
the superego or inner tyrant. As Freud showed, the superego then
suppresses the sexual urges which are considered taboo and antisocial.
However, what is really being suppressed along with sexual ardors is
the child's rage for being denied, humiliated and dominated, and his
murderous rage against one or both parents. The superego also
suppresses one's own disgust at one's impotency and inability to over
come the rival. It suppresses one's shame and self-loathing needing
love from those incapable of giving it. The superego becomes the
barrier between the socially-approved pseudo-self and Imperial Self.
For all its control it cannot permanently stifle the voice of the
conscience or Imperial Self. For most of a person's life this voice
is, however, itself a source of anxiety.

FREUD WAS RIGHT when he deduced that anxiety is caused by a
child's rage toward its parents, a rage that must be repressed by the
superego. Boys and girls suffer pangs of rage and hostility toward one
or other of their parents, and often toward both parents. If the
father is seen as weak and feminized he is despised by both sexes.
Such a father does not assist his child to effectively and sanely
reach the solar world. If a mother's Animus makes her abusive, she is
also despised by a son or daughter. Melanie Klein and other child
psychologists found that many children endlessly fantasize about their
mother's or father's destruction by this or that means. Children feel
guilty over these poisonous thoughts and as a result are likely to
become clingy toward the most despised parent. That parent's constant
presence serves to temporarily alleviate the intense worry in a child
that their destructive fantasies have "magically" brought sickness or
death to the parent in question. Counterpointing this anxiety is the
more ardent desire to punish the offending parent and see them suffer.
The conflict results in one child turning out passive and feminine and
another growing to be offensive, violent and immature.

FREUD WAS RIGHT when he identified anxiety as a primary cause of
neurosis. As Rollo May states:

More than three decades ago, Freud singled out anxiety as the
crucial problem of emotional and behavioral disorders. Further
development of psychoanalysis has only substantiated his proposition,
until it is now recognized on all sides that anxiety is the
"fundamental phenomenon of neurosis," or in Horney's term, the
"dynamic center of neuroses." But not only in psychopathology; in the
actions of "normal" people as well as "abnormal," it is now
recognized that anxiety is much more prevalent than was suspected
several decades ago – (The Meaning of Anxiety)

Freud knew that infant helplessness brings on anxiety, whether
it be during the Oedipal stages or before. The experience of being
removed from the body of the mother and having the umbilical cord
severed emphasize the helpless feeling in the face of danger. Of
course that danger can extend to a parent's subsequent disinterest and
inadequate nurture. Freud stated clearly that a child also experiences
anxiety when it registers its mother's personal anxiety. He also knew
that the child who sufficiently manages or overcomes its anxiety grows
up without neurotic tendencies. If a child is not able to do so, they
remain anxious throughout their lives and are threatened each time
they are faced with even minor life-challenges.

FREUD, KLEIN AND OTHERS were correct when they stated that the
superego is a more severe prohibitor and cause of anxiety and guilt
than the actual parents. Even though the superego, or moral center, is
brought about by way of parental authority, its correctional shaming
voice is often more penalizing than most parents are wont to be.
Parents may punish with stern words or occasionally a few smacks, but
the superego threatens the ego with complete breakdown. Consequently,
Freudians rightly understand that the introjection and inflation of
parental imagos can be the cause of neurotic tendencies, and even of
full-blown paranoia, hypochondria and schizophrenia. The schizophrenic
introjects the parental prohibitions, inflates them far beyond what is
realistic, and then in order to flee overwhelming feelings of guilt
caused by his tormenting superego, re-projects the parental imagos
externally onto other people and objects in the world. Naturally, the
ruse fails. All that happens is that the world becomes a terribly
threatening place full of dangers. Other people's looks are menacing
or meant to kill, ordinary plates of food are poisoned, and every room
is full of dirt and germs. The schizophrenic's feeling of internal
guilt is so worrying and self-destroying that projection is an attempt
at salvation which goes wrong. Now those same internal threats
besetting the ego are externalized. It is not the superego or one's
own mind that bites, snarls, cuts, claws, stings and devours, but
other people and surrounding objects that do. As a result, the
schizophrenic's ego only finds refuge by complete withdrawal from his
hateful projections. He or she completely shuts down internal feeling
and at the same time denies the reality of the external world. Since
the origin of the trouble came from inside their own being, wherever
the self-hating schizophrenic goes they are bound to find the place
dirty, poisonous and life-threatening. The source of their neuroses
lies, as I show, not in the Oedipal phase but in conditions
experienced in utero. The problems encountered later during Oedipal
stages merely awaken earlier pangs of rage, hostility and lack.
Together they lead to the neurotic tendencies psychologists are
familiar with.

Abraham has pointed out that criminal phantasies of manic
patients are for the most part directed against their mother –
Melanie Klein (The Psychoanalysis of Children)

According to my observation of children, the mother has to
prove again and again by her presence that she is not the 'bad'
attacking mother – ibid

FREUDIANS ARE CORRECT when they analyze the manner in which
anxiety-creating imagos are projected onto externals objects. The
oral, anal and phallic-sadistic tendencies forbidden by the superego
must be disowned if anxiety is to be lessened. In severe cases, when
the superego is most condemning, the ego displaces the sources of
anxiety to the world. After projection takes place, and once the
intellect is in ascendency, a person is able to replay destructive
feelings and fantasies externally and more safely. The sport fetishes,
team rivalries, hatred of certain players or coaches, violent
television programs, films and video games, political feuds,
nationalistic allegiances, obsessional work practices (as seen with
accountants, bankers, teachers, sergeant-majors, etc), pronounced
ambitiousness, interest in body-building, surgery, demolition,
hunting, fishing, gambling, gossiping, bullying and stalking, as well
as theft, fraud, gang-membership, sadism, murder, and so on, can be
traced to the projection and therapeutic replaying of anxiety-causing
affects. Ironically, even science, philosophy and psychology often
serve as the means by which we seek to overcome or "understand" inner
conflicts.

Freud was right about many other controversial ideas and
studies. What is more, many of his ideas were updated, revised and
improved by neo-Freudians such as Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Karen
Horney and others. I highly recommend their superlative works. At this
point we must move on to look at instances where the great man proved
less astute.

