Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

by Robert L. Moore

  You can do a lot by accessing the archetype of the warrior. For example, with help from the warrior within, the human psyche always manages to find the enemy and mobilize against it. This is important, because people often have a hard time locating where their primary struggle really is. If you are a practicing counselor or working with people, you will find that a lot of people have never taken the time to raise the question, “Where is my struggle?” They are not clear about what they want to struggle for, toward, or against.

  Some people today even suggest that you do not need to struggle, that you should just relax, get a hot tub and enjoy. That is a different archetype, the archetype of the lover, that wants you to get into a hot tub, take off your clothes, get all warm and fuzzy, and not be too task-oriented. It is hard to be task-oriented while in the archetype of the lover. On the other hand, a lot of people do take the warrior into their love life and try to be task-oriented there, but it doesn't work very well.

  One way to understand the warrior is to check out the people you work with and ask, “Do they have a real functioning general operating somewhere in their psyche, in their life?” If not, they are probably backing their way through life in a depressed, passive-aggressive mode, and will continue to do so.

  Audience: What do you mean by “a functional general”?

  Moore: Someone to take charge when there is a clear need, someone to clarify the terrain, make judgments about resources and where one should open an offensive. You cannot do everything at once. You need a capacity to assess, prioritize, focus, mobilize, evaluate, and concentrate. All these things come right out of the archetype of the warrior and the study of the psychology of leadership. All talk about leadership qualities draws upon the archetype of the warrior and the regal archetypes of king or queen. The warrior does not necessarily have anything to do with war at all, but with struggle in general, and being able to focus on objectives and effectiveness.7

  Audience: Is this regardless of personality type? Would not an intuitive have a different warrior mode than a thinker?

  Moore: They would typically have a different way of expressing it, or not expressing it, but a lot of introverted intuitive types are out of touch with their warrior. They sort of wait around, because they expect to intuit their way through the struggles of their life. You can have excellent intuitive knowledge, but it is no substitute for action. There are many things in life, and particularly in individuation, that you simply cannot get without action. If you do not act and face your individuation tasks, then you tend to just sit and do nothing, and consequently, you do not get the transformation you need.8

  Audience: Are there not types that just inherently find some certain things easier than others?

  Moore: Certainly, but sensation types are more in touch with this, and your ESTJ is probably more natural, but these types have limits. I am suspicious of typology in general, because it is too simple. Human beings are not as simple as typology seems to indicate. Each type still has to face the various archetypal structures and the challenge to achieve a more optimal integration.

  Audience: But people do have different kinds of personality.

  Moore: Yes, they do, largely determined by the structure of the archetypal integration in their personality. But they also have different abilities to be in touch with their surroundings and make accurate, reality-based judgments. People who are paranoid, or otherwise have bad judgment, will tend to misread their surroundings. Any personality can improve its integration through an optimal accessing of the warrior within.

  We have to avoid simplistic use of typology because an optimally integrated personality usually transcends the limitations of one particular type. For example, a close study of the biographies of outstanding generals throughout history shows they tended to be very intuitive, but they also tended to be good thinkers in touch with their surroundings. A fully integrated warrior has a mature personality that you cannot expect to be locked into one narrow typological function. Even an intuitive type is better able to assess the shadow of the enemy. It is a subtle thing. Saint Augustine, for example, whatever else you may think about him, was a great person who was a powerful administrator and a leader, yet he was also a mystic, intuitive, and introverted. Powerful historical leaders simply do not fit well into neat typological categories.

  A first-rate general often knows what the enemy is thinking, while second-rate ones do not. The overrated British general Bernard Montgomery knew what he was going to do, but he often could not discern what the enemy was going to do. That was one of the greatest problems with his leadership. Military historians have evaluated him badly on that score. A good general anticipates what the enemy is thinking, and he takes that into consideration as part of his decision-making process.

  You can see how adaptive this insight is. What does it mean if you cash it out? It means that people with a developed warrior part of their personality are less narcissistic. They are able to have more empathy with the enemy and offer them appropriate respect. The greatest generals have always admired the generals on the other side. There is a wonderful line in the movie Patton (1970), which you ought to watch in this context. George C. Scott is incredible as General Patton. You can see Patton's immaturity and narcissistic pathology, but you can also see some of his greatness. In one scene he has just left a great battle where he faced off with the great German general Erwin Rommel and wiped out Rommel's tanks. He stops for a moment and takes down his binoculars and says, “Rommel, you magnificent ———, I read your book!”

  A pure narcissist would never have read that book, because he could not give the enemy that much admiration and credit. A warrior like Patton attained the level where he never underestimated his enemies, never disrespected them, but learned everything he could about them.

