Facing the Dragon

by Robert L. Moore

  Understanding this makes a lot of sense out of political and organizational behavior around leadership. You get a little blood in the water around your executive, or around your king, and the sharks begin to gather. Once the leader shows himself to be vulnerable, unable to carry the numinosity, then the human psyche has an archetypal desire to kill him and get rid of him so we can find another one who doesn't have that flaw. If the king has a flaw, the kingdom can't flourish. That is the old wounded Fisher King myth, but there are also wounded Fisher Queens. When I do active imagination with groups on this, I sometimes find a person whose queen is healthy, but whose king is sick. Or I find a person whose king is healthy, but whose queen is ill. It is fascinating to look at that if you know the archetypal dynamics. A whole range of things happens based on these archetypal dynamics.

  Audience: Joseph Campbell talks about the collapse of mythology in general, and you talk about the collapse of the sacred canopy. Where do we go from here on this? Campbell says we have to go out and find it individually because the collective is not doing it. So where do we find that?

  Moore: Yes, we need to address that question. Campbell's contribution is to say, “You need to become students of world mythology to enrich your understanding of the fullness of masculinity and femininity, and the richness of all human experience. Mythology will give you a vocabulary, a language to talk about matters of the soul.” Campbell is right about that. It is time for us to do this. We cannot allow ourselves to be lost in tribal myths anymore. We must open ourselves up to the entire symbolic treasure, the human symbolic trust.

  Joseph Campbell, however, was not a psychologist, and he did not pretend to be one. Some people try to turn him into a guru, but he does not make a great guru. His advice to “follow your bliss” may sound good, and now everyone talks about “following your bliss,” but they forget that Hitler was following his bliss. If he could have followed his bliss a little longer, I for one might not be here today, because I have enough Jewish blood in me that I could have been burned in the ovens. Following your bliss can be a recipe for enormous ego inflation and destruction. So Campbell did not have Jung's genius for understanding the moral and spiritual discipline required to create and regulate the ego-Self axis.

  Campbell does give us the imperative to learn human mythic language. His contribution is one big move toward a new global human Pentecost. The image of Pentecost is a great healing metaphor that counterbalances the image of confusion in the Tower of Babel. You hear all these different languages, but then you start thinking, “Now I can listen to this Islamic mythology and make some sense out of it as a human being.” This is new. With Campbell and Eliade, we have reached a new level in our growing capacity to be good stewards of the entire human symbolic trust.

  Why is this so important? For one thing, we need to understand that the patriarchal symbolism permeating our culture results from being lost in a narrow band of the spectrum of the world's mythic imagination. The archetypal psyche of the coniunctio, the divine marriage of king and queen, is expressed in all the world's mythologies, but only partially in each one. When people think they can solve the world's problems with a different myth, they are only offering to make you one-sided in a new way. The issue is to realize that we need to create a container, a chalice or grail, that holds with reverence the entire human symbolic trust and enables us to cherish it all.

  Audience: Bliss is like a Sanskrit word satchitananda which means “bliss” in a very sacred way, not in a profane way, but we tend to “follow our bliss” in a Western way. Also I wonder about Jung's comment that a Westerner cannot grasp an Easterner's thought and vice versa, so that having a world view of mythology might be wrong for us, because our internal wiring would be, maybe, circuit A for Westerners and Circuit B for Easterners. Moore: Yes, that is software from culture, the cultural unconscious, but the archetypal psyche is not software; the collective unconscious is specieswide.

  Audience: How do you know? How do you know that it is not differentiated?

  Moore: First, because I am not a racist, and second, because of the burgeoning scientific evidence that humans across the world are essentially the same primate animal. That is not to say I have no radical differences within myself. I carry Russian Jew, Cajun French Catholic, and Scotch-Irish Protestant, so I have a lot of the cultural unconscious within me, and I am quite clear that it comes from very different streams. We need to study how ethnic and cultural differences impact the unconscious. There is no question that there is a cultural unconscious, but in a Jungian framework the cultural unconscious is not the same as the archetypal Self or the collective unconscious. The instinctual collective unconscious is specieswide.6

  I am a neo-Jungian on this issue. No one has to agree with me on it, but I think it is much more hopeful to assume a general human unconscious that serves as a base for the cultural unconscious, the family unconscious, and the personal unconscious. It is layered like that. I am convinced that any hope for unification and cooperation of people around the world is grounded in an affirmation of a common deep psyche from which we can reach out to each other. That is the importance of Campbell, Eliade, Jung, and the other people who are urging us to look at world mythologies as the human symbolic trust.

