The Vampires Among Us

Posted on by kay

October is the month many of us start watching horror movies old and new. It’s a way of transitioning from summer to winter, a ritual for bidding goodbye to sunny days and embracing long dark nights that make the setting of a Tim Burton movie look positively cheerful. My all-time favorites are Kenneth Branaugh’s Frankenstein, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, and Shadow of the Vampire, where John Malkovich plays the obsessed director of Nosferatu and Willem Dafoe plays an ancient vampire. EXCELLENT movie. Things get nice and dark when the human director is more evil than the actual vampire. And I have to mention James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, too. Love that hisssss from Elsa Lancester at the end.

 

Thus, October is the month to think about vampires. They’re everywhere these days! But, why is this myth so prevalent? Why have vampires become one of our most enduring archetypes?

 

Because we all know in our bones—oops, in our blood—that vampires are real. Because each one of us has been sucked dry. And because we have each done some sucking ourselves.

 

A real live vampire doesn’t wear a cape or have eyebrows like Bela Lugosi. A real live vampire is just an ordinary, everyday person who goes around sucking all the juice out of other people. He’s the perpetually disgruntled guy whose mood subdues a whole room full of otherwise cheerful folk. She’s the one who can’t get enough attention, can’t get enough love, can’t get enough praise. A real live vampire is that person who leaves you exhausted and drained after every visit. The one who talks and talks and talks, but never listens. The one grabbing for control in every situation.

 

And of course the ranks of ordinary vampires are swelled by the truly diabolical among us, the genuinely unbalanced: sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists, borderline personalities… those who only see others as means to an end. These are the vampires that keep us up at night, the often charismatic world-wreckers who charm legions of followers into supporting their nefarious causes, and pass their dis-ease on to others, generation after generation.

 

Here’s what the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism has to say about vampires:

The vampire is a strange phenomenon of the imagination, a shapeshifter, hypnotist and captivator, erotic and chillingly repugnant at the same time. He or she is often ravishingly, irresistibly seductive. That the vampire is also represented as a form of were-animal, fanged and nocturnal, suggests that as a psychic factor it shuns the light of consciousness, manifesting in the twilight of the subliminal as a sexual compulsion or another form of raw, insatiable hunger that cannot be put to rest and eventually takes possession of the whole personality. Some have compared the vampire to the “hungry ghost,” the revenant of unmetabolized deprivation and trauma, which obsesses us, keeping us out of life. The most deadly aspect of the classic vampire is that it can replicate its condition in its victims, who then also become the melancholy, exhausted, or restless “dead.”

More contemporary portrayals have idealized the vampire as a being of pale, lunar beauty, in whom soulfulness, wisdom and magical powers combine with exhilarating animal instinctuality. In this version, because the vampire lives forever, it can teach us the lessons of history. The human and vampire lovers of the Twilight series reflect the youthful romance between consciousness—which involves process and change—and the alluring fantasy of physical perfection, immutability and immortality. But though the vampire can never again become human, a human can become a vampire, suggestive of our vulnerability to the wholly absorbing nature of desire.

—The Book of Symbols,  edited by Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin. Germany: Taschen, 2010. Page 700.

 

Drains a living person… hypnotist, captivator, irresistibly seductive… shuns the light of consciousness… subliminal compulsions… insatiable hungers… revenants of deprivation or trauma… replicates its condition in the victim… an alluring fantasy of physical perfection and immortality…

 

We have a fascination with vampires because real live vampires walk among us.

 

But of course we can’t see them when we look in the mirror.

 

 

Projecting Our Own Evil Onto Others

Posted on by kay

“If we do not see our own shadow, we project it onto other people, who then have a fascinating effect on us. We are compelled to think about them all the time; we get disproportionately stirred up about them and may even start to persecute them. This does not mean that certain people whom we hate are not in truth intolerable; but even in such cases we could deal with them in a reasonable manner or avoid them–if they were not the projection of our shadow, which never fails to lead us into every possible exaggeration and fascination.”
–Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche

Imagine a movie projector. You’d be the projector whirring in that little room at the back, and the other person would be the big screen down in front. You’re CREATING the image, the image is actually coming from you, but the other person is the only place where you can SEE the image. Thus we can hate someone else for having whatever quality of our own we’re projecting, while remaining steadfastly in love with ourselves and not having to change a thing personally. “I don’t have a bad temper. What are you talking about, you asshole? YOU have a TERRIBLE temper!”