  Underestimating what you are dealing with is one of the marks of grandiosity and immaturity. This is really important in the human psyche and in psychotherapy. Both therapists and people in therapy make mistakes about this. They underestimate what they are dealing with and have what I call “flights into health.” The flight into health is where people say, “I am all better now, no more symptoms,” and they quit right at the time when they were getting somewhere. That is the same kind of thing as underestimating the power and cunning of the great enemy within.

  This leads us to a discussion of the personal and archetypal aspects of the shadow, before concluding with some observations on the therapeutic relevance of these archetypal realities.

  INTEGRATING THE PERSONAL SHADOW

  The Jungian concept of the shadow, and the whole struggle toward consciousness, is a contemporary reappropriation of all the light-and-darkness imagery in religious traditions and mythology. Jung makes good use of this imagery as background for his goal of an increased awareness that brings light into the recesses of the personality so we can see relationships between the various aspects of the personality. He describes the mighty struggle going on in your psyche between your shadow and your ego personality, and how you must get them to stop warring and start communicating as partners and brothers. The struggle is like the twinship images of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, which all reflect the inner alienation and need for reconciliation.

  In the Jungian psychology of the shadow, your goal is to bring about mutual respect and peace negotiations in the inner civil war in your soul. This is certainly true for personal developmental issues and splitting off childhood pain and traumas. The whole idea of healing means bringing these denied feelings and experiences back into awareness, and not allowing them to split us right down the middle. The integration of the personal shadow brings peace, harmony, and integration to the psyche. That is how Jungians deal with the mythic struggle between light and darkness. The psychological task in analysis is to help the light win by including many things that were formerly excluded. You can equate light with awareness.

  The darkness of unconsciousness is very strong, but the light of awareness pushes it back. In Jung's morality of a
wareness, the struggle for individuation is a struggle for light, a struggle to get conscious, to get more of your experience and personality out of the dark so it can be respected, loved, accepted, and affirmed. The challenge is relating consciously to the depth and complexity of who you are. Like Jean Bolen says, you can have your inner get togethers where all your warring family members can come together and have a family council meeting. All the different parts of your shadow get together and talk to each other, and say, “Okay, I want this, and you want that, now what can we agree on here?” This is like trying to get mutual respect and peace talks going around your inner round table. That is all true and very important.

  THE ARCHETYPAL SHADOW

  The archetypal shadow is another idea we need to reflect on. Is the shadow all personal or not? What does it mean to talk about the archetypal shadow? Can you distinguish between the archetypal shadow and the personal shadow? Many Jungians don't make that distinction, of course, but I am one Jungian who takes archetypes very seriously, as well as the distinction between the personal psyche and the objective psyche, the collective unconscious.

  Let me give you a quick sense of what I mean by archetypal shadow. All Jungians who have studied developmental psychology know how an archetypal configuration can come in and take over a personality and possess it. This happens all the time in one-sided personalities where the person has been hurt developmentally and the resulting ego is weak. The more you were hurt in your early development, the weaker your ego structure will be, and the more likely an archetypal pattern will colonize you and derail your individuation. That is a fundamental assumption of my neo-Jungian psychoanalytic theory.

  Jung taught that archetypes have their own shape and objective psychic reality. The mother archetype is the mother archetype whether it possesses you or not, and the child archetype is the child archetype whether it manifests overtly in your psyche right this minute or not. There is compelling evidence that some archetypal elements of the shadow are not simply split-off personal experiences, but represent common human experiences that the religious traditions associated with an archetypal adversary, whether it be Satan or Iblis or Ahriman.

  The study of human apprehensions of evil is interesting, because people in very different places have much agreement about its principles and dynamics, and how it works. I have studied the history of human images of evil in great depth for a long time, and I teach courses at the doctoral level on the images of evil in culture and psychopathology. This is complicated, but I can summarize it a bit. Evil is very much antilife. It is full of hate. It tries to destroy relatedness. It uses deceit, lying, and illusion. In fact, almost all folklore presents evil as deceit and lying and a master of illusion. Evil hates the light, and even loses its power when light is around. Evil cannot stand to be exposed, and it hates human community for that reason. Evil wants to get you alone and isolate you. It also wants to get you in the dark.

  Popular culture is wonderfully insightful about this. Popular horror films, for instance, are wonderful about picking up on these motifs about the marks of evil, and they all agree. Evil wants to get you in the dark, wants to get you alone, wants you to think it is not coming from that direction, because as soon as you think it is not coming from that direction, that is the direction it will come from.

  Several recent films give a wonderful treatment of these archetypal mythic dimensions and assessment of evil. The Thing (1982) starred Kurt Russell. Another example is The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), not the early version but the recent remake with Donald Sutherland. Take a look at these films. It is worthwhile just to see Kurt Russell or Donald Sutherland dramatizing these psychological realities.

