"He" brought me back from "vacation"

It's been a while since I last posted here - some of it is that stuff has been happening. Some because I just got sidetracked. What brought me back today was stuff that's been happening with the animus, especially as the father.

I was thinking about me and G (again) - same old same old, where is this going? Why can't I just let go? WTF! I've had some dealings with the angsty teen in me after feeling rejected - whoah, she's still in there and still so easily hurt! It was kind of overwhelming the pain she's in! But at least the little girl has grown up a bit, which feels like progress.

At any rate, I was thinking about G, and The Girl (the Puella) was there, and I felt the (healthy?) Animus there. And I felt another rush of feeling; I felt that I'm not supposed to be the one protecting her! I felt so sad, and tired. The Hecate protector has been trying to help and shield this poor girl for so long, but it's not her job! She was doing it because there was no Animus to do the protecting.

This was all brought out because I had the realization that what I was dealing with was G's anima! I was listening to a song I knew he liked, a man singing about a "sleeping beauty":

Truly thought I could make it right
If I kissed you one more time to
Help you face the nightmare
But you're far too poisoned for me
Such a fool to think that I can wake you from your slumber
That I could actually heal you...

(Sleeping Beauty by A Perfect Circle)

Well... it occurred to me that this is how he think about this woman that he's still stuck on. And then (after I got over the horrible jealousy that he feels this way about someone else, but I'm just chopped liver) I realized that he's actually the Sleeping Beauty... or at least his anima is. And this got me to thinking about my animus, which lead to the whole interaction above.

The two waves of emotion - one when the Puella came to the front, and the other when I felt Hecate's tiredness at having to do the protecting - are definitely signs of further growth. It brought to mind a relatively recent dream in which the animus is clearly growing, but not yet strong and firm.

Of course I did some readings to try to dig further into this topic - hopefully more stuff will come up in the coming days! (This was kind of a disjointed post, but I wanted to get back into the habit of writing this stuff down - too much has happened and just disappeared "into the ether"!)

Eros vs. the will to power

Or Freud vs. Adler.

I just had a brainwave: I've been reading Jung's "Two Essays on Analytical Psychology," from the Bollingen series - I'm determined to get through the whole series - and I'm up to the two sections where he describes Freud's and Adler's theories. They both seem to make sense, and he writes:

I fear the reader must feel like the cadi who, having heard the counsel for the one party, said "Thou has well spoken. I perceive that thou art right. Then came the other party, and when he had finished, the cadi scratched himself behind the ear and said, "Thou has well spoken. I perceive that thou also art right." (para. 54)

At that moment, I remembered reading something in June Singer's "Boundaries of the Soul," her introduction to Jungianism, about Freud and Jung.

Emerging differences in approach to dream material became explicit in 1909, during a lecture trip to the United States which Jung and Freud made together. They saw each other daily on board ship and spent a good deal of time analyzing one another's dreams. In that very uncomfortable process, each must have withdrawn from the other in terms of revealing his own inner life. Jung described the whole affair in his autobiography. From his point of view this encounter foreshadowed the dissolution of the relationship. Freud had presented a dream of his own, and Jung had indicated that he could do much better in interpreting it if he knew some more details about Freud's private life. Freud regarded him in that moment with a look of "utmost suspicious" and replied, "But I cannot risk my authority!" (p. 245)

Freud's neurotic fear of "losing authority" - and his unforgiving fury when anyone disagreed with him - is his shadow! Freud's conscious is obsessed with eros, with the force that unites us. And he was apparently a warm, subtle analyst with his patients. But his unconscious shadow, which was as obsessed with the will to power as his conscious was with sex, combined with what I think was his personality type as a thinking type, was the root of what compelled him to ruin relationships with anyone who disagreed with him.



One more thing - I've really slowed down my posting. I took a bit of a hiatus - nothing planned, it just happened that way. I ended up focusing on lots of other things in my life, but now my libido seems to be moving back towards inner work so I'm going to try to post things on a more regular basis.

Knocking on the door

Work. Keep digging your well.
Don’t think about getting off from work.
Water is there somewhere.
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to thatis a ring on the door.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.

~ Rumi


Had a great time with G yesterday. Put the question to him again... with a negative answer. But I can tell things have moved on. First off, I know what this is all about; it's about the desire for love, trust, a home. And second, I'm not infatuated anymore, and I haven't been for a while now.

Last night, and recently as well, I've noticed my reactions towards him, and the things I've notice about him: his immaturity mainly. And, although I've known it for a while, his weakness, the general weakness and cowardice that's a basic part of his personality. Although at one point I did think that we were on different levels (i.e. that I was more psychologically developed) later I wasn't so sure - different maybe, with different strengths and weaknesses but maybe not different levels. But his shit isn't cute anymore and, although it could be something for us to work through if we actually had a relationship, I really think it's not going to be.

The biggest thing I had to deal with in the aftermath of our day was feelings of loss, of longing for love, for someone who would be protective of me, to whom I was special, unique and beloved. To be beloved of someone, and to protect and have them be my beloved. And I still feel grief over the loss of what we could have had - I still think that we mesh well together - but I think I have my answer about who the pairings in the readings I've been getting are. I kept wondering; are the "two beings" who unite and work together as one me and G, or two different sides of me? And I think I have the answer.

