Facing the Dragon

by Robert L. Moore

  These insights, however, are radically more important on the larger level of planetary culture for anyone trying to provide adequate spiritual leadership for humanity at this time. The increasing difficulty now is that everyone's grandiosity is bumping up against everyone else's grandiosity. As long as your tribe does not have to deal with anyone else, it can have as grandiose a self image as it wants to, as long as it has ways to rationalize that it is okay. If you live in a hermitage, and you consider yourself the greatest spiritual athlete of all time, and there is no one else around that has to put up with your personality, hence no one around to criticize you for anything, then you can get away with believing you are indeed the greatest spiritual athlete of all time, the most humble man in the entire world. Once some other guy moves into the hermitage, however, then you have to start dealing with that other guy, and now there are two little boy kings, and little princes do not get along very well.

  Audience: This is a problem that I have with a lot of the religious philosophies. I am thinking of one theologian who went into the woods and communed with nature and came up with a lot of wonderful ideas. But I keep wondering, if a woman had been living there with him, they might have spent a lot more time arguing over what the hell they were going to do next.

  Moore: I have always said that the greatest antidote to pathological narcissism is a relationship with a real person. That is why grandiose people have difficulty with real relationships. To the extent that you don't deal consciously with your grandiosity, you won't be able to stand real human beings. You will either try to dominate them or seek to be dominated by them.

  Many mythologies have the gods and the goddesses constantly warring in a sort of mythology of family life. If you study world mythology, you will see the dysfunctional family of the gods, and then you will understand us humans better, because we are their children. When all our great marital therapists die and go to heaven, maybe the gods and goddesses can finally get some good marriage counseling! What if you got Zeus and Hera together, and you said, “We are having a lot of problems here among your children on earth, and we think it is probably because you two don't deal properly with your relationship.” It is fun to think about family systems theory in terms of world mythology and the relationships between the gods and the goddesses. It is a fascinating and playful thing to do, but it is grounded in the serious issues we have been talking about, because primitive grandiosity does not want to acknowledge and respect any other center of divine power. You get this fantasy that there is only one throne, while the problem in any relationship is that there must always be two thrones. Otherwise it will be a sick relationship.

  Audience: Doesn't the healthy impact of relationship on narcissism make a strong argument for a noncelibate clergy and also for marriage counseling for married people?

  Moore: I recently attended a conference where a male priest and female priest were co-celebrating, and they were wearing rainbow stoles. In practicing “active imagination,” I tried to image the great royal couple. I thought, “There is my coniunctio, right up there, leading this Mass.” It was really lovely.

  It might help the Holy Father to have an articulate, brilliant, passionate, sexual wife. It would help him ground his infantile grandiosity, and his spiritual director would have a lot less to worry about. The boy king in him would have some help in coming down. I am not arguing for or against celibacy, but I can imagine the benefits the pope would get from marriage. Remember how archetypal projections can inflate your grandiosity. Think if you were the pope. It would be a real spiritual problem to deal with your grandiosity because everyone constantly dumps their idealizing projections onto you. It would be a tremendous problem. If you think the priest has a problem, the bishop has a greater problem, the archbishop has an even worse one, and if you were trying to be the spiritual leader of all the millions of Roman Catholics in the world, think of carrying that archetypal burden. Think about going around the world and having 400,000 people gathered in front of you idealizing you while you do Mass. This man obviously has to be relatively healthy emotionally in many respects or he would become greatly disturbed.

  So clergy have a huge emotional challenge. Just because you are ordained doesn't mean that your shadow disappears. I deal with clergy all the time who have massive problems managing their own grandiosity. They tend to act out a lot. In fact, the phenomena of clergy acting out sexually, or in substance abuse, workaholism, or any other compulsive behavior, relate directly to the problem of managing their inner grandiosity. Clergy burnout is nothing in the world but a manifestation of grandiosity and the inability to regulate it. We need to work with this a lot to get more conscious of the problem. If we are going to pretend to provide spiritual leadership to the planet, we have to provide some spiritual leadership at home first, in terms of getting up every day and having our own ritualizations to help us contain and channel our grandiose energies.

  We need to set up our own personal and spiritual ritual practice so we understand what we are doing. Many people who teach about prayer do not realize what they are dealing with, because they do not understand the radical power of these grandiose dynamics in the psyche. Once you begin to understand what a great struggle against infantile grandiosity we all have, then you will understand how important prayer is, and liturgy, and active imagination, and consecrated objects. (See chapter 10 for more discussion.)

  Audience: When you talked about male-female relationships, you seemed to imply that marriage was a great thing for wholeness. Doesn't marriage as an institution have just as many pitfalls as the institutional church? Isn't there always a potential sickness in the marital relationship?

  Moore: There is such a thing as marital dysfunction, yes, but there is a struggle against narcissism in all relationships.

  Audience: But can we really say that marriage supports wholeness? Marriage as an institution seems problematic to me. Isn't relationship the key factor?

