Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

by Robert L. Moore

  Whether or not you believe these ideas theologically, or ontologically, or metaphysically, you better have some connection with them in a mythical sense. Myth needs to live for you, because if you do not have an “other world” where the gods and goddesses live, or a king and queen, then you are going to be eaten up with grandiose energies. You will either identify with the royal archetypes or project them onto other humans. Both paths lead to chaos.

  From a Jungian point of view, I would argue, I should not try to tell you which myth to use to contain your archetypal projections, but only that you need conscious mythic and ritual containers. If you come to me for analysis and therapy, and you absolutely refuse to have any spirituality, I will still work with you, but I will have to tell you honestly that without a spiritual practice it will be much more difficult, perhaps impossible, for you to deal effectively with your archetypal Self, its grandiose energies, and its unconscious projections.

  If you come into analysis with me without a spiritual life, you might project your god-complex onto me if you like me and idealize me. I will probably try to carry it, and we will be tempted to have one of those Woody Allen, twenty-year analyses. This is what happens with Freudians and other therapists who do not understand that an idealizing transference of the god-complex onto the therapist is a mythic and spiritual phenomenon. If a therapist has trouble letting people terminate their therapy, it is because it is not therapy, but unconscious religion. The therapist has become a little Holy Father with his own little pseudo-religion. “Worship me and bring me your sacrifices, and I will do my best to make it sacrificial for you. If I can talk you into the necessity of it, you will come to see me five times a week. If I belong to a certain school of thought, you may come to me for as long as twenty years.”

  When you terminate, however, you are likely to get depressed again. You will wonder what happened to all the money you spent on your analysis, because it's over now, but you're depressed again. You go consult someone else about it, and they tell you that obviously your analysis was not finished. I am not joking. Thousands of people have been in therapy forever, and they cannot understand why it does not work. Are they just particularly stupid in choosing therapists? Maybe, but the therapeutic process can also be undermined by the analyst's inferior theoretical understanding.

  This underscores the importance of Jungian thought. Authentic Jungians are clear that you have to deal with an archetypal god-complex in your psyche. The archetypal psychologists and post-Jungian theorists who have no archetypal Self find it difficult to understand the psychological structure of a god-imago. If it possesses your ego, how would you be able to detect its grandiosity? If you identify with your god-imago, if it intrudes into your ego consciousness, you will get a narcissistic personality disorder, and your religion will be having everyone else adore you. Narcissistic people always try to find a dependent partner, so they can keep this private pseudo-religion going on in their image. They project their god-complex onto you, and get you to say, “Thank you, that is entirely appropriate.” Millions of marriages are private pseudo-religions like that. They work fine until it begins to occur to the woman that she probably could find a better deity than this one if she tried. That is what happens when a woman gets started in therapy and then begins to realize that she might be able to accomplish the same thing somewhere else somewhat less expensively!

  SUMMARY

  We now have enough understanding available to us from psychoanalytic research to form an integrated understanding of the human spiritual problem. Eliade alone is not enough, Campbell alone is not enough, and Jung alone is not enough, but all their contributions work together to articulate a realization that the secularizing processes of modernity have not lessened the pathological narcissism and compulsive acting out of grandiose energies. As Jung saw clearly, the flooding of grandiose energies has increased to epidemic proportions.

  Joseph Campbell has become so popular because people intuit their need to rediscover the mythic realm to deal with these energies. Why is that? Why must we rediscover the mythic realm? Because if we do not, our inner grandiose self organization will remain trapped in the human realm and cause us endless problems. To deal with pathological grandiosity successfully, you must project it outside the human realm, and that is the function of myth. If the full numinosity of the god-energy stays inside human relationships, Armageddon is upon us. We must get the numinous energy contained outside the realm of everyday life. The indigenous tribes understood this, and they were ahead of us on this. That is the meaning of the first commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” You may not believe it theologically, but it is still true psychologically.

  Our contemporary challenge, then, is to rediscover ways to use ritual process and mythic vessels to contain and channel grandiose “god-energies.” We can do this in a conscious way informed by these new psychoanalytic insights. Our forebears, lacking such insight, used myth and ritual to displace their grandiose energies onto their various tribal groups. They had no way of knowing that it was a bogus solution to achieve personal humility by displacing grandiosity onto the tribe, the royal personage, or the national identity. Social displacement of grandiosity still leaves the grandiose energies intact and fundamentally unchallenged. They have, in effect, gone underground and achieved social and even spiritual camouflage and sanction.

  This kind of failed social displacement mechanism has been the engine behind all genocides, all racism, classism, sexism, nationalistic hubris, and religious and ideological warfare.3 Rather than facing the dragon of our grandiosity consciously, the social displacement mechanisms have enabled the dragon to wreak havoc on our planet. Periodically, in families, communities, and in larger groups, the pressure of grandiose energies builds to intolerable levels, and people turn to desperate unconscious pseudo-ritualizations expressed in ritual violence that includes warfare and the quest for the human sacrifice of those weak enough to serve as scapegoats. Violent catharsis may lower the pressure for a while, but soon the dragon, cloaked in the darkness of unconsciousness, returns to feed its terrible insatiable appetite.4

  Our challenge includes going beyond unconscious displacement techniques, ritual violence, and the use of scapegoats as unconscious means of controlling our grandiosity and its demonic consequences. We must face the dragon consciously with our new psychoanalytic knowledge. This presents a huge and decisive challenge for our species. Meeting it successfully can bring us to a new phase of human evolution, but ignoring it means we would rather continue arranging unconsciously for our own last rites.