◊

WRONGS

AS WE SEE from the preceding chapters, Freud was wrong in his
account of the origins of the Oedipus Complex and his conception of
why men and women subconsciously wish for a return to the alleged
serenity of the womb. I do not think we wish for a return to the
uterine repose solely for security and passive nurturement. This
theory gives rise to contradictory conceptions about the fundamental
nature and purpose of human beings, and flies in the face of our
vision of ourselves as rational, progressive individuals. Freud sought
to provide us with a coherent account of human conflict and neuroses,
but failed to see the true reason for the regressive hankering in his
neurotic patients. He failed to understand the true reason why
frustrations occur and why we often neurotically recoil from the
pressures of existence. The regressive subconscious desire for a
return to a uterine condition occurs because it was, for a great many
people, in the womb that the foundations of Selfhood were shaken. Any
deep, underlying hankering for a lost paradisiacal state arises
because that condition of wholeness and inner security is sorely
missed after birth. We try to find it again in worldly experiences, in
extrovert engagements and conquests, in learning and social
interaction, but soon learn that it is nigh on impossible to
reconstitute. As Freud rightly illustrated, we fantasize and dream,
and identify with heroes and icons, not only to solidify the superego,
as he thought, but to inculcate, via simulation and identification,
lost wholeness and fortitude of being. On a deep level we are each
aware that we emerged from the womb in a fragile state, not only
physically but psychologically. We realize that we inherit great
personal suffering as a result of this weakened condition and from our
inadequate but incessant attempts to regain the lost parts of Self. It
is from our problematic and often futile attempts to regain Selfhood
that life takes on its odd and distasteful complexion. It is the
reason we become sadistic and/or masochistic. It is why we become
troubled, morose, withdrawn, envious, compulsive, defensive,
aggressive, insensitive, obsessive, suspicious, paranoid, acquisitive,
competitive, delinquent, criminal, violent, warlike, brutal and
tyrannous. Any external event that threatens or compromises the
authority of our fragile and impaired Self is a source of fright and
conflict. Our penchant for pleasure and terror of discomfort,
challenge and pain stem from this dynamic. This is the reason soldiers
cry out for their mothers at the moment of death in the trenches and
on the battlefield. It is why the image of the female is so
captivating, and why violence toward women is prevalent in history. It
accounts for the over-sexualization of media and culture, for
perversity, fetishism and fascination for womb symbols. It is the
reason for child abuse, and explains our heinous desecration of nature
and abominable treatment of animals. It explains the manufacture of
supernatural gods and apollonian refuges where the cares of mortality
cease. It accounts for our penchant for antihuman technology and our
desire to build a sterile, post-psychological, post-philosophical
dystopia in which we will not be troubled by emotions of any kind.

I had already reached the conclusion that the human being is
dominated from the moment of birth onwards by a continuous regressive
trend toward the reestablishment of the intrauterine situation, and
holds fast to this unswervingly by, as it were, magical-hallucinatory
means, by the aid of positive and negative hallucinations –
Sandor Ferenczi (Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality)

FREUD, KLEIN AND OTHERS of their school rarely if ever mention
that a mother's (or father's) abuse of a child is intentional. Reading
their works, good as they are, leaves one with the impression that no
parent is intentionally malign, perverse or deliberately abusive. Of
course we know this is simply not the case. Lackadaisical
breast-feeding, neglect, shouting, shaming, vocalizing adult problems,
comparison with other children and helicoptering, etc., are often
exercises in deliberate cruelty. They constitute the extreme form of
adultism. Psychologist Alice Miller was the first to unashamedly
indict parents for their deliberate mistreatment of children in their
care. As a result she is all but forgotten by the psychiatric
community which is loath to address the problem of and reasons for
parental abuse.

The great psychologist Alice Miller
(1923-2010).

ACCORDING TO ALICE MILLER and Robert Fliess, Freud was wrong to
dismiss accounts of parental sexual abuse toward children. Originally
he accepted the problem but was deterred from taking it seriously by
his colleague Wilhelm Fliess. As Fliess' son Robert later confessed,
his father had sexually molested him as a child. Freud's turnabout, in
this regard, had devastating effects on the credibility and
effectiveness of psychoanalysis. Confessions of sexual abuse by many
of Freud's clients were summarily dismissed as fantasies. Indeed most
Freudians continue to adopt the same dismissive attitude toward such
accounts. In Freud's day parents were not held accountable, while
victims were diagnosed as "neurotic" for sincerely and accurately
describing the events which originally traumatized them. Miller's work
confirms that the Oedipal stages are indeed a prolonged power-struggle
initiated by parents who wield formidable power over the child. The
child quickly learns to submit, but hates itself for doing so. It also
learns to identify with the object of its hatred. This identification
becomes the seedbed from which many other pathological tendencies
sprout. Miller certainly acknowledged the role of the soma or body in
this repect, and how the body's wellbeing depends on the intensity of
one's denied emotional suffering.

FREUD WAS WRONG to attribute sexual attraction and longing exclusively
to the child. He failed to see that the parent's attention toward
their child can be sexually provocative and psychically incestuous. In
my opinion this seductive energy toward a child is inappropriate and
damaging, whether it occurs before, during or after Oedipal stages.
Had Freud taken parental seduction seriously he might have radically
altered his Oedipus theory and reassessed the schizogenic effects on a
child of a resentful and sexually abusive parent. He might not have
over-estimated a male child's perplexed interest in its parent's
sexual antics and not have made a child's witnessing of parental
sexual acts the principle cause of its Oedipal desires toward its
mother. In our opinion parental seductiveness, born from subconscious
resentment, is the main cause of the eroticization that Freud
attributed to the child alone. It is one of the main causes of
anxiety, guilt and rage harbored by a child and expatiated through
fantasy and gameplay. Since the legitimate rage felt by a child about
its mistreatment, sexual or other, must not be expressed, it is
summarily repressed by the superego, itself the bioenergetic
representative of the parent's will. The repressed anger causes
unconscious tensions within the child who continues to be plagued with
fantasies about striking back at its offending parents. If it is not
able to adequately do so, it strikes back at itself with more
guilt, rage and repression. If it does manage to strike back, it
stands to be severely punished and penalized by parents and society.
Crucially, in our opinion, it is the mother who tends to be the
principle seducer and cause of her child's most egregious and
persistent neurotic tendencies.

If little boys feel that they cannot separate from their
mothers, perhaps this is caused by the way some women succeed in
making their sons overly attached to them. Direct seductiveness
produces the same result as unattainability: in both cases, the child
learns that what matters most is to possess the other person –
Arno Gruen

FREUD FOCUSED ON STAGES that are relatively late in the process of
child-development. Although he had interesting things to say about the
prenatal period, and although he knew that the regressive urge is
paramount, his focus was on the Oedipal stages which begin at two
years of age and go to about six or seven years of age. There are five
distinctive stages which are termed Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latent and
Genital. As I show throughout this book, Freud was wrong to overlook
so much of what happens between a child and its mother before
the age of two. For this reason we prefer the theories of Otto Rank
and Erich Neumann when it comes to understanding the circumstances
which commonly determine a child's experience and development before
Oedipal stages commence. Freud was not the only analyst to emphasize
the later development of infants. Generally speaking this was the
trend with Erik Erickson, Jean Paiget, Melanie Klein, John Bowlby,
Maria Montessori, Lev Vygotsky, Lawrence Kohlberg, and other prominent
experts in child development. Additionally, none of these specialists
sufficiently dwelt on the seduction theory which implicates parents
guilty of the sexual abuse of infants before, during and after Oedipal
stages. In any case, now that new super-microscopic instruments help
us perceive what is happening to a fetus in the womb-environment, a
major revision of this early period of development is essential.