  Moore: Right, but I am not a sociologist, so you would have to talk to a sociologist about the sociology of these institutions. I am a psychoanalyst, and what interests me here is what marriage does psychologically. Murray Stein writes of marriage as a vessel, the creation of a crucible that can help both people deal with their problems. The fine book by Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want (1988), also treats this particular issue, not institutionally but emotionally. What you need is a container that allows the real people to emerge and gives them enough support so that they do not immediately leave.

  We need creative ritualization. We really blew it when we depreciated the importance of ritual in the Enlightenment. We need ritualized containment with human beings in relationships to help people manage unregulated grandiosity. You have studied the history of ritual and human communities. Ritual is a technology of dealing with this problem. We create ritual forms that help us be less destructive. The history of human ritualization is the history of people struggling to find ways to be less destructive. That does not sound pretty and romantic, but that is how we are.

  No, marriage is certainly not perfect, but it can still help provide some containment for working with the psychodynamics of life. This is what Harville Hendrix tries to point out. The family is not a perfect vessel, but it can provide a lot of containment for helping people down off their high chairs.

  HOW PERSONAL PSYCHODYNAMICS LEAD TO MALIGNANT TRIBALISM

  How then do these personal psychological issues relate to the problem of destructive tribalism?

  The human psyche develops over time, and numinous tribalism was one stage that gradually developed in human consciousness. At one time in human history, outstanding leaders carried most of the group's grandiosity. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt functioned that way.

  This evolution of kingship is fascinating. (Certain matriarchal cultures probably had a similar roles for queens, but we have fewer records of that.) The king was not at first merely a human being. The Egyptian pharaoh was not a human being but a god. Over time he gradually tra
nsformed into a sort of deputy or earthly aspect in service of the god. John Perry's useful book, The Heart of History (1987), discusses this, and I have been influenced by Perry in this area. Frankfort's book on Kingship and the Gods (1948) also traces this development.

  These dynamics work gradually something like this. Humans have always known they must do something about the solar furnace within, because it is creative and wonderful, but also seductive, and when it comes up and burns you, all hell breaks loose. The book Anthropology and Evil (Parkin 1985) describes many tribal traditions associated with this idea. All these traditions, in spite of their different languages, found the same force lurking about inside that was creative, exciting, and wonderful, but could also go bad and create enormous problems for the community. There is substantial anthropological evidence for these traditional understandings.

  Humans began to realize over time that they had erred in these kingship forms by putting all sacredness on the kings and then totally controlling them. With continuing progress in psychic differentiation, we gradually enlarged the arena of sacralization for carrying the idealizing projections. The container for grandiose energy gradually got larger and larger until the group itself, the tribe, became sacred, that is, became the vessel for idealizing projections and infantile grandiosity. We constantly project this numinosity on many different cultural and religious forms and social groups of all kinds. We use numinous tribalism, in other words, to displace our rampant grandiose energies.

  Let me give you an example of how this numinous tribalism might express itself in American religious terms that we can all understand. Suppose you meet me for the first time, and you start talking with me. You see that I don't have an unrealistically inflated image of myself, that I certainly don't think I am God, for instance. In fact, I may seem very humble to you, and as we talk you think to yourself, “Surely this person has no problem with grandiosity. He is not lording it over me.” Soon, however, you get to know me a bit more, and suddenly you discover, to use a Southern example, that I belong to what is known in some parts of the South as the Church of Christ.

  Audience: I started out in the Church of Christ in Kentucky.

  Moore: Then you know what I mean. Let's just say this example comes from the Church of Christ as it exists in Texas and certain parts of Arkansas. I don't want to generalize too far. Suppose you talk to me some more, and you learn that I belong to the Church of Christ, but you think to yourself, “That's fine. There are a lot of different churches around.”

  You talk to me some more, however, and you discover that I believe that only members of my church can have a right relationship with God. When I find out that you are a Baptist, or a Methodist, or a Catholic, or a Jew, or whatever, all of a sudden our relationship changes, because you realize that I believe you are one of the goats, and I am one of the sheep!

  An enormous psychic split has opened up between us. I may even have family members who are not part of my particular “elect” group. It is very difficult to believe that your family members are condemned to eternal damnation because they are not members of a particular church.

  Audience: That actually was true in my family. We had members of my family that were not a part of our church, and there was a lot of pain.

  Moore: Oh, enormous pain, because you love them, and you want so badly for them to be “saved.” We form these selfobject relationships to groups, and, technically, they are not separate because we are the selfobject. When a particular group is a selfobject to me, then for me that group is me. It carries my idealization and my grandiose energy, and I will begin to fragment if it stops containing and carrying the numinosity, the god-complex, and is no longer divine for me in this special way. I can no longer maintain my human ego structure or self-structure after the group I identified with stops carrying the numinosity for me.