“A predominant behavior characteristic of those I would call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their image of self-perfection… Since deep down they feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will perceive the conflict as the world’s fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.”
–M. Scott Peck, from “Healing Human Evil,” in Meeting the Shadow

It Ain’t Just Donald

Posted on by kay

 

In “The Strongmen Strike Back,” (Washington Post, March 18th) Robert Kagan did a very thorough job of making it clear that Donald Trump is not just some isolated aberration in American history. Trump is part of a world wide wave of authoritarianism endangering the very idea of democracy.

Kagan brilliantly covered the subject from a political perspective, and I heartily recommend his article. But my curiosity reaches toward the psychological.

WHY do so many people — not just in the USA, but all over the world — follow cruel and unethical strongmen whom they know they cannot trust?

WHY do so many of us so long to be told what to do?

WHY do so many of us long to be told who to hate?

That’s what we need to be worrying about.

Not how much we love or hate Trump, but what how much we love or hate Trump says about us.

Technology–up! Patience and spirituality–down.

Posted on by kay

Yesterday I spent an hour online with our cable and internet provider, trying to set up a land line (dinosaurus as that sounds, we live too far out of town for cell service to be safe as the only alternative) and when David got home he spent another hour with them online. Then he still had to go into a brick and mortar store this morning to finish the deal. Everything about the process was frustrating and time consuming. Nothing about it could possibly be considered progress, except that the company employed as few actual live people as possible.

I don’t really understand this. How can technology advance so rapidly while our ability to actually get something done reaches new lows? Is that progress? What is progess, anyway?

Is it having microwave ovens? (Which cook so fast we get impatient when it takes 2 minutes to boil water.)

Is it having high speed internet or cell phones or wifi ? (Where we connect ourselves to the whole world via increasingly tiny electronic devices while we tune out the living beings right next to us.)

I’m afraid each speedy new technological device only makes us more impatient with each living breathing moment, only takes us further from the here and now … Which would be OK — hoky here and now shit, who needs it? — except that our bodies, those mysteriously interconnected physical, mental and spiritual temples which we inhabit, call the here and now home. They can only go so fast for so long, before they start breaking down.

Modern times are stressful. In very weird ways. Because the shadow aspect of all the devices that are supposed to make our lives easier and faster and more fun is:  they don’t. It just ain’t so. Nobody’s talking about it — it would be very bad for business indeed — but our devices actually complicate, frustrate, and impoverish our lives as much as they enrich them. They’re so fast and so necessary to our overall entertainment and trendiness that we rely on them more and more every day, but when they quit working, as they often do, they’re far too complicated to fix. And expensive? Squished bug guts! What families pay per month today for electronic technology is more than families paid twenty years ago for their mortgages. These wonderful things are not at all affordable. We just can’t live without them, so we buy them anyway. Which creates another chronic stress, called chronic poverty.

Robert Bly said once, while lecturing on the human shadow, that “for every technological advance there’s a necessary and corresponding spiritual loss.” If we don’t get better at managing all the products our peers can think of, ole Robert might just be proven right.

technology-shrine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pin the tail on the complex

Posted on by kay

We can be totally sincere and still do real damage to others — that’s what fanaticism is. Sincerity and integrity are not necessarily equals.

Transmog-6-color

Tunnel vision is actually a complex. When we act out of a complex we think we already know what’s going on, so we react to whatever happens in the same old way. In fact, we can’t see anything else happening but what we already ‘think’ is happening, because we simply can’t pay attention to things which don’t fit into our complex. Tunnel vision produces distortions. It demands selective inattention.

And it tends to get hysterical when opposites or oppositions appear.

