We are confronted here with a problem which is often overlooked by psychologists, be it by analysts of the Jungian or another direction. Although the archetype of the Self can sometimes appear in the initial dream presented by an analysand, one must, as Jung emphasizes, first work out the integration of the shadow. If one does not do this, then the ego is too weak and does not have enough substance to endure the inner process. One can compare it to catching a huge fish which one cannot land, and it disappears together with the hook. The more shadow aspects the ego can integrate, the more vital, substantial, and strong it becomes, so that at the decisive moment it can “land the fish.” The moral and ethical qualities of the ego are decisive, for one cannot lie one’s way out. These are very simple facts which many people cannot accept, so their individuation is prevented. Life itself, for instance bad fortune, can help to integrate the shadow and to strengthen the ego. Being tortured by people in one’s surroundings, being persecuted by them, any kind of pressure, such as poverty, help to strengthen the ego. I would say that regular work is the best remedy. Jung speaks of it in his seminars where he says that work is the means by which to overcome the mother complex and avoid being overwhelmed by the unconscious.
I remember a very intelligent young man, who had a strong mother complex, and who entered analysis mainly out of interest, but he was lazy, which is mankind’s greatest passion. In his inner talks with the anima, who always appeared as a goddess, he tried to defend himself with a realistic attitude, but he did not manage very well. When he asked her why she tortured him, she answered that she wanted him to become a man. He replied that she should give him a chance. When she reproached him with being weak, he asked how he could make himself adequate. She answered that he should look at the cornfields behind her and harvest them, and bring in the harvest, and then he would be an adequate man. People who have a weak ego are too lost in the unconscious and cannot work regularly. Anybody carried by enthusiasm can work, but the problem of laziness begins when one has to do something which one does not feel like doing. Laziness is the bait by which the Great Mother catches us back; that is her greatest magic charm!
Tlepolemus is the man who endures war and withstands difficulties; Lucius has been forced by fate into conflicts, but involuntarily. In mythology, Ares, the father of Eros in some tales, stands for war. And in the name Tlepolemus there is a hidden allusion to Ares. Charite is secretly one with Psyche, whereas Tlepolemus represents an aspect of the god of war. He is an image of masculine aggressive courage, of endurance and the capacity to withstand conflict and go through it. Men need these qualities when faced with life or with a woman. Men who do not have them are afraid of women, for they feel that at the crucial moment, and instinctively, they will not react in an adequate way. If a man is afraid of women he cannot love them, for you cannot love someone of whom you are afraid, because that would be a question of domination. Real love contains a great amount of trust, and if you are afraid of someone it means that you have no real confidence in them. That is why a mother’s boy in relation to women is afraid and leaves them with an uncertain feeling of being cold and distant, for he knows that if the woman really gets aggressive, he will not be up to the situation. He would not be able to take back the bouquet he has brought, slam the door, and say something coarse enough to shut up her animus. In marriage, men who have not assimilated their masculinity become henpecked husbands, just good enough to carry the luggage. If the wife makes a scene, some men go to a friend for advice. Then the friend says he must retain a cool head and take the upper hand; but that does not help because the woman feels that someone else has advised him to do this, and just laughs at him because of that. That defense reaction must come out at the given moment and out of the instinctive basis, and this a man can only achieve if he has integrated his “Tlepolemus.” Then he can react at once in a spontaneous way, for he will have the right fantasy and say the right thing. It might even be a joke, if she is sailing around like a dreadnought with her unleashed animus.
After Tlepolemus’s death, there is a small strange remark in the book, namely, that Charite worshipped her dead husband in the likeness of Liber, a name for Dionysos. This points to the Dionysos mysteries, which in Apuleius’s time had become a part of the Attis and Osiris mysteries. Merkelbach’s contention that probably Apuleius thought of these parallels and discreetly alludes to them is therefore justified. So again the sacred marriage, the hieros gamos, and the marriage quaternio fall apart. Everything disappears into the realm of death, blotted out without a concrete result, first by the robbers, then by Tlepolemus, as Haemus, and then later by Thrasyllus. If someone has thus missed his chance, his depression will generally then become much worse. This reminds me of the fairy-tale motif in which a valuable flower blossoms every nine years out of a pond, or the earth, and if one misses this moment, then one must wait another nine years for the next chance. There are those numinous moments of possible realization, and if one misses them then it is over. I remember the story of a man who fell in love with a woman and for conventional, moral reasons did not take up the relationship. His dreams bothered him on and on about it, but he continued to have ethical reasons for not deepening the relationship, till finally one day he woke up from a dream with a voice saying to him, “If one misses certain things at a certain moment, one has missed one’s whole life.” This frightened him sufficiently to get him to act.
So there are these moments where one knows that if one is now a coward, if one now misses the curve, one will not get the chance again for a very long time. The unconscious generally makes that quite clear, and because things have not reached consciousness we have this terrible comedown afterward.