One of the things I was thinking about is our role in each others lives. I know I'm in his life to help draw him out into living, to spread his wings and fly. But for the longest time I thought his role in my life was for me to suffer all the things I've avoided all my life. Last night I got a deeper look into that. The suffering isn't just suffering for its own sake - the suffering is part of connecting to the world. I fell in love with him because, as Jung said, love makes us risk everything for it's sake. It connects us to the world. And that connection often hurts.

All my life I've avoided anything that hurt. That meant that all my life I never connected to anyone or anything. It was always easy for me to ditch anyone who was difficult or caused me pain, and that meant I never lived, I only drifted through my life, so that I reached my middle years without ever really having lived at all. That's what I needed G for, to be willing to stay with a relationship with a person who caused me pain, stay with it even when it caused me pain. I've never done that before. I did a tarot and i-ching reading after G left and they indicated something big, something big and beautiful and amazing, was coming down the pike. I think it's related to this staying connected with life, even through what feels like unbearable suffering. This is the work that Rumi wrote about, the knocking at the door of Joy until It looks out to see who's there.

Being Prometheus

Monday of this week was a HUUUUUGE, monsoon like storm, which had completely blown over by the time I had to go out for lunch. When I came back to the office, however, I saw what at first I thought was a dead locust. It turned out to be a dead praying mantis (!!!) I took it as a sign that something, and not something good, was up with my Inner Mantis.

A couple of days ago, I had another freakout at work; worried that I was a terrible worker, would never be able to do my job effectively, would get fired and end up living on the streets, etc., etc. When I started doing visualization work later that night, I felt/saw vultures ripped out my stomach, like Prometheus. I was panicky and terrified. Then they changed into owls; it was still serious but it became more sacrificial and ritualistic. And off and on since then, the panicked feelings will come back and those visions will be in my head.

Before all this I had a dream about how we all put these giant belts around our midsection, which give us "super powers" but keep us from being our real selves. I realized that that's why we have these horrible, humiliating experiences; to rip off this artificial barrier we created to get by in the world. Each time I go through another round of the stomach-ripping, afterwards, I feel calmer and the world clearer.

Things have slowed down a bit as far as this kind of work is concerned (although I'm getting signals that I need to get back with the program) but this was a pretty interesting and encouraging development.

Dealing with the Wicked Witch

In my last post I wrote about how I'm going through the issues dealt with in the Hansel and Gretel fairy tail, but I was still unsure about the most important part of the story: how to deal with the wicked witch. What does it mean to trick the witch and push her into the fire that was meant for you?

So, I spent a lot of time pondering that question and I've come to a realization: yes, we do have to burn in the fire. It is about us not avoiding the flames and cooking in them... but we don't get attached to the feelings that are burning us.

By burning in whatever fire is burning us - anger, longing, bitterness, whatever - we let that fire burn out naturally, as Jung wrote. But there has to be a tiny distance, a tiny bit of space between "I" and the feeling. That's what Gretel pushing the witch into the fire is.

Normally, when we get caught up in a passion, we get completely caught up in it - we get so completely caught up in it we're possessed by it, to the point where we ourselves disappear. Part of moving the sense of "I" back from the ego to the Self is that when these overwhelming passions come over us, we can allow ourselves to be burned but not be possessed by them. It's like a trick, like tricking the witch, burning her instead of us.

And I didn't just have an intellectual understanding of this; the realization came while actually pacticing it. I experienced a couple of overwhelming, burning feelings and managed to let them burn without being taken over by them. Sometimes I went so far as to imaging pushing the witch into the oven. I also realized that water doesn't work, neither does earth. Only fire burns and purifies.

The hungry mouth

I get the neck of the chicken;

I get the plate with the crack.

I've been dealing with the parental wound lately; the lack of mother love. It's funny but what the ups and downs of my relationship with G have been leading me to is not my animus but my Mother. I've come to realize that the great, big, gaping hole in me - the one that howls like a starving, half-crazed wolf - is Mother Hunger, hunger for love and nourishment, acceptance. Hunger for Home.

So I've been reading books and scouring the internet for info on this particular kind of negative mother complex (there are several varieties apparently.) Some strike a chord in me... or maybe it's more accurate to say, they struck a wound.

Others suffer all their lives from a sense of their own inadequacy and inferiority; they feel that they are inevitably unacceptable, they are doomed to be outsiders debarred from normal companionship, whatever they do will be wrong, whatever they desire will be forbidden. They are accursed, alienated from God and man, and not least from themselves.

These are the individuals who have never had an adequate experience of mother-love. In childhood they felt they were not wanted, and consequently in them the image of Mother is of a demanding and destructive power. But the archetypal pattern of Mother as the source of life, that Jung described in the passage quoted above, is not, for that reason, obliterated in them, but inasmuch as it has not been activated by their actual human experience, it remains in the unconscious, latent, not even appearing as an image, nor is it capable, in the most injured persons, of being projected to some mother substitute, an aunt, grandmother, nurse or schoolteacher. This positive image, however, does manifest itself, even in the most deprived individuals, as the expectation of Mother. The reciprocal of child is mother, his weakness and dependence being the obverse reflection of her strength and care. And so in these individuals, the absence of the mother-image is felt as a lack - the deprivation is felt but not the possibility possibility of fulfillment. The child wanders in the wilderness, and remains not only deprived but actively hostile to everyone and everything, and not infrequently in his despair he becomes self-destructive as well.