FREUD AND KLEIN were not wholly correct when they asserted that a
child's sadistic tendencies commence after Oedipal stages begin.
Freudians correctly note that oral-sadism is a consequence of
frustrations that arise in a child during weaning. They are inclined
to date sadism to this time, when a child is insufficiently weaned.
The physical emptiness felt by a child leads to anger at the mother.
Naturally this is true to a point. But as I point out, feelings of
emptiness predate this period, early as it is. In any case, Freudians
know that oral-sadism progresses to anal-sadism and later to
phallic-sadism after the child witnesses amorous activity between its
parents. Freud and Klein have written extensively and perceptively on
the neuroses that intimate and often violent sexual scenes give rise
to in most children who see them. One syndrome that occurs is anger
toward the parents. Since this anger is taboo and cannot be expressed
openly, it is canalized into various fears and phobias, as well as
nightmares and dreams. Eventually a child's feelings are repressed
almost entirely by the superego which develops to its peak through the
Oedipal stages. During weaning a child tends to not only suck but to
bite the nipple of its mother. It is unlikely that this act of
oral-sadism comes about because a newborn infant witnesses the sex act
between its parents. We therefore do not think that Oedipal sadism
originates when Freudians say it does. In our opinion the sadism of
the Oedipal period occurs because the supposed violence a child
attributes to the sex act arouses earlier memories of sadism
experienced in utero, during weaning and thereafter. It awakens
repressed rage toward the mother, and only later, during the Oedipal
stages is that rage redirected toward the father. This means that
Oedipal neuroses is a secondary manifestation. The roots of
oral, anal and phallic-sadism must be traced to earlier conflicts
between mother and child. Freudians are wholly correct when they
assess and list the psychological scarring that the sexual scene
leaves on a child's mind, and how the child's thinking about itself
and the world is preoccupied with the apparent violence of the scene.
They are correct when they address the overwhelming rage and hatred a
child consciously and unconsciously feels toward its parents. Freud
was correct when he said "...hate as a relation to objects is older
than love." Melanie Klein was particularly correct when she stated
that a major factor in the creation of the superego is the necessity
of repressing these powerful but taboo emotions. She understood that
in spite of the repressing capacity of the superego, rage still plays
a large part in the behavior of the average child. The quiescent
autistic child is one whose energy is largely directed toward
repressing overwhelming emotions of rage, whereas the overactive
difficult child's rage is not sufficiently repressed. In both cases
guilt plays a considerable part and must also be repressed. The child
fears punishment from the parent for witnessing a private and
perplexing scene, but is also driven by its wish to partake in the
scene. A child attempts to reenact the scene by way of masturbation,
exhibitionism and demanding or irascible behavior. When these acts are
punished by disapproving parents the child is made to feel guilty. The
superego develops from the need to repress anxiety-creating emotions
of guilt, rage and hatred. Guilt was already instilled at the anal
stage, when parents displayed disapproval over a child's inadequate
sphincter control or overt interest in feces. But guilt increases at
the phallic stage, after the sex act is witnessed and a child attempts
to deal with the considerable anxiety aroused by the scene.

FREUD WAS NOT RIGHT when he attempted to explain the rivalry that
allegedly exists between a father and son when the latter reaches the
so-called phallic stage of psychosexual development. As I show, the
rivalry is not over the son's sexual interest in his mother. If a
rivalry exists, it is between a son and his mother, into which
a father may find himself drawn. Of far greater importance is the
manner in which a father's image is transferred to a child by his
mother. And if a child's identity has suffered corruption at the hands
of his mother, his image of the male world is bound to be impaired
before he reaches two or more years of age.

Child analyst Peter Blos indicates that Freud's interpretation
of the Oedipal situation inaccurately overemphasizes the son's wish
to replace the father. Freud's Oedipus thesis is opposed to the
realization that the father establishes a sense of trust and safety
in the pre-Oedipal child. The early bond of love between father and
son, Blos points out, frequently continues despite the conflicts of
the Oedipal period – Carl Goldberg

If a child envies his father it is probably because the latter
receives a love different in kind to that which he receives from his
mother. A child certainly feels justified in this notion after he or
she witnesses sexual activity between the parents. The child is
enamored at these events and wants to partake in the "love-making."
This does not mean he sees himself as a rival to the father. It only
means that he too wants what his father gets from his mother. If a
child does become pathologically envious and resentful it is not
because he is refused adult love, but because his mother neglects his
basic non-sexual need for love. This unbearable lack throws his
attention toward the kind of love and attention his father receives.
If he were appropriately cared for by his mother, his interest in and
envy of adult forms of love would not be as ardent. It goes without
saying that if the parents are caught in a loveless marriage, a
rivalry is hardly likely to exist between a father and a son. The
latter will remain attached to his mother and just as desperate for
her affection as he would if she and his father were fond of one
another.

The average child does not want his mother sexually or in any
other way. He is dependent on her for what he needs, but
subconsciously wants to escape her influence, particularly if it is
neurotic. This is why his attention shifts to his father after the
onset of the Oedipal phase. However he is not rivalling his
father for the erotic attentions of his mother. He has been
overwhelmed by her attentions from the moment of conception and aches
for a lessening of the tension that arises between his need of her and
his animosity toward her. On the contrary, he desires a victory over
his mother, and craves his father's manly station in order to avail
himself of it. He is excited by the idea that his mother can be
"conquered" and subdued by the secretly witnessed apparently violent
sexual act. This identification with the male parent, and subconscious
desire to overpower the terrible mother, is the primary urge behind a
child's ego-development as well as the existence of its superego and
ego-ideal, the superego's foremost purpose being the repression of a
child's legitimate rage against its mother.

In her psychoanalytic investigations of children, Klein
discovered that early feelings of overpowering rage, directed
especially against the mother and secondarily against the
internalized image of the mother as a ravenous monster, make it
impossible for the child to synthesize "good" and "bad" parental
images. In his fear of aggression from the bad parents –
projections of his own rage – he idealizes the good parents who
will come to the rescue – Christopher Lasch

Classical theory has it that the boy fears castration by his
father as punishment for his sexual interest in his mother. This is
not verified by my clinical experience. It is his mother whom he
fears...The mother cares for and disciplines the child and it is her
attitudes toward excretory function and the genital organs and
autoerotic activity that basically determine the child's fears...It
is the rule in my experience for the patient to reveal the mother as
the agent of mutilation. Throughout life, the man fears the woman as
castrator, not the man – J. C. Rheingold

In the newer understanding of the castration complex it is not
the father's threats that the child reacts to. As Brown so well says,
the castration complex comes into being solely in confrontation with
the mother...It all centers on the fact that the mother monopolizes
the child's world; at first, she is his world. The child cannot
survive without her, yet in order to get control of his own powers he
has to get free of her – Ernest Becker

FREUD WAS NOT WHOLLY CORRECT when he attempted to explain the
origin of "penis envy." In our opinion a young girl's Oedipal or
erotic desires toward her father merely compensate for her antipathy
toward her mother, the same antipathy a son harbors toward the same
object. Both sexes attempt to identify with their father and the male
world in order to escape the traumatizing effects of a neurotic
mother. In this sense the girl's (or boy's) attachment to their father
is born from hatred of the mother and her ways. More correctly, hatred
for the mother exists whether the father exists or not, and regardless
of what emotions are displayed toward him, and vice versa. Most
Freudians fail to grasp this simple fact, and incessantly state that
incestuous desires toward the father precipitate dislike and rivalry
toward the mother. They do not realize that the rivalry toward the
mother is present early on in both sexes and is not necessarily a
consequence of the father's presence and lovability. Hatred also
exists toward the mother after the child realizes it cannot, as it
wants to, wholly detach from her, physically and mentally. The mother
has the power and it is her will that dominates. In any case, when a
young child witness sexual activity between its parents, there usually
follows an intensification of distaste toward the mother and awe
toward the father. He is no longer seen as the mother wants him to be
seen, but as he is. His masculinity enthralls the young child who from
that moment on identifies with him and his "penis" (or power). The
penis is seen, as the father is seen, as a weapon of sorts to overcome
the terrible mother's influence. A non-neurotic daughter attracts her
father's affection by masculinizing herself (particularly during
puberty), an act which both she and her father approve of and benefit
from. The father who pampers "daddy's little girl" doesn't encourage
his daughter's masculinization at puberty or before, and is probably
himself a feminized type afraid of being dominated by a second
sado-masochistic female. The non-malignant father is drawn to a
daughter who admires and emulates his ways. Both father and daughter
are able to take emotional refuge in each other, escaping the toxic
influence of the neurotically neglectful or overly-possessive mother.
The girl's identification with her father is not born, as Freud
supposed, from a frustrated desire to be a man ("penis envy"). The
girl wants to be nothing more than herself. She is just disinclined to
be the same type of female as her mother. Bonding with her father
affords her this opportunity.