  We will never get psychic wholeness by adding up all the myths and then dividing them by a hundred. That is the old syncretism. An authentically Jungian point of view is different from that. Jungian psychology in these issues is not theosophy, or even an attempt to find a “mono-myth.” Theosophy tries to study all the world's religions as if they were basically the same, and then tries to develop a theology that unites them all. That approach is not Jungian. The products of the imagination are diverse and different, and any particular product of the imagination—whether a myth, a dream, or a philosophy, a theology, a psychology, or anything else—will only be one expression of the deep archetypal Self of the pleroma, and it will be uniquely structured, and it will be partial, not complete so as to cover all expressions.7

  So we need to find other ways to relate to the wholeness besides adding up myths and coming up with a new theosophy. That will not work. That is another reason why Jung argued that Westerners should not appropriate Eastern ideas too quickly, or that Easterners should not appropriate Western materials. I differ from Jung in emphasis here. I think we must ask people to study the mythologies of other cultures even if they do not want to convert to them. It is essential for people to study and learn from the symbolisms and mythologies of other faiths and cultures than their own. All these materials belong to the human symbolic trust, a part of the inheritance of every human child. The entire symbolic pleroma, therefore, is a very important part of the human birthright and must be stewarded appropriately by all of us. Jung's work offers us a way to address this task effectively.

  NOTES

  1. This chapter is an edited account of the early morning session on Sunday, July 16, 1989, of a weekend workshop and discussion led by Robert Moore at the C. G. Jung Institute in Chicago, Illinois. The original program was entitled “Jungian Psychology and Human Spirituality: Liberation from Tribalism in Religious Life.”

  2. Mystics and magi of different traditions understand how to incarnate these energies in ways that are creative and not demonic. I am working on a book, to be titled Riding the Dragon, which will address the creative embodiment of dragon energies.

  3. The classic Sanskrit Hindu epic Ramayana appears in many English translations and novelized retellings.

  4. See Falk (1987). Additional background can be found in Ling (1997) and Boyd (1975).

  5. On the ego-Self axis, see Edinger (1972).

  6. Jungian analyst Margaret Shanahan has done extensive research into how the cultural unconscious impacts on individual appropriation of archetypal potentials. On the instinctual, specieswide unconscious, see Stevens (1982, 1993).

  7. See the philosophical theology of Paul Tillich for an unsurpassed understanding of the limitations of language and symbolism.
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  CHAPTER 8

  How Modern Spiritual Narcissism Leads to Destructive Tribalism

  THIS CHAPTER REVIEWS OUR PROGRESS THUS FAR AND then looks at how all the psychological issues relating to the combat myth and the archetypal enemy work together to emerge as the problem of pathological tribalism.1

  The Tower of Babel image illustrated how human infantile grandiosity brings individuals and groups into deep struggles to maintain their cohesiveness, and this leads them to great difficulties relating to each another. Any serious study of narcissism and narcissistic pathology, whatever your school of thought, will show that the greater the unregulated grandiosity in the psyche, the more difficulty the individual has with both symptoms and relationships. All the major schools of psychoanalysis—classical Freudianism, Adlerian, Jungian, and contemporary Kohutian self psychology—recognize the reality of a powerful grandiosity in the psyche that is not the authentic human ego, even though the ego often unconsciously identifies with it. In fact, the worse the parenting you received, the more likely your consciousness is contaminated with grandiose fantasies, wishes, and behaviors.

  Almost all psychopathology, except what comes from biochemical deficits or organic failures, results from individuals not having had an adequate nurturing environment to let them down empathically and slowly from their little high chairs. We come into the world on a grandiose divine pedestal. That is what the Jungian understanding of the divine child is all about. This is perfectly normal and natural, but the task of human maturation must be to help the individual get down off of that little divine high chair and into a human position.

  I love to teach comparative psychotherapy, because all therapies are trying to help you do that same type of thing, to be more realistic, to be less totalistic in your claims, to do less exaggerating, to do fewer behaviors based on some sense of entitlement or special exemptions, and help the individual to face limitations. All therapies tend to address these issues in some form or another.

  We are in a position today to understand this phenomenon better. We should provide public education on this, however, and not let this understanding be the exclusive possession of a professional guild. We need to realize that the human propensity to grandiosity is universal. This is not a simple moralism. When people acted out in grandiose ways, the spiritual traditions were hard on them moralistically. Acting out in a grandiose way merely shows the seriousness of the wound. It is a sign of either excessive pampering or inadequate nurture. Self psychologists would say it indicates a lack of attunement with parental figures, how much impatience was encountered that tragically split off the child's godlike consciousness into the unconscious rather than employing its numinous energies to feed life, to inspire and fuel the child, and provide the strength needed for work and play.