(M. Esther Harding, The Parental Image, pp. 15-16)

Mothers, in many cultures, are expected to be accepting and nurturing. A woman I know has received a minimum of nurturing from her mother and has developed an intense fear of being abandoned. Thus, she has an "abandonment complex" intertwined with her negative mother complex. Her fear keeps her in a state of anxiety. Because of her over-eagerness to be accepted, she tends to drive away friends and lovers.

(Matton, Mary Ann, Obstacles & Helps to Self-Understanding)

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/psychology/complex2.shtml



Most of the things I found - and there's surprisingly little on the internet about this specific form of negative mother complex - were in this vein, but then I stumbled upon this site which contains author and analyst Jules Cashford's amazing essays (I've only read the one referenced in this post - there are many more to savor once I finish this post!) Below are (rather lengthy) excerpts from her piece on Hansel and Gretel, and the process of defeating the inner Evil Witch and restoring peace and fertility in one's life.

What struck me was the motif of the devouring mother, or the hungry mouth (the Evil Witch in the story.) I never thought of myself with a devouring mother, quite the opposite in fact as I had an absent mother, the lack of a mother. But, it seems, when the Mother archetype is wounded, she becomes the hungry maw that seeks only it's ever elusive satisfaction.

Neumann points out that ‘the destructive side of the Feminine, the destructive and deathly womb, appears most frequently in the archetypal form of a mouth bristling with teeth' (The Great Mother, p.168), as in the myths of the North American Indians, Egypt, Greece, some parts of Africa, and the Aztecs. In Aztec mythology, a gigantic open mouth is the hungry and all-consuming earth, and the death goddess is drawn with many knives and sharp teeth.

...That primary sense of life as a source of nourishment is missing.

http://www.julescashford.eu/articles/


So what to do? For many years I thought that nothing could be done about it; certain wounds could never be healed, just managed. But the very fact that I've been lead here must mean something. So I poked around and this is what I found. The whole process of transforming the Devouring Mother into the inner source of nurturing appears to be a long and complex one, but does seem possible. I guess it's important to remember that Jung said that we never solve our problems, we just outgrow them. Continuing with Cashford's essay, let's take a look at what that might look like.

First off, there's the relationship between Logos and Eros, the mind and the heart. Originally, it's the mind that keeps us safe, but at some point we must rely on our feelings and instinct.

Hansel, who as the boy images that aspect of the new life or the Self which is the more conscious, logos-oriented way of solving this problem, manages to outwit the step-mother's particular plan the first time, but fails to follow through the implications of what she intends: that life is not safe at home. It is only when his strategy is itself outwitted by the birds that he can be, as it were, tricked into facing the problem at a deeper level. The story moves towards an intensification of the original situation for the bread house with sugar windows and a witch inside is an image at this deeper level of the sweetness of any home with any kind of mother inside, and points to the danger of fantasizing the missing aspect of the archetype. The need for the mothering that was originally withheld is both appeased and perpetuated in fantasies about the original mother, and, more subtly, re-enacted in the search for a symbolic substitute in any experience. This creates a person predisposed to dependence on the other, hungry (to return to the metaphor in the story) for love while fearful of being starved or detoured (rejected or overwhelmed) by the imagined source of it. It would seem, then, that the first stage of growth would require a distinction between the good and the bad in the actual mother, and between good and bad mothering in general - what one has a right to expect - and, more fundamentally, between the Good and the Bad Mother in the Great Mother Archetype.

So looking at the fairy tale more closely as an image of the ‘anatomy' of the psyche, what can it tell us about this stage of separation? For the children to survive with all the odds apparently against them, so we have to follow what they do and what ‘happens' to them as a model for the instinctive responses that are right for this specific situation. It then appears that the deliberate, purposive working out of the matter, which Hansel adopts, is necessary to start with, but has to be suspended at the crucial transitional point in order for the more feeling, less conscious impulses of Grettel to take over.

In the beginning Grettel can only weep and must be comforted by her brother, who provides the ‘temenos' in which she can feel safe: ‘"Be comforted, my dear little sister, and go to sleep"', and he crams his pockets with the white pebbles that glitter in the moonlight. The way he drops these signposts for their return is instructive for, apparently unnecessarily, he stands still and looks back at the house each time he drops a pebble, pretending he is looking at his kitten waving him farewell, an image, possibly, of the magnetic power of the complex. Jung writes that a ceremony is magical so long as it does not result in effective work but preserves the state of expectancy' (VIII, 46), and in Hansel's ritual we could see a reluctance to give up the former expectations from his home. The first time his plan succeeds, but it does so only to lead them back to the original situation with nothing changed, pointing to the circularity of conscious solutions to problems of feeling. The second time there is a famine, the step-mother argues still more forcefully, and this time the door is locked against Hansel's ingenuity and they are taken still deeper into the forest, ‘further than they had ever been in their lives before'. This tells us that left alone the complex gets worse. They are more lost than last time, and they have half as much bread, for Hansel has to take from his own portion to feed his strategy, the dropping of crumbs that are picked up by ‘the thousands of birds that fly about in the woods'. The beauty of this image already implies that the failures on the side of the good, that reason, ‘the ratio of what is already known' (Blake), must fail in order to call forth from a deeper level of the psyche that which is not yet known, but which knows. "Never mind", said Hansel to Grettel, "you'll see we'll still find a way out"; but all the same they did not'. This ends Hansel's effective leadership, and for three days, the time of the moon's disappearance, Jonah in the whale and Christ in hell, things get darker than ever before. Once consciousness is unable to operate, however, as in all fairy tales, the unconscious is free to surprise us with its magic, and into this gap, this desperate need for help or else they would surely perish, comes ‘a beautiful little snow-white bird sitting on a branch, which sang so sweetly that they stopped still and listened to it'. Like Orpheus, the song enchants them, end they are distracted from their hunger and their longing for a way out of the forest - their own sense of what help is needed - and when the song is finished the bird flies in front of them and leads them directly to the witch. It is obvious that the bird does not belong to the witch even though it perches on the roof of the house she has made to lure them inside, so here we see a deeper impulse in the story.

