Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

by Robert L. Moore

  Moore: Yes, so you get the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic, and all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of World War I. Of course, the American Civil War was the beginning of modern warfare, but it was just barely the beginning, because they didn't have real machine guns yet. World War I was the first war to put the full-blown results of modernization into warfare.

  Soon after the war ended, grave doubts began to arise about modernized warfare. The great antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front was first published in 1929 to express the terror and futility of war. During that time you began to get people like C. S. Lewis and Tolkein, and that whole group of people who began to raise serious questions about modern civilization. “What is wrong here? There is something radically wrong that they didn't tell us about!” You need to look for what is wrong, but you need comparative psychoanalytic theory to get a complete picture.

  Mircea Eliade made a major contribution to understanding these issues. Most people have overlooked his most important point – that space and time are heterogeneous for homo religiosus, that is, for premodern human beings. There is not just one kind of space and time, not just one world, but two worlds, two kinds of space and time: (a) the world of the profane and (b) the world of the sacred, the world of myth. Eliade's book The Sacred and the Profane (1959) lays all this out in a beautiful way that I cannot do adequately here (see Moore 1984, 2001).

  This world of homo religiosus was not just Christian, however, but existed for eons prior to modernity, including most of human history. In fact, this radical distinction between ordinary space and time and sacred space and time prevailed throughout human history prior to modernization. Premodern people regularly felt the need to make contact with the divine realm. The liturgical year is a vestige of insights from that time. The Mass also served as a refuge from an ordinary world in which it was important to return often to the sacred center, the axis mundi. This world down here is imperfect and human, but the other world is full of numinosity and sacredness and power and grace.

  In my view, our survival requires that we get back to the axis mundi, the center of the world. We must do this differently, of course, from how premodern people did it, but we must get back to the center in order to survive.

  What is the sacred center in Christian thought? You Roman Catholic theologians, what is the center in orthodox Christian theology?

  Audience: The sacred coming into the profane?

  Moore: Yes. Where does it come in?

  Audience: Jesus?

  Moore: Yes, and where? This is the literal place for Christians. This is the cross. The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation, the bread of life comes in through the cross of Christ. We are healed, we are fed, and we are made whole through the grace that comes in through the sacred body and blood of Christ. We cannot be made whole without it. That is the primordial intuition in orthodox Catholic Christianity. You may argue about it theologically, and systematic theologians have a field day with it, but psychologically, it is true. The psyche must make connection with a non-ego world through which it can be centered and nourished and made whole in the face of all the brokenness invariably suffered in profane historical clock time. This is the chronos time where we are all alienated, as Peter Berger would say, and we are all broken. Or, as Paul Tillich the great theologian put it, where we are all estranged. This profane time of estrangement is very different from the kind of time that Christians touch in the Mass and other sacraments.

  Muslims have similar experiences with sacred time. I had a great conversation with a Shiite Muslim who was driving my taxi from the airport yesterday, and I learned about Shiite Islam. When the Muslim goes to Mecca and circumambulates the Ka'ba and walks this whole pilgrimage, he is going on a journey to the center. According to Eliade, humans must go on a journey to the center in order to experience renewal and regeneration. That is, until modernity. What happens with modernity? Do you go on journeys to the center?

  Audience: Journeys to the outside?

  Moore: You journey to the outside, right, in an unconscious attempt to locate a center, but what about the center in modernity? There isn't one, according to Eliade, and he is absolutely right about this. When you become truly modern psychologically and culturally, you cannot find the center anymore. Modern and postmodern cultural blinders render the traditional centers invisible. Whether or not you agree theologically with orthodox Christian dogma or ritual is another issue, but Jung thought it accurately represented psychological reality in many ways.

  The two Greek words chronos and kairos distinguish between regular, everyday time and special or sacred time. A lot of people have the wrong idea that kairos only refers to special moments, because it means “fullness of time.” There are indeed times when you experience this fullness in pregnant moments, ready-to-be-birthed time, but Eliade helps us understand that kairos time is always pregnant and full. It is a misunderstanding to think that kairos only means a pregnant moment so special that it only comes once in a thousand or two thousand years. The psychological and spiritual source of kairos is always full. According to Eliade, this is the sacred. For Jung, it is the pleroma (fullness).

  Suppose, for example, that I am a primitive herdsman, and I have a family. Perhaps I'm Abraham wandering around in the desert, and I'm getting tired of it, tired of feeling lost all the time. Luckily I happen to know about rituals and divination, so I get my special goat that was revealed to me in my dreams, and I set this goat loose, because I know it is a sacred goat who can find the center of the world. It is an instrument of divination. I don't know where the sacred spot is, but I believe my goat can find it. So I let my goat wander around, and we all follow that goat. When it stops, in the biblical tradition, at a place called Bethel, we all know that this must be sacred space, the center of the world, the axis mundi. This is where Jacob's ladder is, where traffic takes place between the sacred and profane realms. We offer up a sacrifice and put up a pile of stones to mark the place or put an altar there.