In this position her (a daughter's) hatred and sadism against
her mother becomes intensified and she has phantasies of destroying
her with the help of her father's penis – Melanie Klein

Freud was not wrong when he said that penis envy manifests in a
woman's need to bear a son of her own. He meant that a son stands-in
for the penis women lack. The birth of a male child, emitting from the
mother's vagina, simulates a male penis. The attention she gets for
being pregnant, from relatives, medics and the general public, also
"masculinizes" her for a while. She becomes the erection, so to speak,
around which everyone revolves. But this is a single instance of a
wider set of ithyphallic urges and desires. A male son does represent
a penis, but it is the masculinity most women subconsciously
desire, and by birthing a son they are able to become quasi-fathers.
This is also one way a daughter wins a victory over her mother. By
marrying and birthing she "gets" what her mother possessed and
coveted, her husband's penis. But, as we say, it is not the penis
itself, nor sex with her father, that are truly objects of desire. It
is triumph over her mother that matters, pure and simple. The phallus
simply becomes a symbol for a daughter's rivalry with her mother. It
is something the father (or male world) entrusted to her mother, and
something she must, in her fantasies, fight for and win for herself,
thereby demoting her mother. Should she feel a failure, her mother
remains an object of fear and hatred. In this case the daughter tends
to identify with her mother more. She is not able to break free
of her terrible power and her identification with the father and male
world is not sufficiently strong for her to enter the solar world as
an independent, confident woman. Her mother remains a major influence
in her life for years to come, and they both loathe strong independent
men on sight. The daughter remains in subconscious awe and envy of her
mother who, figuratively speaking, retains her husband's penis. In
extreme cases the daughter who fails to individuate and escape the
lunar world of her mother, denies her own masculinity altogether and
becomes a homosexual, surrounded by other women in a similar
predicament, or by feminized "castrated" homosexual men. A feminized
female may be subconsciously saying "...See daddy, I have turned away
from you and your kind because I choose not to hurt you like mother
hurts you. I haven't stolen your power. Aren't I a good daughter after
all?" The lesbian who openly detests men certainly failed to win her
dragon-fight, but justifies her feebleness by subconsciously blaming
her father for not assisting her in the struggle against her mother.
It is as a neurotic female that she enters the solar world which she
obsessively critiques and pretends to loathe. In less extreme cases, a
feminized female takes refuge in the world of a chivalric man whom she
knows has not broken free of his own terrible mother's influence.

For a son, the father is not regarded as a rival because he is not, as
we said, sexually interested in his mother. He is interested in the male
power he imagines will win him a victory over her. Of course this
identification does not occur if the father is seen to be a weakling
kowtowing to his wife's every whim. The son is more likely to despise
his father as much as he despises his mother, and likely to wish both
of them dead. As Melanie Klein and other child psychologists show
throughout their case histories, children are usually boiling with
repressed fury against their parents.

...in early analysis we find that quite small children of both
sexes are not only afraid of their father but have a feeling of
boundless admiration for his power – a feeling which is very
deep-lying and primary in character – Melanie Klein

Both the boy and girl turn away from the mother as a sort of
automatic reflex of their own needs for growth and independence
– Ernest Becker

Klein perceptively noted that the development of the superego, or
moral center, partly occurs as a means to the end of repressing the
guilt a child harbors over its rage toward its parents, particularly
the mother. This rage is for the most part not displayed openly
because the child fears retribution from its omnipotent parents, a
fact it becomes particularly aware of during the anal stage when their
disapproval and criticalness is more severe and conspicuous. The rage
Klein observed and analyzed comes out in nightmares, bed-wetting
cholic, tantrums, tics, nail-biting, asthma, poor eyesight, sibling
rivalry, bullying, animal phobias, animal cruelty, fantasies of
killing the parents and violent gameplay. The feelings of rage are so
powerful they must be hidden from the world and from the child itself.
This accounts not only for the function of the superego, but for its
relative severity. The critical voice of the superego, which alarms
the child, is less intense in children who do not harbor as much rage
toward their parents. In our opinion, a child's rage, whether strong
or weak, is mostly directed toward the mother. It is her imago that
shapes both the superego and ego-ideal, and primarily accounts for the
phenomenon of repression or dissociation. This fact is not conceded by
most Freudians who habitually implicate the father and his imago in
the process of superego development. Klein veers closest to the truth
in one passage from her book The Psychoanalysis of Children:

My experience has shown me that the first object of this
instinct for knowledge is the interior of the mother's body, which
the child first of all regards as an object of oral gratification and
then as the scene where intercourse between its parents takes place,
and where in its phantasy the father's penis and the children are
situated. At the same time as it wants to force its way into its
mother's body in order to take possession of the contents and to
destroy them, it wants to know what is going on and what things look
like in there

Since, according to Freud, it is the father's imago that forms a
child's superego, a girl is bound to identify closely with her
father's ways, since as far as she is subconsciously concerned he is part
of her. Consequently, she seeks to please him in all things and
curtails in herself whatever desires she thinks he disapproves of,
even if this includes hostility toward her mother. However, I do not
think this Freudian theory is wholly accurate. It implies that the
father is the stronger parent. But as I show, this is rarely the case.
The mother can be the dominant or "masculine" parent. Given that this
is the case, the daughter's identification with her cannot be due to
her father's masculinity. In other words, she does not have "penis
envy," no matter what Freudians argue. What she has is simple
antipathy toward her mother and the kind of masculinity she
projects. Since this masculinity is of a malignant kind, the
daughter's relationship with males and their world is benighted from
the start. It goes without saying that her concept of femininity is
also warped. Unless she gets to positively identify with a male
outside the home (a relative, teacher, coach or friend) the damage to
her psyche is not repaired. She may become immodest, deceitful,
delinquent or sexually promiscuous as she approaches puberty. Lacking
sound morality it is likely that her choice of sexual partners will be
inappropriate. This is usually the case with women whose knowledge of
masculinity and maleness is primarily derived from a terrible mother.
The implications of this are enormous. We see that it is not the
alleged profligacy of the male world that necessarily causes
immorality and delinquency in boys and girls. Women are not oppressed
and morally led astray because of males, but by their own distorted
conception of masculinity, a condition originally caused by their
malignant mother's attitudes. In today's world many women prefer
raising children without a male influence being present. This is
because the "male" is rejected in a similar way as the woman (or
mother) is rejected. Neither the father nor the mother have
contributed to the creation of a positive superego or ego-ideal
(Self-image). Consequently, both parents are demoted in the eyes of a
malignant daughter. She subconsciously wishes her son to be what her
parents are not. Her dream does not come true of course. She is unable
to raise the healthy child because her own Anima and Animus are
fractured and weak. In this way another cycle of dysfunction is set in
motion. A pregnant woman's phobias about giving birth, or her fears
about potential dangers besetting her health and fetus, arise because
her pregnancy reawakens her own terror in utero. She pines about the
condition of the fetus in the womb and needs constant reassurance from
nurses and doctors. She frets about her home environment, often
irrationally, because uncomfortable subconscious memories and feelings
are rekindled which trouble her for months and sometimes years after
she conceives. If her terrible mother – the grandmother to be
– appears at her bedside, the daughter is ambivalent and even
terrified by her presence. If her mother brazenly "takes over"
proceedings, the daughter's telepathic communion with her fetus is
eclipsed. It is not the fetus's birth that is prioritized, but her own
birth that is replayed. Indeed I believe it is partly because so many
women subconsciously desire this reenactment that birthrates soar
throughout the world, particularly among younger women. Husbands often
sense that the child they conceived is not important to their wives,
and that they themselves are simply means to a narcissistic end. This
partly accounts for why they do not feel as connected to their wives
and children as fathers of the past were wont to feel. It accounts for
why so many fathers are inclined to neglect or reject parental
responsibilities and wander away from their families. It is not that
they do not want their wives and children. It is more that the latter
do not want or respect them.