[W]hen the snow-white bird brings the children to the witch, and obliges them to confront irrevocably that which they would have avoided had they known, we can see at work the fundamental directing agency of the Self. For the superior wisdom of the Self brings together the fantasy and the reality of the mother in the children, given in the image of the fantastic house of food on the outside and the child-eating real old woman on the inside; which is to say that the Self brings together the superficial conscious attitude adopted to the deprivations suffered from the mother - that it didn't really matter - and the interior unconscious feeling - possibly, that it hurt so much it's impossible to break the spell and get away from her. For what is a witch to a child except a figure whose power is so absolute, so all-containing, that escape is unthinkable? And when the imagination fails then the spell is cast.

What is the meaning of this psychologically? Two comments of Jung are particularly relevant here: ‘A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full. In other words, if we are to develop further we have to draw to us and drink down to the very dregs what, because of our complexes, we have held at a distance' (IX, i, 99). Also, ‘A neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering' (XI, 75). So the children must go inside the sweet-tasting house and fully experience the evil of the witch within. They must suffer emotionally to the extent of imagining being boiled alive, roasted and consumed in what they had tried to avoid feeling too deeply because it hurt. Fire is traditionally a symbol of the heating up of feeling, the intensification and concentration of the whole being so that the inessential is burnt away and only the essence remains. The alchemists insisted that the fire be kept forever burning beneath the retort lest the heart falter and become distracted.

One of the things that strikes me about the above is how the mind helps us deal with things. It's the mind that schemes and helps us avoid being truly thrown "to the wolves." Of course, the problem is that Hansel - the mind - can only bring us back to the problem, never lead the way forward. For that we need the white bird, the symbol of the Self. It's only when we follow the bird that we finally break free of the endless cycle of suffering. Of course, originally it's to more intense suffering, but it's our legitimate suffering. Unlike the neuroses that we escape to - and are trapped in - when we try to avoid our problem, this suffering is ours. It belongs to us, as ugly and as horrible as it is.

Now that the witch can be seen for what she is, what can she tell us about the way the negative mother complex works? The story says that ‘witches have red eyes, and cannot see far, but, like beasts, they have a keen sense of smell, and know when human beings pass by'. This suggests that the complex acts relatively blindly, automatically, crudely, without differentiation and can be discerned whenever the person ‘takes things literally', recalling the literal imagination of the step-mother, who could not ‘see through' Hansel's strategy, supposing each time he was mistaking what he said he saw for the morning sun glittering on the chimney. On the other hand, she can smell like a hunting animal, which suggests her power is in the unconscious which is where she must be faced. On the surface, though, she is ‘apparently friendly', and her house likewise is a temptation to overlook what it contains, to take it literally for what it pretends to be, which is what the children do. They respond to it as though under a spell; they don't ask questions - whose house is it, will they miss the roof? Even when a shrill voice calls out from inside ‘who's nibbling my house?' the children answer: "Tis Heaven's own child, The tempest wild', and go on eating ‘without putting themselves about'. Because of their great hunger she gets them in her power, the extreme longing to be loved creates the dependence.

However, once Hansel and Grettel see the woman to be a witch, their relation to each other and to the problem change places. Hansel, as the carrier of the more conscious approach of the self, is locked up in the stable, and it is up to Grettel, the feeling powers hitherto dormant in the self, to take the active role. At first, like Cinderella, she has to serve the witch, is held in thrall to her, called a lazybones and starved of anything but crabshells, while Hansel, the imprisoned leader, is to fatten up to be eaten. Perhaps this is the testing time that is so difficult to predict. Who will win.