  This is true throughout human experience, no matter what the tradition. They all did this at some level, and still do. You travel around the world as I love to do, and you study every culture on the globe, and I will guarantee that you will find many interesting places where people have done this. Some of them have been there for thousands of years, and they have survived through the different religions that controlled them. Those of us who love Jerusalem will always consider it sacred space whether it is ruled by the Muslims, the Jews, or the Christians. It will always be sacred space, a representation of the axis mundi, the spiritual center of the world.

  Mecca is the same thing. This great mountain of Islamic pilgrimage was a sacred destination for pilgrims long before the time of Mohammed. From a history of religions point of view, when Mohammed organized what later became known as Islam, he used many things that already existed in ritual practice at sacred centers. Eliade describes how the symbolism of the sacred stone at the heart of Islam preexisted. Harry Partin (1967) wrote a great dissertation on the Islamic pilgrimage that was never published, and I think it should be. He traced the sacred stone worship that preceded the pilgrimage to Mecca to the forms that exist today. Do you follow what I am getting at? There is always this human journey to the sacred center.

  Another good reference on this is Victor Turner's essay, “The Center Out There: Pilgrim's Goal,” in History of Religions (1973). Before Victor Turner's death, he and his wife Edith also published Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978), but its understanding of pilgrimage applies to every human culture, because they all have pilgrimages. If you have a Jungian point of view to complete the psychological side, then you have an integrated and holistic understanding of this.

  So what is lost when modernization occurs? We are always wanting to be autonomous, right? We want to cut the umbilical cord and tie it off right here and now. Autonomy is our goal. No more conflicts between autonomy, shame, and doubt, for those of you who know Erikson. We get rid of all those Catholics,
all those priests, and especially all those nuns we went to parochial school with. “I had shame and doubt when I had them, but now I have autonomy. Where they wanted me to have poverty, chastity and obedience, now I am going to have prosperity, sex, and autonomy. Get rid of spirituality and you get the goodies.” That is the modern fantasy, but we did not anticipate the rise of the culture of narcissism with its worsening epidemic of pathological grandiosity.

  UNDERSTANDING GRANDIOSITY AND ITS IMPACT

  Contemporary psychoanalytic research has led us full circle on these matters. We are now beginning to understand that contemporary culture has this one little fly in the ointment: the epidemic of unregulated human grandiosity.

  Every concerned person needs to stop and think about this question. Why might grandiosity become a growing problem in modern, secular culture? What is there about secular-oriented culture that might cause an increase in problems of psychological grandiosity? Not theological problems. Forget theology for a moment. This is just a question about the psychology of narcissism. We can bracket theological issues here and talk about psychodynamics.

  Chicago is the center of a school of psychoanalytic thought grounded in the work of Heinz Kohut whose psychology of narcissistic personality disorders created great conflict in Freudian circles. Kohut noticed that grandiosity, rather than improving your sex life, either makes you impotent or makes you so promiscuous that you cannot sustain relationships and you put yourself in danger of getting AIDS and dying. In other words, grandiosity tends to destroy you if you don't face up it and learn how to regulate it.

  Another example is the work that many therapists do with addictive disorders of various kinds. Jerome Levin's book Treatment of Alcoholism and Other Addictions (1987) shows how infantile grandiosity generates addictions and compulsions. This is Kohutian, not Jungian, but it just happens to agree with Jung. Levin thinks that all addictions and compulsive behaviors reveal an incorrect relationship to one's grandiose self organization. That is interesting to me, and I believe he is right (see also Levin 1993).

  Audience: What exactly do you mean? Can you give me a quick definition of exactly what you mean by “infantile grandiosity.”

  Moore: Your ego becomes so inflated that you act as if you thought you were God. A more detailed definition is given under “narcissistic personality disorder” in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association. My research finds intrusions of grandiose energies in all four major forms of archetypal energy (see chapter 6).

  Very simply, “grandiosity” means you have larger fantasies and wishes for yourself than your real life experience can support, so they either make you manic, running around trying to keep up with their demands, or they make you depressed because your desires are so high and unachievable that it soon seems useless to try to do anything at all.

  A manic state exists when you cannot sleep because your mind is thinking of all the great books you are going to write, or you cannot develop a relationship with one woman because you want to have sex with every woman you know. Or you cannot drink sensibly, because you want to drink everything you can get your hands on. One person said, “If I do not watch my grandiosity, the grandiose lover inside of me wants to drink all of the bourbon they can bottle in Kentucky.” People like this are not satisfied with a shot here and there, now and then. They want all of it. Another example of addictive personality manifesting in greed would be someone who takes inordinate risks in gambling on the stock market.

  Whether the addiction is sex, money, alcohol, food, or whatever, there is this greedy little god in the psyche, and everyone has it, whether from the point of view of centrist Jungian thought or psychoanalytic self psychology. There is no one alive who does not have a grandiose, exhibitionistic self-organization, an actual psychological structure or entity that thinks it is God. This fascinating thought has many disturbing implications.