The attitude of the mother to her children is based, as we
know, upon her early relations to her objects. Those emotional
relationships which she had in early childhood towards her father and
uncles and brothers, or towards her mother and aunts and sisters,
will be reflected to a greater or lesser degree in her relationship
to the child according to its sex – Melanie Klein

We do agree that a daughter's identification with her father and his
ways plays a part in the repression of rage toward her mother. Her
rage will not become conscious as long as her father approves of his
wife. If a daughter is forced to take sides in a divorce, things
become more problematic. Her attitude toward one or other of the sexes
will drastically alter at this time. She will either become more
masculinized or less so depending on the behavior of her parents
toward her. She may be inclined to identify with her father since his
parting from his wife gratifies two strong subconscious needs. She,
the daughter, is now the primary female in her father's life, and by
sticking with him she wins a deeply desired victory over her
"castrating" mother. On the other hand if she sides with her mother,
for whatever reason, her conception of males is likely to considerably
deteriorate. She may even deny her own masculinity and begin
displaying homosexual tendencies. Of course this is also a possible
reaction if her father is a feminized type who shows no strength of
character to counteract his wife's more dominant behavior. If a mother
has a strong Animus, a daughter might still prefer her father's
masculinity, especially if he does not misuse his authority. In any
case, a malignant mother will disapprove of any strong male in her
daughter's life, be it the father, a friend, teacher or coach, etc.
That kind of man poses a direct threat to her control over her
daughter. Identification with such a man might lead to her daughter's
repressed rage against her coming to the surface. If a malignant
mother feels no threat from a man in this regard, she approves of him
as a suitor for her daughter's affections. How he expresses feelings
about his own mother let's her know all she needs to know about him.
If a suitor's relationship with his own mother was troubled and
trauma-creating, he will not be considered worthy of her
daughter's attentions. The girl who never succeeds in freeing herself
from her terrible mother's influence usually goes on to marry either a
feminized or chivalric male who, for the most part, poses no major
threat to her mother. In short, the feminized and terrible female have
themselves been "castrated" or demasculinized by their terrible
mother.

Girls are ostensibly more law-abiding than boys because the latter
possess a penis, the organ reminding them of their masculinity. The
organ reminds a boy that he has reached the solar world and escaped
the influence of his terrible mother. This is the case even if he has
not truly escaped. For non-malignant men their penis serves as a
reminder that they are creatively free to do what they want in the
solar world. For malignant men it reminds them that they can do as
they please in the solar world. The non-malignant type
exercises his masculine will to make the world a better place for all,
whereas the malignant type uses the world made by others to satiate
his repressed desires. For girls, the lack of a penis reminds them
that they have not fully escaped the influence of their "castrating"
mothers. This is true even if they have succeeded in doing so. The
non-malignant female is attracted to men whose presence emphasizes and
supports her creative will. The malignant female is not attracted to
such men. She prefers feminized or chivalric types who on the surface
look as if they are creative and self-possessed. But as we have seen,
these narcissistic types are not as differentiated as they appear. The
malignant female is attracted to them because they, like her, only appear
to have broken free of a terrible mother's influence. The creative
type asks too much of a malignant or feminized female. His presence
goads them to commit to Shadow Work and individuate. They would much
rather avoid this difficult process and follow paths endorsed by
society and malignant men and women like themselves.

We see then that the penis can symbolize victory over a terrible
mother. This in turn means that a healthy boy's superego does not need
to work overtime repressing rage and hate as much as it does in the
average girl who must continue repressing such emotions. This accounts
for why girls tend to be more law-abiding than boys. It also accounts
for why most girls avoid major life-challenges and why their
physicality and aggression expresses itself primarily in sporting
activities with other females. A girl's relative homeliness and
passivity means her ego is protected not only from challenges and
strife, but from the deeply repressed emotions of rage and anger she
would otherwise need to consciously draw upon in order to overcome
whatever obstacles stand in her way. Only a non-malignant female who
has won her dragon-fight authentically strives for and ethically wins
success in the solar world. Only a woman of this kind is secure within
herself. Such a woman is exceptionally rare, and consequently one
finds it hard to be optimistic about the future of civilization.

FREUD AND KLEIN go wildly wrong when they attribute a child's sadistic
fantasies and acts solely to his desire to harm one or both of its
parents. The majority of Klein's writings describe this syndrome which
is particularly strong for both boys and girls. Masochism is also
erroneously regarded as a by-product of a child's subconsciously
displaced desire to damage or kill a parent. The reasons given for a
child's rage are many, but Freudians believe the negative emotions
primarily arise at the oral stage when a mother weans incorrectly or
neglectfully. Feelings of emptiness as well as the absence of the
mother, even for short periods, terrifies a child who soon becomes
hostile and defensive toward the offending parent. On that point we
agree. Freudians also describe the emptiness experienced by a child at
the anal stage when it is encouraged or forced, as the case may be, to
defecate on schedule. The pang of emptiness would not be as
disagreeable at the anal stage if the oral stage passed without
trauma. Trouble is sure to erupt, however, if the latter was a time of
lack and loss. In any case we are unable to accept the classic
Freudian position as to the origins of sado-masochism. In our opinion
Freudians have things the wrong way round. It is not rage toward the
mother that primarily accounts for maladaptation during early and late
Oedipal stages. That is a secondary phenomenon. It is the underlying
antipathy and resentment from the mother toward her child
(manifested in neglect, coldness, disapproval, anger, criticism,
punishment, mixed-messages, hypocrisy, ambivalence, favoritism,
clinginess, etc) that is the primary if not sole reason for her
child's pathological tendencies toward itself, as well as toward
siblings, parents and other people.

Of course a child does harbor enormous rage toward its parents. This
fact is not disputed. I agree that the rage is mostly directed toward
the mother for inattentive weaning and other infractions. Anger is
also directed toward a mother because she is, in our opinion, the
parent who primarily constitutes her child's superego. Freudians know
that the superego acts like an inner prohibiting parent, suppressing
the many taboo urges of the id or unconscious. Jungians know that the
superego gives rise to one's Shadow Self, the legitimate but taboo
aspects of one's personality that must be disowned and repressed in
order to please the parents and society. The superego, which is often
more punitive than most parents are wont to be, is therefore a source
of considerable anguish to the id and ego which wish to be freed from
its oppressive authority. We see this rebellious streak expressed at
different periods in a child's development, particularly during
puberty. A girl is less inclined to act out against authority than the
average boy. This is because, as stated above, they cannot afford to
resist strong emotions such as anger from any external source. It
arouses their own inner rage and compromises sanity. Girls are,
therefore, not only more law-abiding but are inclined to emulate their
mother's ways more than boys are wont to do. They do so even in the
case of a terrible mother. If a girl's rebelliousness and rage does
emerge on a conscious level, it is more likely to do so toward her own
son or daughter after she conceives. In other words she does not rebel
against the strictures of her own superego, but as a superego
she disciplines, punishes and traumatizes her own children. As a
terrible mother herself she is able to vent her sado-masochistic
tendencies by "castrating" her own son or daughter. This scenario once
again reveals the close connections that exist between society's mores
and the female psyche. The terrible mother is not flaunting
society's standards when she mistreats her children. She is, in fact,
acting in accordance with society's preferences. Her superego was
constellated by way of her mother and society. Now, toward her own
offspring she does as her mother did. It is not as an Imperial Self
that she acts violently and sado-masochistically toward other people,
but as an ego completely dominated and instructed by her superego or
pseudo-self. Ironically, she is able to satiate legitimate
frustrations by way of her superego not in spite of it. Therefore, for
women of her kind there is no need whatsoever to exercise and express
the Imperial Self or live authentically and holistically. There is no
need to resist society's ways and individuate, and no need to champion
creative will in herself or her offspring. All she need do to exorcise
her considerable personal rage is go along with society's norms and
directives. We now see how implicit or explicit female violence gives
rise to pathogenic societies.