The tale tells us that trickery wins, that the trickster archetype is what is needed here. Both Hansel and Grettel play the witch's game, only they play it better than she does. Hansel pretends that he is thinner than he is, knowing she wants to fatten him, and holding out a bone instead of his finger, gains them time. Grettel pretends she is as helpless as she used to be - ‘I don't know how to do it; how do I get and shoves the witch in the oven instead of herself. That Grettel does to the witch exactly what the witch would have done to her may suggest that feeling must accept some identification with the dark aspect of the mother imago personified in the witch, maybe in the form that it is a greed for life's inexhaustible possibilities that contributes to the fear that they may not manifest themselves... At any rate, with the witch and Grettel before the open oven, ‘from which fiery flames were already issuing', it is not the time for moral deliberations, and we cannot but think that Grettel acts spontaneously rightly. But where does this usually weeping girl get her strength from? It seems from a combination of awareness and intensity of feeling. We are told that ‘Grettel perceived the witch's intention', and it is perhaps this moment of awareness that transfers the power of the witch to Grettel by releasing the energy trapped in her fear. At the point of immanent death she gathers enough strength, rebellion and even ferocity of feeling to say No to being devoured and this tips the balance and the negative complex is, as it were, burnt up. As with the stepmother, the witch's literal reaction to Grettel's pretense is no match for the dual perspective of awareness. Perhaps what this means is that the person trying to deal with the ‘witch' in himself or herself, since, while the witch may play a different role in the male and female psychology, there is a level at which the need for freedom from this complex is the same for both), must somehow trick the witch within, that is, withhold the habitual, automatic reaction in order to allow the feeling to deepen to an intensity that gets its power to respond from a hidden, previously submerged level of the psyche. As the trouble with this complex is that the instincts themselves have become distorted, it would seem necessary to, as it were, distort the distortion, do what feels wrong, to reach that last instinct of survival common to all animals when even a zebra will fight a lion to protect her young. It may be that in human animals this instinct has its parallel in the instinct of individuation.

Grettel flies straight to Hansel, crying: ‘Hansel, we are free; the old witch is dead', and we are told that ‘Hansel sprang like a bird out of a cage when the door is opened', a wonderful image of ‘the release of the dove'. Now appears the treasure of the Self, the pearls and precious stones disclosed in the other rooms of the house which they are free to explore once the fear has gone. Here are the jewels of the life renewed - joy, fearlessness, purpose, affection all that immersion in the waters of life makes possible. Leaving the ‘witch's wood' they come to a big lake with no bridge or ferry-boat, but just a white duck swimming in the water. The ‘crossing of the return threshold' is the hero's last trial in the hero myth (Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 210-243), in which he is set the task of reconciling the truths won in the inner world with the actions he undertakes in the outer, public world. Here, some period of adjustment or some effort at translation is obviously indicated in the absence of any predictable way to cross the water to find the familiar part of the wood they came from. It is significant that at this point Hansel is the one who decides they can't get over because there is no bridge, and Grettel who sees the white duck and asks her help. The renewed feeling of the self can now for the first time exercise power for the care of life, for Grettel, sensitive to the duck's needs as well as their own, overrules her brother: "No", she answers, in total contrast to her submissiveness at the beginning of the tale, "we should be too heavy a load for the duck: she shall carry us across separately". The logos and eros of brother and sister are now in harmony with each other, such that each takes the lead when it is appropriate, and thus the original imbalance in the family is redeemed. Implicitly the story says that the killing of the witch is the death of the step-mother, for when the children run to ‘their father's house' and fall upon his neck, we are told simply: ‘but the woman had died'.

The restoration of the nourishing and healing aspect of the Mother archetype is shown in the emergence of the big lake with the bird now swimming upon it, an image of unity between nature and spirit which puts the duck, as Hermetic ferry-bird, in loving service. For the duck, white again as was the snow-white bird who led them deep into the unconscious, here ‘returns', in touch with the newly discovered waters of life to lead them back again. The treasure of the witch vanquished will buy them food to withstand any hardship, and so they are released from complete dependence on the Great Mother. But nothing is heard of the former famine in the land, and it is as though the confrontation with the reality of the bad personal mother which frees them from the negative mother complex within, activates at the same time the potency of the good mother archetype, so that from now on life may be trusted:

'Thus all their troubles were ended, and they lived happily ever after'.

http://www.julescashford.eu/articles/


Ok, I'm kind of stuck here. Everything up to the examination of Gretel shoving the witch into the oven makes sense to me. Part of it is that I'm still pretty early in the process (basically at the point where I'm exploring the nature of the witch), but part of it is that this explanation doesn't resonate with me. This is just speculation, but my feeling is that Gretel pushing the witch into her own fire represents "burning" the witch - the hunger and desire - in it's own "fire." In other words, cooking in one's own juices. This is, in fact, the dragon's fire that I wrote about in an earlier post on snake symbolism:

[It] is hard to accept: the fire has to burn the fire, one just has to burn in the emotion till the fire dies down and becomes balanced. That is something which unfortunately cannot be evaded. The burning of the fire, of the emotion, cannot be tricked out of one’s system; there is no recipe for getting rid of it, it has to be endured. The fire has to burn until the last unclean element has been consumed, which is what all alchemical texts say in different variations and we have not found any other way either. It cannot be hindered but only suffered till what is mortal or corruptible, or, as our text says so beautifully, till the corruptible humidity, the unconsciousness, has been burnt up. That is the meaning, it is the acceptance of suffering.

(Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy.)

So, the way I'd interpret it is that Eros (Gretel) draws us to those situations in which we have to cook in our juices. While our mind may tell us to stay safe, our heart keeps dragging us into just those situations where the witch is tossed into her own fire. Again, early days but this seems to be the more likely interpretation of the fairy tale. At least for me.