  We need to understand the universality of this propensity to unregulated grandiosity. I never met anyone who did not have a struggle with it. I have met a lot of people who didn't think they did. Some people have the illusion that psychoanalysis successfully transformed all their primitive grandiosity. You can only sustain such a fantasy of idealizing transference if you don't have to get along with very many psychoanalysts! Once you do, no matter what the school of thought, you soon recognize that they still have plenty of primitive infantile grandiosity left. Otherwise, their feelings wouldn't get hurt so easily.

  Audience: What do you think about the feminist theory that every woman should raise her consciousness and discover “the goddess within”?

  Moore: Absolutely, I think that is true. Every woman, and every man, needs to discover “the goddess within,” but it is also important for them not to mistake themselves for it, or project it onto another human being. This is where a lot of contemporary voices do not help us much. The men's movement and the women's movement need to help individuals connect to the coniunctio, the inner divine marriage of the king and queen, but not to identify with it. What we call “problems of gender identity” in loosely organized personalities often result from overidentification with the coniunctio. The deep Self contains the king and queen in all of their forms. If your personality is loosely organized and without an adequately functioning ego, you may have a lot of androgynous fantasies. I would rather say that the deep Self is a royal couple than that it is androgynous. The two are very different. When the human ego thinks it is the royal couple, you have a lot of grandiose acting out. We increasingly have many people in our culture and around the world who unconsciously identify with the divine couple.

  Audience: What does that look like on a practical level?

  Moore: It manifests in individuals who are extremely confused about their sexual identity and simultaneously assailed with impulse disorders. Some new magazines are trying to get people to be complete in themselves, a sort of Madison Avenue autism. Think about that. That is why we need to have some psychoanalytic sophistication, because a lot of popular advertising is aggressively selling pathological narcissism as a normative vision for human life.

  Certain circles today argue for a human norm based on the old autonomy fantasies, that the mature human is autonomous, adequate within himself or herself. This is just a symptom of pathological narcissism. When you work with people in their problems with relationships, and their problems with their own instability, you will notice that those individuals who are struggling to be one in themselves have enormous problems with their symptomatology and acting out. They have tremendous difficulty dealing with other real persons. They prefer fantasy persons, what we call the anima and animus projections, the nonreal person that you are in love with.

  Robert Johnson's little book, We (1985), laid out a lot of interesting material on this. The person who carries the goddess projection for a man, or the god projection for a woman, is a real, human person. You discover this as soon as you have problems in a relationship. The little boy king in us, and the little girl queen in us, do not like it when our partners do not worship us uncritically.

  People deal with this all the time. When someone treats you like a human being and does not worship you, to the extent that you are overidentified consciously or unconsciously with a grandiose exhibitionistic self-organization, you will have a rage response and a “grandiose retreat” into isolation. The more sensitive and easily hurt we are to nonadoring responses, the more it signals a possession state by this grandiose organization. When you find yourself having rage responses and withdrawing into detached isolation, such as when you say, “I do not need them out there, because they treat me that way,” that is the angry king or queen. I should say prince or princess, because it is not a mature king or queen. There is much literature available on this.

  To understand the dynamics of human evil, whether in the personality or the human community, you must look at the underlying dynamics of pathological narcissism. Scott Peck is right about that, but he is wrong to make it the province of only a handful of evil people. Narcissistic pathology is more like sin, a condition common to all. Spiritually speaking, you don't ask, “Am I a sinner?” You ask, “How am I a sinner?” So psychologically speaking, you shouldn't ask, “Am I carrying any narcissistic pathology?” You should ask, “Where is my narcissistic pathology? How am I acting it out? Where is my continuing residual unconscious, unregulated grandiosity possessing me and destroying my relationships?”

  That is why, contrary to the Kohutian tradition, I delineate the different configurations grandiosity can take. The Freudian school can't give you a map, because they don't even study the collective unconscious, so they can't see the various archetypal configurations that unregulated grandiosity can take. Yet mythologies throughout history in all parts of the world have given us precise maps of these various configurations and responded to them.

  Unregulated grandiosity expresses itself in different ways depending on how you were programmed in your family. The family unconscious will shunt you in a certain direction, and you will express your grandiosity in one form, and your sister will express it in another one, an
d your brother will express it in another. It is all unregulated grandiosity. The holy one and the hell-raiser are equally grandiose. They just express it in different archetypal configurations. My decoding of the archetypal structures, as presented in chapter 6, represents my research contribution toward providing a more adequate understanding of this.2

  The spiritual traditions certainly never understood it. That is why we have what Reinhold Niebuhr called “spiritual pride.” We thought that a really humble person was not grandiose, that an ascetic lifestyle was the same thing as humility. Discoveries in twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory, however, clearly show this not to be the case. That is why I talk to spiritual directors about subtlety in discernment. We have had a quantum leap in resources for discernment in individual spiritual direction since the origins of the various schools of psychoanalytic theory.