In Reichean terms women tend to be less "armored" than men. The
reasons are explained above. Their identification with their mothers
and compliance with the directives of society means their superegos
are relieved and less severe. An acculturated woman still embodies
considerable rage toward her mother, but is able to process that rage
by way of her malignant relationship with her own children. Women who
have not conceived and birthed a child tend to be more armored, in the
Reichean sense. This need to reduce the power of the superego, and
lessen anxiety and rage, accounts for soaring birthrates throughout
the world. It also accounts for the rise of child-abuse and teen
delinquency. Additionally, it is the reason why most women are not
interested in Shadow Work or individuation. They have no need for
either. These processes are only of concern to those who cannot
otherwise lower their levels of anxiety. The inauthentic female may
reduce her anxiety by subordinating her will to social norms and
immersion in domestic minutiae, but she remains an inhabitant of the
lunar world. Such a mother hampers the positive development of her own
children on all levels. In turn they too find it difficult to
matriculate to the solar world, and are unlikely to become
non-malignant types.

FOR THE MOST PART Freudians track a child's explicit and
implicit sadism only to the oral stage of the Oedipal phase, when the
infant first experiences emptiness from insufficient weaning. Of
course, as I show, feelings of emptiness predate the weaning period.
Anxiety and pain exist from the days after conception not after birth.
And these emotions are first experienced at the hands of one's mother.
The father's influence is secondary and comes in at a much later stage
of development. At the phallic stage, when identification with the
male and his world intensifies, a child is enamored by masculine
strength after witnessing the dynamics of the sexual scene. The power
of the father and the relative docility of the mother, and her final
collapse at the end of the perplexing scene, appears to the child as a
death of sorts. It its imaginings the child parodies the event,
dwelling mostly on the conquest or destruction of his mother that
appears to occur at the termination of the sex act. It is this
identification with the muscular strength of the father that causes a
child to progress through the final stages of the Oedipal phase, from
the phallic to the latent and genital stages. It is the reason for the
child's interest in ithyphallic images and games, for sibling rivalry,
exhibitionism, combat, and other well-known interests and syndromes.
The independence of a young boy (or girl) at this stage is, however,
again handicapped by the fear that their secret hatred and destructive
desires toward the mother will be found out by the latter or, more
problematically, that she might actually die because of the evil
intent directed toward her. This fear steeps the child in feelings of
considerable subconscious guilt, which in turn expedites conscious
conformity to the mother's will. The child subsequently becomes more
needy and clingy toward her, not from love but the need for
reassurance that his destructive thoughts haven't made her ill or
killed her off. Her presence simply serves as guilt-abatement. As I
show in Chapter Four, this falling into lockstep with the mother's
will, because of subconscious guilt and repressed rage, corresponds to
the strengthening of the superego and ego-ideal. The result is that
from childhood on a person's morality and image of themselves is
tinged, and in neurotic cases overwhelmed, with subconscious guilt. As
I point out it is almost invariably the imago of the mother that
determines one's typology, not the image of the father. The neurotic
child goes on to become delinquent, breaking rules and accepting
punishment because he or she still has not rid themselves of guilt
over their destructive thoughts. The child's guilt is intensified if,
for whatever reason, a mother becomes ill or does in fact die.

The child's desire for punishment is likely to increase its antisocial
tendencies. Most habitual criminals as well as murderers are
subconsciously motivated by a cocktail of troublesome emotions,
particularly those of hate, rage and guilt. External punishment
is regarded as less problematic than the reproaches they endure
throughout their life from their own superegos. Non-criminal types who
choose to make no waves and obediently conform to every rule in the
book do so to lower the intensity of their superego's disapproval.
Acculturated types are severe toward criminals who get to express
emotions the former forbid themselves to acknowledge. This does not
mean that non-criminals are sane and non-violent. They include people
who cunningly find socially-approved ways of expatiating their inner
anxiety. This does not make them any less violent and immoral than
those society incarcerates and punishes.

FREUD'S SPECULATIONS about the prehistoric totemic father and his
rivalry with his sons, as presented in Totem and Taboo, are
incorrect. It is now known that the authority of the mother was
predominant for hundreds of thousands of years before males took over
tribal affairs.

Primitive religion...abounds in pictures of a self-sufficient
or (later) hermaphroditic goddess who originally creates life without
the aid of man – Otto Rank

FREUD WAS NOT CORRECT when he proposed that sexual drives are the
central component of a person's mental and emotional character. Sexual
energy is only one avenue by which libido or bioenergy expresses
itself. Rank, Adler, Reich, Jung, Horney, and even Anna Freud were not
satisfied with this concept and were compelled to explain human
behavior in broader ways than Freud, for all his brilliance and
insight, was wont to do. By the time he came to write Three
Essays on Sexuality and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud
knew that there were other more important motivating drives than
sexual energy. He postulated that hate was an older emotion than love.
And he was right, at least for the reasons I delineate in this book.
In other words, that which is needed and loved by an infant can at the
same time be rejected and loathed. The object might conceivably be
despised first, or hated because it is desired. The child may
hate himself right from the off. If this is the case, the
syndrome needs investigating and explaining, which is what I have done
in this book.

FREUD WAS INCORRECT when he explained the origin of the superego
and ego-ideal. For Freud the father's influence was the dominant cause
for the orientation and function of both. However, as I show, it is
the mother's influence that dominates in the pre-Oedipal stages of
development. By the time the father's influence comes to bear, the
superego and ego-ideal functions are already set. The father's
influence, as Freud defined it, exists but is secondary to that of the
mother. A child certainly knows to obey his father, who is "always
right." But he learns to obey his mother who is "always right" just
that tiny bit more.

Freud makes the mistake of deriving the superego from the
Oedipus complex and chiefly from the father; he regards it as a late
authority resulting from introjection – Erich Neumann

FREUD BELIEVED that the function of the superego was to suppress what
was antisocial and evil in one's personality. But according to Karen
Horney its function is to suppress the true Self, in order to
win approval from parents and society. The superego and ego-ideal set
up an idealized or false self in place of the true Self. Freud
certainly knew that the superego represents the norms and standards of
society, but did not emphasize that the so-called "evil" impulses
being suppressed were not in themselves evil. Rather they are
legitimate expressions of the Imperial Self considered taboo by
authority figures who leave little room for a child's natural
expression. Freud did not see that the superego suppresses legitimate
memories and feelings of anxiety experienced by way of a mother's will
during pre-Oedipal stages of development.