... *dammit*



Edit: 7/31/12

Some further thoughts (I expect these to keep coming for a while):

The house is a spun sugar fantasy of a relationship. It's not a real house, it's a fantastical house. When we've been driven from "home" (nurturing) by a mother who cannot give us the mother-love we need, we end up lost in the woods. And what we come upon is this faux house; it's not only not a real house, it's pure temptation. It's everything we thought we wanted, we are fed after we've starved for years (the years of famine.) But inside the house is the witch, the demonic caricature of the murderous stepmother. Something else to consider is that it's the Self itself that brings us to this deadly situation, because this is exactly what we need in order to truly resolve the problem at home. It's in the witch's house itself that the treasures of the Self reside.

Another thing is Gretel; this whole experience with the evil stepmother makes her completely helpless. When we are denied this mother-love our feelings can't function; we feel like we can't let ourselves feel, like it's all too much for us, leading us to rely on logic and reason. This can keep us out of trouble for a while but by itself it's incapable of finding a way out of the situation. The problem is that Gretel - our feelings - can't find her power until we're actually in the witch's house, i.e. the middle of our tumultuous emotional drama.

What does this mean? Is it that being in the situation with the witch puts the mind under lock and key forces us to rely on our feelings? Or is it that being in this situation allows us to bring some of the witch into us (Gretel doing to the witch what the witch had planned to do to her)? In either case the empowerment of feeling is part of the healing process as Gretel becomes more active, until at the end she tells Hansel they can't both ride on the white duck.

Gretel, as the female child, is the renewal of the feminine instincts. In the stepmother and the witch, and the presence of the famine in the land, the current female instincts (emotion, instinct) are wrong, turning them into the opposite of the nurturing mother into the destroyer. But, as with many stories of "evil" older women, their actions instigate the confrontation and change needed for renewal. The white dove is a symbol of the Goddess, and the white duck at the end is also female; with one hand the Mother Goddess drives us to wholeness with her terrifying side, and with the other she lures us to the same with her angelic side. All of this is in the service of pushing the young feminine, represented by Gretel, into her own power.

This reminds me of significant dreams I've had about the young girl in me (breaking and entering , the girl with long white hair) - is she the Gretel in me? The tender, connected emotional part? The part that the tough, intellectual surface me has always protected, the way Hansel protected Gretel? This seems to be the case, but I'm still not quite certain what she needs to do now. I know that I've been in the witch's house with this thing with G that I've been going through (the sugar spun fantasy of love with the raging, hungry witch inside.) What exactly is that Gretel's supposed to be doing?

Hansel has been jailed. Gretel is suffering (the whole thing with G is the pain of her Cindarella suffering - loving and loving, but with no reward.) But what is the thing with tricking the witch with the bone, and with Gretel pushing her into her own oven? How can I empower my inner Gretel to find her power? From my dream I've started by rescueing the trapped little animal, but later the girl was blind (a weakness) and she ran away. Do I need to keep my emotions present - keep Gretel from running away - when all I want to do is stop feeling for him? I need to ponder this some more...



Edit #2:

Had some futher realizations, specifically about the symbolism of burning the witch.

Snake symbolism: Birth of the Sun Child

Zeus is the Eagle, raising itself higher and higher; competent, bright, bringing self-esteem upon oneself. The snake is pain and difficulty, feeling helpless, lost in the dark woods. The ego naturally seeks out the Eagle... but the Self seeks wholeness, because what the ego doesn't realize is that it's in our weakness that God can enter our lives. Children are our wholeness, including what is frail, weak, stupid, helpless and frustrating. It's our humiliation, and our uncontrolled passions. It is what is in us that is exactly what it is, regardless of what is socially desirable... or even socially acceptable. The Child, like the Ouroboros, is the symbol of wholeness.

Child, snake and lion

Very often, the snake appears in ancient mythology combined with the motif of the child. For instance, the mythical god of the Athenians was King Erechterus, who was the son of Athena and who was kept as a little child in a basket into which one should not look, for one would see a child surrounded by snakes. One cannot be sure exactly what it means, but coffrets grotesques have been found in Southern France (probably material from the Middle Ages and not earlier), in which naked children are playing with snakes. The child-god and the snake-god were very often combined like that.

The child-god is also the archetype of the poisoner, so to speak. The Cupid of antiquity has a very poisonous arrow with which he can even subdue - as the poets say - the great god Zeus, for if Cupid shoots an arrow at him, Zeus may have to hopelessly pursue an earthly woman, though he may not even like the situation... If you do like it, you will be happy and say that you have fallen in love. If you do not like it,  you will say that you have been poisoned; you are bound to do something you do not like and are forced into a situation which feels like subjection or poison to the ego.

(Marie-Louise von Franz, Puer Aeternus)

Some people have a frustrated infant within them. Usually they are very correct and polite, and make very few demands on the analyst, but being too polite and correct and considerate is always suspect. One knows that they would like to eat up the analyst completely like the lion, making childish demands and scenes, because the analyst has stopped five minutes before the time, or answered the telephone, or put off the hour, or even had the flu!

That is the symbolism of the madness in the lead, but it also contains Osiris, the immortal man, and if only you accept that spot within you, you will come to the creative content where the Self is hidden. The frustrated child could be said to be an aspect covering up an image of the Self, and the devouring lion also an aspect of the Self.