Out of gratitude, Tlepolemus gives Lucius to a stud farmer with whom he is supposed to have a good life and be happy. But this man, as soon as he is at a good distance from the house of Tlepolemus, uses him as an ass to turn the mill. In antiquity the milling of the corn was done by grinding it between two stones. An animal—cow, horse, or ass—or even a slave or several slaves had to turn the stone. There is still the same system in Egypt for obtaining water. In its negative aspect the motif of milling around means being caught in an emotional complex. When someone is stuck in a neurotic complex, the same problem goes round and round in his head. People cannot get away from the problem, and they tell you the same thing over and over again. But as we have seen, there is also something numinous hidden in the complex, and in the very worst center of the neurosis or psychosis there is generally a symbol of the Self and that causes the fascination and makes people hang on to it. If one contents oneself with the repression of the illness, the symbol of the Self is thereby also repressed, and that is the reason why people often fight against being cured. They have a hunch that the best of themselves lives in their worst suffering, and that is the awful difficulty.
At the basis of neuroses as well as of psychoses one finds generally a symbol of the Self, but it is constellated there in a form which cannot yet be assimilated. So Lucius is bound to the wheel without understanding anything. The picture is especially characteristic since the animals or the slaves mostly had a black bandage tied over their eyes to prevent them from becoming giddy. That is a picture of every neurotic situation: with bound eyes one must drudge in a circulus vitiosus, to turn around the psychic center, without being able to “see” something and to understand the meaning of suffering. It is the classical circumabulatio of alchemy, but in its negative form.
After this episode, Lucius is sold to a woman and an adolescent boy. The boy uses him to fetch firewood from the mountains. There, being alone with him, he enjoys torturing him sadistically; he also spreads around the village bad stories about him, claiming that Lucius has pursued women and sodomized them, and he thus succeeds in having the ass condemned to be castrated.
This boy represents the most negative version of the puer aeternus symbol; he is the shadow of figures such as Attis and Osiris, and also of Lucius himself. The shadow of a young man whose feelings a
re undeveloped often has the boyish attitude of puberty, like those teenagers who pour kerosene on tramps and set fire to them just to enjoy the reaction. There is a misguided instinct behind it! Youngsters who have been castrated by so-called “good education,” those goody-goody mama’s darling boys, frequently have a secret longing for what one could call the bloody cruelty of life. It is normal for young men in puberty to develop a certain curiosity about the gruesome and dark sides of life, to go to a morgue to see what corpses look like, or to the backyard of the village butcher to watch the killing of the animals. Such boys instinctively seek shock effects to wake up out of the honey-sweet atmosphere at home in which they have been lulled to sleep. In a way, therefore, a certain amount of curiosity about evil corresponds to a healthy instinct. It means that the young man is seeking the truth of life and yearns to know how things really are. Naturally, if it goes too far it becomes pathological. In our story Lucius is not cruel, not even firm enough with Charite. If he had only said when fleeing, “Shut up now! We’ll go where I want to go, we can make love afterward.” Or, “You can howl afterward, but now I want to do this or that!” That would have been the man’s task, but he missed being cruel with her sentimental nonsense at the right moment. Because of that, his cruel shadow became autonomous and destructive and tortures him now. Lucius is therefore now whipped, castigated, and tortured by this sadistic boy; this means he suffers from a childish self-criticism which leads nowhere. Finally it goes so far that the villagers decide to castrate him, and he only escapes by urinating all over the hostile old woman who intends to burn his genitals.
In alchemical texts urine is an especially productive and positive substance. Urina puerorum, the boy’s urine, is, for instance, one of the many names for the prima materia of the alchemical stone of the wise. Even in the nineteenth century the poet Gustav Meyrinck, who also secretly practiced alchemy, still believed that. In Prague he paid a lot of money for a very old outhouse and dug round in it for years because he had read so much about urine in old texts. It exploded in his face! In the Canton of Appenzell, the practice of medicine without a doctor’s degree is still not forbidden, and it is therefore the canton where a lot of nature healers, good and bad, accumulate. Some of them prescribe that people should drink their own urine, the most marvelous cure for practically every disease. The need to urinate is the only bodily need which we cannot control fully. Even in military service one has the right to step out, and not even the general can forbid it. Urinating is therefore a symbol for expressing one’s inner-most nature. It is really something of the highest value and so there are so many jokes about it. Even the emperor must go to the pissoir, and so on. This urge is the defeat of man’s will. He is up against an urge stronger than himself. Sleep and hunger can be repressed for a long time, but not urinating. And because of this impossibility, it is a “god”; in other words, it is stronger than man. It crosses all plans. Very often in analysis, if people do not say truthfully what they should say, or do not confess a transference, or suppress God knows what, they are forced to go out three times during the hour. Jung told a story about a woman who, after she had been sitting with him, was awkward and funny for about five minutes. He felt he had to urinate. He had actually done so just before, but he got up and excused himself, and when he came back she murmured shyly, “I have to go too.” And he said, “Damn it, have I even to do that for you?” Frequently in nightmares people wander about with this kind of an urge and cannot find the right place, which always means that they cannot express their true nature. Therefore, if Lucius here escapes with the help of urinating, this means that at the last minute he returns to a completely natural, genuine expression of himself and by that he saves his own life. It shows that his innermost genuineness is not bro ken, and if completely cornered it will still come forth against his will. So the principle of individuation manifests in this rather elementary form.