  These films show evil destructiveness operating consistently like it does in Dracula and werewolf movies and stories of folklore, fairy tales, and religious traditions. We cannot attribute all this consistency back to personal creativity. Some of it must come from a specieswide intuition and be archetypal in nature.

  The evil force always comes from the outside but is inside you before you know it. You always think it is out there knocking at the door, but it is already inside. The most terrifying thing about “the thing” or the alien is that you can't tell who has it and who doesn't. You don't even know whether it has already possessed you or not. Though “the thing” refers to unconscious grandiose energies that threaten to destroy us, in the mythic imagination the whole struggle occurs in terms of apocalyptic light-darkness imagery. Whenever it is darker, “the thing” attacks. Whenever the people are isolated, it gets them.

  So much consistency in all these traditions raises the probability that these archetypal dimensions of human destructiveness go beyond the fact that someone had a bad mother. Personal developmental failures, and nurturing failures, just like everything else about families, may come from archetypal energies that families unconsciously welcomed into the home in an unregulated way. Personal traumas make people vulnerable at various times in their lives to possession by certain archetypal patterns of destruction that have their own organization and agency and do not derive simply from less than perfect parenting. These objective psychic realities are alien to the personal and family history, and yet are so common that humans throughout the world recognize them when confronted with them.

  Freud, as a non-Jungian example, long recognized thanatos and eros as two opposing drives in human life, based on his clinical observations. He used thanatos, the Greek word for death, to describe something he commonly saw in people, not exactly a “death-wish” in the simple popular sense, but more like an instinct toward death. Freud observed this and tried to explain it, but people told him it sounded too mystical, so he dropped it, but his original observation still stands. He saw something in people that pushes them toward destruction, that tries, in our terms, to get them to leave therapy right when they are getting better, but without consolidating their positive changes.

  In other words, something always seems to intervene the minute you begin making progress. Consider, for example, a person who never had a decent relationship in his life, and just when he finds the right person in a relationship that could go somewhere, a person who will not abuse him but really love him, that is exactly when he comes up with some reason not to have anything more to do with that person. It is so amazing. I see this in people that I am working with all the time, and if you are a therapist you see it in the people you are working with.

  Now if you saw only a few people like this, you might say it comes from their unique experiences with their parents, but if you see it operating this way over and over again in many different kinds of people, then it looks less like personal experience and more like they all read the same manual on “How Not to Survive,” or “How Not to Thrive in Life,” or “How to Self-Destruct.” If you work with a lot of substance abusers, or people with bad self-hate patterns, and you study their families, it is hard to reduce it simply to saying their mothers made some bad mistakes and now we have this mega self-destructing ball of flesh here in the office crying out from the pain and pleading to us for help.

  Another view of this comes from the British object-relations theorists in the Fairbairn-Guntrip school (see Hazell 1995 and 1996). They talk about the anti-libidinal ego, for which there is a whole literature. The anti-libidinal ego should be translated “antilife ego.” Part of a person's psyche is hell-bent on destroying her and not allowing her to have any love, not allowing her to have any trust, not allowing her to have any successful transformation of her patterns of relatedness and her patterns of human interaction. The very minute she gets involved in relationships that are more hopeful, this thing mobilizes, gets aggressive, and seeks to destroy the new relationship. It strikes me that there is a need for deeper reflection on what this is that gets constellated.

  This has an interesting parallel with studies of the psychology of the myth of the birth of the hero, because every time the divine child gets born, what happens? The armies of Herod or Pharaoh are mobilized, and they
seek to attack the baby. That is archetypal and objective, and it suggests that anytime there is new life or progress being made in the personality, you can expect a counterattack that has nothing to do with the parents' lack of quality. It may well be that Herod's armies, or Pharaoh's armies, or the armies of demons that attacked the Buddha, or the armies of Ravana that attacked Rama in the Ramayana epic, that all those armies refer to the same archetypal reality, psychic realities that are archetypal, not personal, and are out to stop you when you start making progress.

  All the different religious traditions have been convinced about this reality. We moderns are the only people who have not accepted it, and we have the bomb and pollution instead. Jung believed that when we stop talking about the demons we become more vulnerable to their destructive force.9

  So I want to suggest that there is more to this archetype of spiritual warfare than simply integrating your personal shadow, or merely learning how to love those denied parts of your personality. It involves learning how to tell the difference between the personal shadow that comes from your individual experience, and the archetypal forces which have access to your psyche from within, that you can never integrate, and had better not try to integrate. Jung discusses this in volume eight of the Collected Works in his distinction between personal complexes and what he calls “spirit complexes.”

  IMAGES OF TRANSPERSONAL ASSISTANCE

  Audience: Where does the Resurrection fit in this? It is beyond warfare. The Resurrection ultimately defeats all the forces of evil that participated in the Crucifixion.