We don’t have to go around nurturing that terrible separateness and woundedness, overreacting to everything: opposite opinions, our past, our parents, or even our present.

We could choose to operate from an easier, more productive place where they allow at least two sides to every issue. We could make a game out of it. Pin the tail on the complex, maybe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playing our roles

Posted on by kay

The enchantments and bewitchments which occur over and over again in fairy tales are reminders. Warnings. Because we're all enchanted at one time or another. We mis-understand the stories. We glorify one type of role to the extent that we think we’re supposed to be Beauty, or be a hero, then we stick ourselves into that role and try not to be anything else.

We just flat get stuck. In the process of trying to fit into our appointed role—athlete or honor student or family man or class clown or skinny woman or powerful businessman or laidback dude or hardened gang member or devoted disciple—we deny the very existence of any part of ourselves that doesn’t fit neatly into that role. We deny we have any desire to skip class, or eat the whole bag of cookies, or blow off work today, or hop into bed with a total stranger.

And we usually can manage to cram all those contrary desires way down into our shadows. {What contrary desires? I don’t see any.} That is, until we wake up one day and find ourselves doing something really stupid and totally “out of character.” Out of character… out of the role we’ve chosen—or were told—to play. Which was probably a fairy tale character’s role, from a fairy tale family, in a fairy tale setting, and not humanly possible in the first place. It’s sad and poignant—as well as poisonous and highly paradoxical—that despite the evil increasing exponentially around the world, most of us are trying so hard to be good.

Denying parts of your psyche on a daily basis is called repression, and it creates another ongoing problem called regression. If I can’t even admit I have certain feelings—if they shame me, or they scare me, or if they’re not permitted in my culture—those feelings will not look the same when they slip past my conscious guard years later. Those feelings will have regressed.

Re-gress is the opposite of pro-gress. To regress is “to go backwards.” The parts of myself I just can’t stand to think about will get less human the longer I refuse to acknowledge them. The longer I pretend not to know anything at all about some part of myself, about some basic instinctual impulse of mine, the grosser and coarser and hairier and wilder that abandoned part of myself is going to get — like a troll living under a bridge, or a castaway all alone on an island.

What makes a bunch of good ole boys who usually hang out down at the café go out and lynch a black man? Or beat a gay man to death and leave his body dangling from a barbed wire fence? What makes one commuter pull out a gun and shoot another commuter over an insignificant driving mistake? Who does the actual torturing in a torturous regime? Were these people all born evil?

No. No one is born evil. However, we are all capable of a distinct downward slide as we move through life… from re-pression to re-gression to ag-gression.

Whenever we try to appear angelic on the surface, the devil inside dances.

As soon as we get really certain that our way is the only way, imps start to grin.

If we can’t admit being wrong… can’t calmly discuss important issues… simply won’t tolerate other points of view, much less change our minds faced with new evidence… when we are obviously much cooler and smarter, and other people are obviously much lamer and dumber… we are bewitched, folks. Self-enchanted. Firmly stuck in a fairy tale role.

And there's only one way to break such a spell: to take off the mask. To face the fact that every person on earth—you, me, and the guy in the corner booth over there—is just as much Court Jester as Wise King, just as much Wicked Witch as Snow White.

To go ahead and admit we're not always perfect, so we can start to do something toward mending our mistakes.

–from Shadow in the USA, p 62-63

Falsehood is so easy…

Posted on by kay
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult…
Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
-George Eliot, in Adam Bede
Posted on by kay

 

Projection of shadow material causes most of the misery, injustice and warfare in the world. –Robert Bly

Learning to integrate shadow material is the single most important task facing mankind, as failure to do so will lead to the extinction of the human race. –Carl Jung

 

 

 

quote 1

Posted on by drewsoske

"Thanks for writing this book. It is a gem and a treasure!"
                    –Robert Johnson, PhD, acclaimed Analytical Psychologist and author of numerous psychological classics, including Owning Your Own Shadow.
 

Posted on by kay

It's more useful to strive for a greater awareness of consequences,

and to develop an openness to change,

than it is to cherish certainty.