Rheingold says categorically that annihilation anxiety is not
part of the child's natural experience but is engendered in him by
bad experiences with a depriving mother – Ernest Becker

IS THE SUPEREGO the origin of the unconscious, or is the latter
an autonomous psychic phenomenon? This was the stance of Nietzsche and
later of Jung who borrowed and repackaged many of Nietzsche's key
ideas. For reasons already explained, Freud did not acknowledge the
supposed wondrousness of the unconscious, its symbolic richness and
autonomy. His idea that the contents of the unconscious were
derivative of an individual's waking life did not, according to Jung
and his followers suffice as a comprehensive explanation of the
unconscious. Others think Freud's conception was nearer the mark. It
is up to each reader to decide who was correct in their assessment of
the origin and nature of the so-called unconscious. Was it Jung, Freud
or Rank? Or were they all correct to a degree? Only by way of a
diligent respectful lifelong study of their superlative works will we
know for sure.

ACCORDING TO ERICH FROMM and many other analysts and thinkers, Freud
was wrong about his Thanatos or Death Instinct theory. Numerous
volumes have been written about the ins and outs of the theory, and
the basics are provided on most online encyclopedias. We do not wish
to take up space here rehashing the details of the theory as Freud
presented it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. We wish only to
address Otto Rank's perceptive reappraisal and simplification of the
complex idea, which existentialist philosophers and psychologists
utilized thereafter. Rank and the existential psychologists prefer not
to think of man as Freud presents him, a being victimized by
conflicting "drives." They certainly do not acknowledge the existence
of a biological death drive. For them a person's inner anxiety arises
because of their conscious choice to live inauthentically, along the
lines described in detail by Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger.
Like Heidegger, Rank did not believe there was a biological
predisposition which drove one to kill themselves or seek out morbid
experiences. But he did clearly see that a neurotic mind does psychologically
stagnate. In other words the death drive for Rank and the
existentialist psychologists is simply the act of deanimation by
losing oneself in a meaningless existence. It is the state Heidegger
referred to as Das Man, or "everyone." In English it would be
better described as being "nobody." The faceless, nondescript masses
going about their domestic routines without true purpose or
Self-expression was for Rank deathly. Conformity, blind obedience,
unthinking loyalty to this or that group or cause, addiction,
infatuation with sport and games, with gambling, gossip, pornography,
excessive TV watching, and other superficial pastimes, keeps us from
becoming Self-directed individuals with a true sense of Self-esteem.
We do as others do, and think as they think. As Rank points out in The
Trauma of Birth, most people harbor the same regressive impulse, so
why not clan up in other ways? The crowd provides whatever comfort and
direction a "nobody" requires. The routine of the job provides his
sustenance and kills the long hours of the day in which he would only
find himself thoroughly bored. Banal relationships also fill the
emotional void, providing a way of expatiating the pent up rage one
feels toward parents and toward oneself for failing to heroically
stand up and fight back when harassed and emotionally or physically
injured. As Erich Fromm writes:

...many married couples stay together for this reason: the
marriage gives them the opportunity to experience hate, quarrels,
sadism, and sublimation. They stay together not in spite of their
fights, but because of them. Masochistic behavior, the pleasure in
suffering or submitting, has one of its roots in this need for
excitement. Masochistic persons suffer from the difficulty of being
able to initiate excitation and of reacting readily to normal
stimuli; but they can react when the stimulus overpowers them

Fromm also addresses the "Death Instinct" in a manner acceptable
to Rank and the existentialists:

One girl, hospitalized in a state mental hospital, had slashed
her wrists and explained her act by saying that she wanted to see if
she had any blood...One of the boys in the training school, for
instance, threw rocks up on top of his garage and let them roll down,
and would try to catch each rock with his head. His explanation was
that this was the only way in which he could feel something...He
reported that feeling the pain made him feel at least something

As we become more technically sophisticated we hope to escape
psychological distress by way of ever more powerful but convenient
pharmaceutical drugs. Happiness is only a prescription away. In severe
cases, such as those addressed throughout this book, a neurotic person
rails against the world as if it were the great impediment to the
regressive urge. Cutting off and withdrawing entirely from people and
the world ends in schizophrenia, which as Freud and other
psychologists warned, is a form of living death. Some think it is a
state worse than death.

...even when the umbilical cord is cut there remains a deep
craving to undo the separation, to return to the womb or to find a
new situation of absolute protection and security...Man, aware of his
separateness, needs to find new ties with his fellow man; his very
sanity depends on it. Without strong affective ties to the world, he
would suffer from utter isolation and lostness – Erich Fromm

...prolonged or repeated disruptions of the mother-child bond
during the first five years of life are known to be especially
frequent in patients later diagnosed as psychopathic or sociopathic
personalities – John Bowlby

The stage of uroboric incest is the lowest and earliest phase
in the ego's history. Regression to, and fixation at, this level
occupy an important place in the life of the average person, and they
play a decidedly negative role in the life of the neurotic and a
decidedly positive one in the life of creative man – Erich
Neumann

Basically Freud's theory of the death drive attempts to explain human
aggression and destructiveness. We see, however, that it does not
cogently explain these tendencies. Rank's theories hit closer to the
mark, as do those of Wilhelm Reich and Arthur Janov. We see from what
I have said about the regressive urge, that one might be inclined to
kill others or even destroy oneself if the urge is perpetually
obstructed and rage builds to a critical point. It is however
ultimately rage against oneself that forces us to live inauthentically
or act out in violent and destructive ways. We might harbor
considerable rage and self-hate because we were not able to stand up
for ourselves against violent parents or, alternatively, because we
were not able to live up to their impossibly high or irrational
standards. As a result we are self-berating and drowned in feelings of
impotency and incompetence. Since we do not possess the power to
rememdy or achieve what is truly if subconsciously desired, we can
find the power to obstruct and punish other people. We can thwart
their desires. If we falsely convince ourselves that another person
stands in our way, or that they "don't understand us," we legitimize
our hostility and sadistic acts against them. If we are racked with
pain, why shouldn't other people share a measure of that pain? The
chivalric male's brutish Will to Power derives from this
sado-masochistic attitude. The schizophrenic attempts to withdraw into
his mentalized womb, while the manic type inflates his importance in
the world external to himself. His sense of omnipotence compensates
for this inner infantilism, and is in any case a false feeling. Even
if he bolsters his omnipotence by wearing a corporate tie, dog-collar
or orange robe, it does not truly make him feel as powerful as he'd
like to be. He simply continues his cycle of dysfunction and enslaves
himself to some other malignant mother or father figure. For the
schizophrenic or manic type nature as it is means nothing. Other
people are not seen for who they are. They are either causes of
anxiety or means of alleviating it. This accounts for why our world
fills with cliques and cults, most of them bizarre, perverse and
dehumanizing. This is why people focus on doing rather than on their way
of doing. It is why ethics have been thrown out of the window in most
spheres of activity and by most people. It is why our world breeds
more malignant than non-malignant types, and why, despite the welter
of superficial "fixes" on offer, little will change for the better as
the years go by.