If you take the image of the devouring lion this is quite clear. If I think I ought to be top dog everywhere, have the most beautiful partner, have money, be happy, and so on, that is a paradise fantasy, and what is that? It is a projection of the Self! So actually, the childish thing is the desire to experience everything in the here and now. The fantasy in itself is entirely legitimate, it has the idea of the coniunctio, a perfect state, a state of harmony. It is a religious idea, but naturally if projected onto outside life and wanted there, in the here and now, that is impossible. The way in which the person wants to realize the fantasy is childish, but in itself it is valuable and has nothing wrong or unhealthy in it.

So just in that undominated mad spot of the person, or in the wild or problematic spot, there is the symbol of the Self. That gives it the drive, which is why people never know what to do for they cannot repress it; or if they are reasonable and just give the thing up and realize how childish it is and that one should be resigned and adapt to life, then they feel that they are cured but that they have been robbed of their best possibilities and so are frustrated.

(Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy)


Oh snaaaaaaap, more stuff related to the owl dream! I love when this happens :D  In it's positive aspect, the child is the symbol of renewal, but the child archetype also has some negative aspects: being incapable, less than perfect, weak... and being "childish;" irrational and unreasonably demanding. This is definitely a problem of mine. I want everything, but I deny myself anything. I know I have this devouring wolf inside of me that could eat, and eat, and eat whole fucking world, so I make sure to keep it down by not asking for anything, and being scrupulous about what I take from others. In fact, if I get more than I give, I feel uncomfortable.

This is also deeply intertwined with my need for love and connection. I grew up being sent from one family member to the other. I always thought my mother had sent me away; she was sick and almost died but, upon learning when I was twenty-four that even on (what she thought was) her death bed she begged to keep me, I burst into tears. I never even knew this had bothered me, just as I never realized that deep down, I felt like I always had to make people like me so they wouldn't send me away again. These are all realizations that came up years later.

I have the eternally hungry infant inside me, and this makes me both fear and long for love. What I long for is the rest and peace that comes with having a place of my own, without fear; as the Wiccan's say "perfect love and perfect trust." This is why I get so crazy in relationships. And this is precisely why I need to work through relationship issues.

In the owl, the child was beheading owls with a stick. I still don't know what the stick means but the child and the owls are pretty obvious: this neediness and childishness in me is beheading my wisdom - my owl's are "losing their heads." Also, both my interpretations are right: the child is a symbol of renewal, but a frustrating, childish one. And the owl is a symbol of wisdom. I don't think the dream is telling me whether I should do one thing or the other as much as just giving me an objective understanding of my situation.



Traveling in Egypt

This is a long excerpt, but it is positively overflowing with gems of insight and wisdom. And straight up excellent advice, in general and for the different types/functions. Here von Franz talks about the value of the inferior function/the child-like parts of ourselves.

[T]he child has a naive view of life, and if you recall your own childhood, you remember you were intensely alive. The child, if it is not already neurotic, is constantly interested in something. Whatever else from which the child may suffer, it does not suffer from remoteness from life, normally - only if it is thoroughly poisoned by the neuroses of its parents. Otherwise, it is fully alive, and that is why people, thinking back to their own childhood, long to have that naive vitality which they have lost in becoming a grown-up. The child is an inner possibility, the possibility of renewal, but how does that get into the actual life of a child?...

It has to do with he inferior function - through which the renewal comes - which has remained childlike and completely naive. Therefore, it conveys a new sight and a new experience of life when the worn-out superior function comes to its end, and it imparts all those naive pleasures which one has lost in childhood. That is why we have to learn to play again, but on the line of the fourth, or the inferior, function. It does not help if, for instance, an intellectual person starts some kind of intellectual play. If a thinking type were to quote the Bible, saying that unless you become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven, and then would go to a club to play chess - that would not help at all, for it would again be on the main function. There is a great temptation to do that; namely, to accept the idea of play and of turning to something else, something noncommittal, but to do it within the field of the main function. I have often seen feeling types whose feeling functions have run out. I tell them they must do something which has no purpose, something playful. Then they propose working in a kindergarten, or something like that. But that is nonsense, for that would again be on the feeling side; that would be a half-way acceptance and an escape at the same time. The really difficult thing is to turn directly to the inferior function and play there. For this, the ego must give up its directing line, because if you touch your inferior function, it decides on the kind of play; you cannot decide. The inferior function, just like an obstinate child, will insist that it wants to play at something or other, though you may say that it is not suitable and would not work well. For example, in an intuitive, the inferior function may want to play with clay, but the intuitive person lives in a hotel room and would much prefer something clean because clay makes a lot of dirt in a hotel room! But you cannot dictate to the inferior function! If you are an intuitive and your inferior function wants to play with stones or clay, then you have to make the effort to find an ambiance where that would be possible. That is exactly the difficulty. That is why the ego always has thousands of objections to turn to the inferior side. It is always something very difficult to arrange in practical life

The inferior function is a real nuisance, just as children are, whom you cannot put in a box and take out when it suits you. It is a living entity with its own demands, and it is a nuisance to the ego which wants to have its own way... But if you accept the humiliating experience of making the ego submit itself to the demands of the inferior of childish part of the personality, then the divine child becomes a source of life; then life has a new face, you discover new experiences, and everything changes