  The bad news about this grandiosity is that trying to avoid it by being humble only indicates the enormity of your struggle. I hate to disturb anyone's good day, but a really humble person may be having more trouble with grandiosity than someone who thinks they are pretty hot stuff. If you get depressed a lot because you think you are worthless, it indicates a mighty struggle with this little god within. You need to feel like you weigh a thousand pounds in your leaden depression so you won't float off into the sun and be destroyed by an Icarus complex.

  From this point of view, what is depression? It is your friend. Thank God for your depression, because it is the ballast on your psychic balloon. Without it, you would be flying into the sun of psychosis. The genius of this recent psychoanalytic work is simple and profound, because it shows that everyone without exception has the same problem of this powerfully burning solar furnace within, what Jung called the archetypal Self.

  Different psychoanalytic theories talk about it in many different ways. Adlerian therapists label it the “superiority complex” behind every “inferiority complex,” and then try to help you find the ways you think you are better than everyone else. They try to get you to come down off your little throne and join the rest of humanity (Adler 1989). Most theorists agree with the Adlerians that it is simplistic to blame someone morally for being up there on their little high chair.2

  Traditional religions, by contrast, do tend to blame you moralistically for being up there on your high chair. This creates the irony of one person sitting on a little high chair over there criticizing you for being on your little high chair over here. What traditional spiritualities do not seem to understand is that sitting on a little monk high chair is no more humble than sitting on a little libertine high chair. Spiritual athletes are often just as inflated in their grandiosity as are people who seem just the opposite. The chair of the spiritual athlete is neither higher nor lower than the chair of the sex addict. Both chairs manifest grandiose energies. You can be just as arrogant in the Mother Theresa mode as in the Madonna mode. Spiritual practice, then, can often be a clever disguise for someone possessed by infantile grandiosity and related delusional humility.

  It is the genius and challenge of contemporary psychoanalytic theory to have given a comprehensive explanation of these things for the first time. We never before had such a powerful resource for discernment to help us realize that you must do more than identify with spiritual archetypes to be truly humble.

  Audience: What would you say about the humility that Christ talked about? Or the renunciation that the Buddhists talk about, like being ego-less? Are they merely dreams?

  Moore: To understand this you have to do a psychology of asceticism. Some early Christian literature did show Jesus giving a scathing critique of spiritual hypocrisy (Matthew, chapters 6 and 23), but nothing like a comprehensive understanding of its psychology. As for the spiritual realities in the actual life of Jesus, modern psychological studies tell us very little. We know enough to know that we don't know anything scientifically accurate about his personality. You have to entertain the possibility that modern interpretations of Christ and Buddha may be projections. We may still know something about Christ through faith, of course, relying on the written testimony of early Christians, but in terms of historical research, we know very little.

  There is such a thing as humility, however, and we must learn the true humility that consists of two things: (a) knowing your limitations and (b) getting the help you need. That is all humility is. It has nothing to do with any ascetic personal style or with being self-effacing. It is simply knowing your limitations. That is what the grandiose self hates. The grandiose self does not want to know any limits, and it does not want to ask for help. The twelve-step programs are so powerful because they teach a form of humility that says: “Know your limitations, and get the help you need.”

  To return to our main topic, how does it feed psychological, pathological narcissism when we declare the entire sacred world nonexistent?

  Audience: You would get all your gratification and fulfillment in the
profane world through some kind of physical gratification?

  Moore: So everything becomes unconsciously sacramental in a very shadowy way. You do not do away with sacraments. Humans cannot do away with sacraments, or sacrifice, or ritual. You just become unconscious and act it out. You become very literalistic. Instead of an offering from another world, as in the Christian myth, that comes into this world to feed you, you feed on others. There is still sacrifice, but you eat other people. This is the dynamic behind the vampire myth and psychological cannibalism.

  In all the cities of the world today, the more our secularization has increased, the more we are “eating the children.” Right as I speak here in River City, there are children being “eaten.” Very few seem to care about these child prostitutes in Chicago, not to speak of the adult ones who are also being “eaten” by the spiritually hungry. The traffic in prostitution is an acted out, unconscious, ritualized sacrificial sacrament.

  American intellectuals tend to ignore such things as this. We seldom worry about the prostitutes. You seldom hear anyone expressing any concern about them. A handful of people at Genesis House here in Chicago care about them, but it is hard for them to raise money. If you are a psychotherapist, you may have worked with some of the very people who are eating them, psychically and physically. It is so horrible that we cannot even let ourselves know that these children die very quickly. The life expectancy of prostitutes is not very high. I am not talking about Bangkok, and I am not talking about Bombay. Not long ago I drove down a street in Bombay where thousands of young women were lined up who had been sold into prostitution. At that time I was blind to the situation in Chicago and New York City, but later I learned how widespread it is.

  We still engage in demonic sacramental behaviors, and terrible things happen when we don't have a conscious connection with the mythic realm, or as Robert Bly would say, the “other world.” Robert Bly (1990) would say to a group of men: if you are not in touch with the king in the other world, your life in this world is going to be a terrible mess. I was surprised that we agreed on this.