APPENDIX FOUR

Reading List and Research

◊

Subjects to Research

Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Psychopathology, Psychogenic
Disease, History of Psychopathy, The Unconscious, Consciousness,
Emotion, Libido, Pleasure Principle, Reality Principle, Oedipus
Complex, Electra Complex, Penis Envy, Archetypes (Jungian), Persona
(Jungian), Crowd Pyschology, Collective Unconscious, Anima and Animus
(Jungian), Autism, Autophobia, Adultism, Id, Ego, Superego,
Conscience, Free Association, Attachment Theory, Separation Anxiety,
Identity Crisis, Autophobia, Inferiority Complex, Defence Mechanisms,
Repression, Dissociation, Regression, Displacement, Sublimation,
Denial, Rationalization, Pathology, Psychopathy, Depersonalization,
Disreality, Depression, Neurosis, Psychosis, Paranoia, Narcissism,
Schizophrenia, Obsession, Manic-Depression, Bi-Polar Disorder,
Borderline Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder,
Anhedonia, Dysphoria, Dyssemia, Ahedonia, Love-Hate Relationships,
Love Styles, Adultism, Creativity, Playspace, Little Hans (Herbert
Graf), Metabolism, Neurohormones, Neurotransmitters, Amygdala,
Hippocampus, Hypothalamus, Pituitary Gland, Parasympathetic System,
Autonomic System, Fibromyalgia, Nervous System, Venal Artery, Myth of
Orestes, Feminism and the Oedipus Complex. Kyriarchy, Venus Figurines,
Monomyth. Enantiodromia. Kenosis.

Psychologists

Erich Neumann, Otto Rank, Carl Gustav Jung, Sigmund Freud, Anna
Freud, Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney,
Edith Jacobson, Alice Miller, Theodore Lidz, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann,
Franz Alexander, Alfred Adler, Boris Sidis, Georg Groddeck, Rudolf
Otto, Jean Piaget, Pierre Janet, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Alexander
Lowen, Abraham Maslow, Erik Erikson, Theodore Reik, Lawrence Kohlberg,
Arno Gruen, R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, John Bowlby, Arthur Janov, Otto
Kernberg, Stanislav Grof, D. W. Winnicott, Gregory Bateson, Antonio
Damasio, Frederick Leboyer, Nathaniel Branden

Suggested Reading List

Melanie Klein – The Psychoanalysis of Children

Anna Freud – The Ego and its Defenses

Mary Esther Harding – Psychic Energy

Erich Neumann

The Child

The Great Mother

The Origin and Evolution of Consciousness

Jean Piaget

Psychology of the Child

Language and Thought of the Child

The Child's Conception of the World

Erik Erikson

Childhood and Society

Identity: Youth and Crisis

John Bowlby

A Secure Base

The Making and Breaking of Affection

Arthur Janov

The Biology of Love

The Primal Revolution

The Anatomy of Mental Illness

Otto Rank

The Trauma of Birth

Psychology and the Soul

Beyond Psychology

Alexander Lowen

Narcissism

Language of the Body

Betrayal of the Body

Fear of Life

Arno Gruen

Betrayal of the Self

The Insanity of Normality

Alice Miller

Banished Knowledge

The Body Never Lies

For Your Own Good

John P. Conger

The Body in Recovery

Bessel van der Kolk

The Body Keeps the Score

Traumatic Stress

Peter A. Levine

Trauma Through a Child's Eyes

In An Unspoken Voice

Healing Trauma

Robert Scaer

The Body Bears the Burden

8 Keys to Brain-Body Balance

Babette Rothschild

The Body Remembers

8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery

Nathaniel Branden

Honoring the Self

The Disowned Self

Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

How to Raise Your Self-Esteem

The Psychology of Self-Esteem

Erich Fromm

Man For Himself

The Pathology of Normalcy

The Sane Society

The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

Escape From Freedom

Karen Horney

Feminine Psychology

The Neurotic Personality of our Time

Neurosis and Human Growth

New Ways in Psychoanalysis

Our Inner Conflicts

Edith Jacobson

Depression

Psychic Conflict and Reality

Scott Peck

People of the Lie

The Road Less Traveled

The Road Less Traveled and Beyond

A Different Drum

Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence

Social Intelligence

Vital Lies, Simple Truths

The Brain and Emotional Intelligence

Rollo May

The Meaning of Anxiety

Man's Search for Himself

Edward Edinger

Ego and Archetype

The Creation of Consciousness

Anatomy of the Psyche

Robert A. Johnson

Owning Our Own Shadow

We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love

Ecstasy: Understanding the Psychology of Joy

Additional Reading List

Martha Stout

Masks of Sanity

The Sociopath Next Door

Robert D. Hare

Without Conscience

Snakes in Suits

Joseph Campbell

Hero With A Thousand Faces

Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

Occidental Mythology

Oriental Mythology

Gustave Le Bon

The Crowd

The Psychology of Socialism

Ayn Rand

Philosophy, Who Needs It?

The Virtue of Selfishness

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

For the New Intellectual

The Return of the Primitive

The New Left

The Romantic Manifesto

The Voice of Reason

Jean Markale

The Great Goddess

Women and the Celts

Leonard Shlain

Sex, Time and Power

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

Art and Physics

Susan Douglas – The Mommy Myth

Judith Warner – Perfect Madness

Cathi Hanauer – The Bitch in the House

Roy Sheppard – That Bitch

Maggie Jackson – Distracted

Mark Bauerlein – The Dumbest Generation

Phyllis Chessler – Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

Frederick Leboyer – Birth Without Violence

Anthony Storr – Human Aggression

Oliver James – They Fuck You Up

John Modrow – How to Become a Schizophrenic

David Viscott – Emotional Resilience

Susan Forward – Toxic Parents

Lenore Terr – Too Scared to Cry

Immanuel Velikovsky – Mankind in Amnesia

Warren Farrell – The Myth of Male Power

Suzanne Venker – The War on Men

Esther Vilar – The Manipulated Man

Steven Adams – Women First, Men Last

Jack Donovan – The Way of Men

Ronald Dworkin – Artificial Happiness

Patricia Pearson – When She Was Bad

Wolfgang Lederer – Fear of Women

Christopher Lasch – Culture of Narcissism

Kerry Boulton – The Psychotic Left

Ernest Becker – Denial of Death

Loren Pederson – Dark Hearts

Sandra L. Dennis – Embrace the Daimon

Elan Golomb – Trapped in the Mirror

Nina W. Brown – Children of the Self-Absorbed

Roy F. Baumeister – Evil: Inside Human Cruelty
and Violence

Frank Bruno – It's Ok to be Neurotic

Theodore Rubin – Compassion and Self-Hate

Cacioppo & Patrick – Loneliness

Carl Goldberg – The Evil We Do

Joel Bakan – The Corporation

Harvey M. Checkley – The Mask of Sanity

Michael Gazzaniga – Nature's Mind

Gregg D. Jacobs – The Ancestral Brain

Richard Tarnas – Cosmos and Psyche

Linda Buzzell – Healing with Nature in Mind

James F. Masterson – Search for the Real Self

John F. Schumaker – The Corruption of Reality

Perceval Symonds – The Ego and the Self

Anthony Stevens – The Two Million Year Old Self

Monica Sjoo – The Great Cosmic Mother

Merlin Stone – When God Was a Woman

Shuttle & Redgrove – The Wise Wound

J. J. Bacofen – Myth, Religion and Mother Right

Also the complete works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung and
Wilhelm Reich.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Ireland, Michael Tsarion is an
expert on the occult histories of Ireland and America. He has made the
deepest researches into Atlantis, the origins of evil and Irish
origins of civilization. He is the author of eleven books on various
subjects, and he gives outstanding presentations on the Western
Magical Tradition, Hermetic Arts of Divination, Atlantis and the
Prehistoric Ages, The Irish Origins of Civilization, Astro-Theology,
Origins of Evil, Secret Societies, Female Illuminati, Subversive Use
of Sacred Symbolism in the Media, Symbol Literacy, Psychic Vampirism,
War on Consciousness, Mysticism and German Idealism.

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