With the death of Tlepolemus and Charite there is an end to any normal love life in the novel; from here on there is nothing but adultery, homosexuality, and sodomy, with the exception of the last chapter. The themes of the novel are now perversion, crime, and torture. First, the sadistic boy is killed by a bear; after that, his mother has an outburst of rage against the ass, whom she accuses of being responsible for the boy’s death. This accusation is not without symbolic meaning: the bear is a mother symbol and one of Artemis’s animals. In American Indian tradition it is connected, as it is in Greece, with madness as well as with healing powers.
In the Greek language the word arktos, for “bear,” is feminine. In reality, therefore, the sadistic boy is killed by the same destructive, devouring mother who threatens Lucius. The negative elements destroy each other, something which at the end enables Lucius to escape. What attitude would be needed in consciousness for this to happen? In fairy tales the hero often meets three giants who quarrel, and the hero acts as judge. The giants kill each other, and the hero gets the magical object which is the source of the conflict. For the opposites to eat each other up is an ideal situation; but one needs detachment, since the ego must stand the conflict and not identify with either party. If the ego does not identify, then the opposites will eat each other up. If one is involved in a conflict, the inner opposites will always try to pull one in; but if one succeeds in staying “outside,” which means staying objective, they may destroy each other, as here the bear and the sadistic boy do.
From now on the story becomes somewhat tedious. One disgusting affair follows another. But psychologically this tiring repetition is not accidental. Often something similar happens within analysis. There is generally a phase where the neuroses becomes rather stabilized and the process is less fluid than hitherto. It is as if the neurosis builds up a defense mechanism. One feels that a part of life is excluded, for the same kind of bad experience is continually repeated. Every time one hopes that something may change, but nothing results, and so the great emotion which would sweep away all the neurotic fixation cannot break through. This long period of being stuck in such a neurotic situation is depicted in this part of the book. I do not know of a general solution for such cases. One has the feeling that the analysis should be able to break through the blockage and force a decision, but one cannot reach the nucleus of the personality. The temptation is then to give up and to send the case to a colleague. The other possibility is to struggle further, even if it means working for two or three years, hoping that one day the unconscious will have accumulated enough energy for a breakthrough. This is what happens finally in our story. Only after a long adverse stagnation does the big breakthrough come in the eleventh chapter. As our diagram shows, much has happened above and below the line, but from now on there will be only nonsense for a long while, little happens above or below, and one wonders where the psychic energy is.
At the end of this tedious part there follows the wonderful appearance of the goddess Isis. So, after the event it becomes clear what actually happened before: while you were plowing through the dirty nonsense, all of the life energy was accumulating in the deeper layers of the unconscious until the healing archetypal content could break through. Before, nature had tried over and over to get through, but now it seems it had to wait until enough explosive force had been accumulated. Admittedly, this is also dangerous, because the energy then returns in a too-powerful way. It is a dangerous moment, because then the energy comes in a brutal form. In such a case you may come to a shock solution, or a catastrophe, for nature does not care which. It can also happen that, if the resistance is insurmountable, inner realization may come only on the death-bed; for example, a cancer can manifest itself and the interior unity is not realized until the last hour.
At any rate, there is here a quiet period when nature accumulates her forces. This is hinted at by the description of the dragon episode: the ass and its master walk past a dragon which is devouring everything. This seemingly meaningless episode, and the fact that no fight takes place with the dragon, conveys that the “devouring mother” h
as now taken on her deepest, coldest, and most destructive form and has disappeared into the bowels of the earth. The mother complex has become a completely destructive force. Nothing happens anymore on the level of consciousness. The god Seth, the enemy of Osiris, was represented sometimes by the figure of a crocodile or a snake (but in Greek the word drakon means both “dragon” and “snake”). It is, as it were, he who now rules the whole unconscious level. If an archetype takes on the form of a snake or a dragon, it means it is in such deep layers that it can manifest only in the psychosomatic area, in the sympathetic nervous system. Then the conflict has taken on a form which can not be assimilated into consciousness: there will not even be any more important dreams. It is the stillness before the storm.
The Golden Ass of Apuleius Page 16