  These groups play a crucial role in people's lives through the selfobject relationship, seeking to displace grandiosity onto a social form like a group or religious “tribe” in an unconscious attempt to regulate grandiose energies. Unfortunately, however, this kind of mechanism usually sanctions a depreciation or even demonization of other people that results in hatred and fuels the genocidal impulse.

  This demonic process occurs in all kinds of social groups, not just with religious ones. Marxism, for example, functions the same way for a lot of people. I know some people who have to struggle to accept me in spite of the fact that I am not a Marxist like they are! They are in great conflict about me, because they cannot demonize me as easily as someone they don't know as well. They know that I am very committed to social justice, but they also know that I refuse to be as blind to the many Marxist atrocities as they are.

  Race is another vessel for displacing grandiose energies. We all have this kind of selfobject relationship to our own race. Whites are not the only racists. As you move around the world and study the planetary cultures, you find that racism is extremely widespread. It is an equal opportunity disorder of the human psyche. The more you travel, the more that becomes clear to you. The reason for racism is very simple: the need for selfobject transferences to particular, discreet affiliations that enable us to displace our grandiosity, avoid personal fragmentation, and act out unconsciously in grandiose ways. Therefore, the less conscious capacity to regulate grandiose energies, the more racism.

  This function of racism is portrayed in the recent movie Betrayed (1988) about a white supremacist paramilitary group. It shows the attraction of Nazism among American youth and poor, marginalized white people. They use their selfobject relationship to the white race to define their circle of affiliation so as to demonize other groups, whether they be Jews, blacks, Catholics, or whatever. People inside the circle carry numinosity, for they are the elect ones, the chosen people, the people of God. People outside the circle are the people of Satan. You can call this whole process “the psychodynamics of the elect.” It is a big part of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic shadow, but all spiritual tribes are afflicted with it.

  The concept of a specially chosen group of the elect is a strategy of the psyche to maintain its integrity and selfhood while trying to cope with its own grandiosity. That is my argument. Whether you agree with it or not, I just ask you to follow it. We constantly struggle to disown our grandiosity because we have an intuition that it can make us psychotic, that it is destructive, that too much of it will kill us, so we spread it around as much as possible on groups of other people. I will get you people to help me carry my load of grandiosity as long as I can keep the sense of grandiose entitlement.

  For example, if you start thinking like a pop Jungian, you will share your personal grandiose numinosity with the group known as Jungians, and you suddenly realize that other groups have little to offer. You no longer have to study other theories, other traditions. You can even study Jung with people who were blessed in an apostolic succession coming in a direct line from Carl Jung himself. The Jungian community has a lot of this apostolic succession nonsense: “Who laid their hands on you?” We have a fantasy of passing on the magic baton from one generation to the next.

  Thus a Jungian can demonize the Adlerians, the Freudians, and everyone else, and not have to study other theories or learn anything from them. You can always tell which Jungian analysts are doing this, because they usually know nothing about the other theories. They know nothing about recent Freudian materials, because they don't think they need to consider them, and Jungians already have the Holy Writ. Some even talk about the “Black Bible,” because Jung's Collected Works are contained in twenty volumes bound in black. That is an extreme example, of course, but understandable in terms of the psychodynamics involved. The Freudians modeled this behavior, and the Adlerians are no better. Every human group does it.

  In this phenomenon of splitting, people try to maintain their sense of significance, specialness, and goodness by excluding other people. It is a universal human tactic, but demonic and destructive. The next step in our evolution requires us to face an
d transform this pattern.

  Audience: I'm trying to understand how this works. Are we fragmented by not belonging to an exclusive, special group where we feel like we are one of the chosen ones? Or are we fragmented when we do belong and think we are part of the chosen group?

  Moore: Belonging to a special group is an unconscious tactic used to avoid fragmentation of the ego, but not everyone uses this tactic. People having an enormously difficult time managing their grandiose self-organization and its energies may handle it in different ways. That is an interesting part of studying this particular phenomenon. Some people seek to regulate it by drinking a lot, others by compulsive sexuality, so that we need a twelve-step program for sex addicts. Others handle it by going to Mass every day. All these self-soothing methods help in the struggle to regulate troublesome grandiosity.

  Other people displace their grandiose energies by disowning them: “Oh no, I'm not proud, I'm humble! But the group I belong to is the most exclusive group in the world. We will go to heaven and leave everyone else behind. I am a humble person myself, but the great cosmic spaceship is coming soon, and it only has room for 144,000 people to get on board. We can't be sure about that. It may only have room for 144, or 14.4, or 1.4, just enough room for me and a small part of someone else!” No one wants to lose touch with their grandiose energies and become more depressed. We just don't want to face it consciously.

  Audience: Would you still be just as fragmented while belonging to such an exclusive group?

  Moore: No, because your ego is not fragmenting if the group serves effectively for you as a defense against your grandiosity. You are no longer being fragmented after you join a group that can truly contain your grandiosity for you. Belonging to a group perceived as an adequate container enables you to offload your personal grandiosity onto the group and say, “I personally am not so great; I am not God.”