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.

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

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.

Avoiding Dr. Jekyll’s Fate

Posted on by kay

In order to make our parents happy we started covering up parts of ourselves before we could walk. And we definitely knew the difference between approval and disapproval before we could talk. It's a basic survival skill. We can't make it on our own as infants. We depend upon the goodwill of others to survive. So if we hear we're too much trouble, or our poop stinks, or we're too lively or too clingy or too clumsy or too stupid, we stuff those parts down into our shadows. By second grade, hiding parts of ourselves in order to please other people has become second nature.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. In order to become a thinking human being who can cooperate with other thinking human beings, some of that old animal instinctual nature needs to be controlled. Some parts of the psyche are like the bad sisters in fairy tales: extremely selfish. "Letting it all hang out" just won't work among intelligent mammals who've been honing their warfare skills for thousands of years.

So some repression serves a useful purpose. It allows children to become functioning, cooperative members of society. We learn not to drown our baby sister or hit our brother over the head with a baseball bat. We learn how to sit still and pay attention to others. We figure out that we are not the center of the universe (hopefully).

However, once we grow up, we have a responsibiity to get curious about what happened to all that juicy emotional energy we've been actively repressing since we were children. Otherwise, we're liable to end up becoming a danger to society anyway — but a nice, sneaky, civilized danger. As Robert Bly said once, "If we want to pretend we're always nice, then our creeps have to sneak around to get out."

Yeah. If we refuse to admit that we even have certain feelings, we exclude the possibility of dealing with those feelings rationally. If we don't take any notice of — or responsibility for — whatever's lurking in our shadow, then we set other people up for ambush by our unsupervised inner demons.

In the famous book by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll was a perfect gentleman. A widely respected, highly cultured, upper class, sterling citizen who spent most of his daylight hours ministering to the poor and needy. Afraid to mar his perfect image but full of unappeased desires — this was the Victorian age, you know — Jekyll created an alternate ego, Mr. Hyde, to act out the shadowy urges in his soul. Bad idea. Because when Hyde slipped out the laboratory door at night he headed straight for the seediest parts of London. As time went on and Jekyll kept denying his influence, Hyde's desires took ranker and ranker forms. He persecuted prostitutes, preyed on the weak, committed murder. The "hidden" Hyde grew ever more warped, ever more bestial, ever harder for Jekyll to control. Eventually? You know it. Jekyll became all Hyde, all the time.

There's a recurring theme in literature about soothing the savage soul. But for that to happen, someone in the story has got to pay attention to the poor beast. Conscious, direct attention. It's the same in the inner world as in the outer world: no critter likes to be caged.

Which means: any archetypal character prowling around in your psyche — and we all have hundreds of them — will perform better and be easier to handle if you can (1) look right at it, admit that it exists, that it's yours; and (2) find out what it wants. Then you can open negotiations with it. Then you can figure out how to handle it without harming others.

 

Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows

Posted on by kay

You can all mixed up with complexes, things like that, but really, as the Polynesian saying goes, you are then "standing on a whale, fishing for minnows." We are standing on a whale. The ground of being is the ground of our being. If we only look outward, we see problems here and problems there. But when we begin to look inward, we see that we are the cause of them all. –Joseph Campbell