I often notice that when the feeling type begins to think, he does so exactly like the early Greek pre-Socratic philosophers. He has thoughts like those of Heraclitus or Democritus, and such people, and is as fired by these as were the early Greek philosophers. If you read Empedocles or Heraclitus, you will find an eternal youth in the way they think. That is why I love those philosophers so much. Nowadays, it seems very like mythological thinking - not very scientific. For instance, the atomic theories of Democritus are awfully naive, if looked at according to modern theories, but there is a kind of wholeness and enthusiasm about them, together with the idea that now they see the whole picture. Naturally, the material is full of projections of the symbol of the Self, so one gets quite carried away when reading it. There is a kind of springtime of the spirit; the early Greek philosophy is like the blossoming spring of philosophy. Very often, if a feeling type gets down to his own thinking, he comes to this kind of experience; when that happens, the thinking type must retire to his own estate and not say that one knew that twenty-thousand years ago! The same thing applies to the thinking type if you get him or her to bring up naive real feeling, rather than something organized. Usually, the thinking type is so much a thinker that he even organizes his feelings appropriately, and because he does not get on with his real feelings, because they are unadapted, he generally has a pseudo-adaptation to feeling. I would say that the main method for getting to the playfulness of the inferior function is to scratch away the pseudo-adaptation with which we all cover the inferior function. The feeling type, for instance, is usually full of school and university theories and imagines that those are his thoughts. But they are not: they are pseudo-thinking adaptations to cover up the fact that his real thinking is awfully embryonic and naive. The same holds true for the thinking type who has very naive feelings; for instance, "I love you, I hate you." If he went round the world saying that, or saying, "I can't stand you," you can imagine what a stumbling block it would be! It would not work for two minutes! Even in school, you cannot tell your teacher that you cannot stand him! I am a thinking type myself and I loved certain teachers and hated others. But I would never dissimulate my feelings sufficiently; I always showed her how I felt. I knew it would have been much more diplomatic not to show too clearly how much I despised a certain teacher, but it was always quite obvious. When you become adult, you hide these reactions and acquire a pseudo-feeling adaptation. Thinking types are often very amiable and seem to have very balanced, amiable feeling reactions, but never trust that! That is just a pseudo-adaptation, because the other is so painful and helpless and childish that one cannot show it. But if you have to go to it, then you must again dig up the naiveté of your real feeling and get the crust off the pseudo-adaptation

Intuitives very often have no relationship to the body and are likely to dress badly or be dirty, but since that does not work, they learn to wash and put on nice clothes, and so on; although they may be quite correctly dressed, there is no personal style. If they would dig up their real sensation, their taste would be artistic, but weird and very much out of the ordinary. Intuitives who get down to their sensation cannot buy ready-made clothes; everything has to be made for them. Neither can they eat hotel food; they must either have a cook or they must cook for themselves, and it must be very special. It gives them a lot of trouble to discover this, and, what is worse, it is a nuisance and expensive both in money and time. You can have the tailor and the cook but that is not quite genuine, or you can go down to the inferior function, but that is the greatest time thief in existence, because it is primitively slow

You know that in primitive countries it is impossible to hurry people. If you travel in Egypt, it is no good ordering the cars for 9:00 am and expecting to be beyond the Nile or in the Kings' Tomb at 10 am. Everyone who travels in the Orient knows that he must put up with being two or three hours late; he cannot arrive on time as Europeans do. But once you have made the adaptation, life is much nicer, because you have all kinds of experiences: the car breaks down and causes a lot of fun, and instead of arriving at the Kings' Tomb, you get into the desert and do a lot of swearing, and so forth. But that's life too! You cannot organize the inferior function. It is awfully expensive and needs a lot of time, and that is one reason why it is such a cross in our lives: it makes us so inefficient if we try to act through it. It has to be give whole Sundays and whole afternoons of our lifetimes and nothing may come out - except that the inferior function will come to life. But that is the whole point. A feeling type will only bring up his thinking if he begins to think about something he cannot use in this world, neither for examination nor study; but if he will think about something which interests himself - that is how to get going because it is not possible to yoke inferior playfulness to utilitarian motives. The essence of play is that it has no visible meaning and is not useful. I would tell a feeling type to learn what he needs by heart for his exams, and not try to think, because he won't be able to do so. He should make pseudo-adaptations, and if the thinking type gets into a situation where he has to behave - say he has to attend a funeral - then he must on no account pull out his personal feelings. He must just behave and do the conventional thing with flowers and condolences; that is the right pseudo-adaptation for him. To get at his real feeling, the thinking type must find a situation where he can play with it, and then it will be quite different. So the first thing to do is to take it out of the adaptation field and keep the pseudo-adaptation for those cases where it is necessary. I think nobody can really develop the inferior function before having first created a temenos; namely, a sacred grove, a hidden place where he can play. The first thing is to find a Robinson Crusoe playground, and then when you have gotten rid of all onlookers, you can begin!

(Marie-Louise von Franz, Puer Aeternus)

So basically, the Snake is also the Child, for ill and for good. It's the part of us that causes us humiliation and pain... and also the door through which God comes. It's the poisoner... and the source of new life. Its why its our weakness and imperfection that is the part of ourselves that is the most valuable.

There's not much I can actually add to this. Go and do as von Franz suggests (as will I.)