  NOTES

  1. This chapter is an edited account of the late morning session on Saturday, July 15, 1989, of a weekend workshop and discussion led by Robert Moore at the C. G. Jung Institute in Chicago, Illinois. The original program was entitled “Jungian Psychology and Human Spirituality: Liberation from Tribalism in Religious Life.”

  2. My taped lectures, “Archetype, Compulsion, and Healing,” are available from the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago.

  3. It is the sinister engine behind both the Enron debacle and the devastating events of September 11, 2001.

  4. These psychodynamics of grandiosity underlie the ritual violence described in Gil Baillie, Violence Unveiled (1995).

  CHAPTER 5

  Discerning and Facing Your Own Grandiosity

  IF WE BUILD ON JUNG'S ORIGINAL VISION, JUNGIAN THOUGHT is not just another point of view in the spectrum of theories. It is not just another esoteric cult for a few eccentric mystics. A serious Jungian researcher does a lot of work in comparative mythology and comparative folklore in order to look for the deep structures of the collective unconscious that are human and not just tribal.1 This makes the present time very important when contrasted with previous eras in history, because scholars have now provided us with access to enormous resources of comparative mythology never available before, much of it not available to Jung himself. This new wealth of material creates an important opportunity for enlarging
human understanding. Jungians have the special task of helping people find the continuities between all this cross-cultural mythology and the many issues of human healing raised in comparative psychotherapy.

  The image of the Tower of Babel relates directly to the issues of this book. History since early tribalism has been a sort of rush hour for the tribes. In the early days you could live in the rain forest and never meet anyone from another tribe. Later, as population increased, you began to have intertribal conflicts that increased in severity as the world became more crowded with tribes. The Tower of Babel story portrays many different people talking in their own language, but no one understands what anyone else is saying. It is a revealing image of modern tribal conflict, but it also gives us an image of personality fragmentation. It symbolizes what happens in the psyche of a person who is very ill narcissistically.

  The word fragmentation is a key technical term in contemporary psychoanalysis. We talk a lot today about “multiple personality disorder,” but it is nothing new. It is simply the latest fad in talking about fragmentation and splitting in the psyche along archetypal lines. It is simply another way of talking about autonomous complexes that Jung was researching in the first decade of the twentieth century.2 There is no new psychology of multiple personalities, but some non-Jungians have begun to pay attention to autonomous complexes. An autonomous complex is autonomous to the extent that it is unconscious and the psyche is being fragmented by its grandiose energies.

  People suffering from a multiple personality disorder have not learned how to manage the grandiose energies in their personality. Just as you can understand addictions in terms of the psychology of pathological infantile grandiosity, so also can you understand multiple personality disorders. Whether in the individual psyche or the larger human community, when pathological infantile grandiosity invades, everything splits. The center cannot hold. Fragmentation occurs into different centers of organization. That is a human rule. It is fascinating how the biblical image of the Tower of Babel anticipates contemporary psychoanalytic theory in a rich and powerful way.

  Audience: Is there a distinction between a narcissistic person and a borderline personality?

  Moore: Yes. Everything is on a continuum developmentally from the most chaotic to the most highly integrated. The borderline personality is more integrated than a schizophrenic or a psychotic, but less integrated than a narcissistic personality disorder. We use this kind of language in two different ways. There is a particular diagnostic category in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders called “narcissistic personality disorder,” but that is only one kind of disorder, the person who has identified with the god-complex but still manages not to be psychotic.

  We all have to deal with narcissistic pathology, but for the borderline personality, the narcissistic pathology manifests itself in a more radical instability.

  If you happen to think that you are the king or queen of the universe and you are very gifted, you may become a surgeon or a judge, because you display such a genuine talent that people will let you get away with it. In fact, there are many roles in society where a narcissistic personality disorder can function because personal gifts can be tailored and grandiose energies channeled to achieve excellent performance in many different jobs and careers, and in many different social roles. If you are not a very gifted person, however, it does not work so well. It is useless to tell people that they can become brain surgeons when they cannot read. What does such a person do in our society? You can always turn to crime. You can deal drugs. There are many of these people who make lots of money for a time as drug dealers. All they need is an automatic weapon and a willingness to serve the forces of death.

  A borderline personality, however, is different. If you think you are the king and you have enough talent that people treat you like the king, then you do not get psychotic, because a certain structural stability is maintained. Given enough talent and public acceptance, you can maintain enormous psychological inflation without becoming psychotic. If you are gifted, people will often transfer their idealizing projections onto you, and you agree with them. “I am wonderful, and you are nothing.” As long as people will accept you absolutely as God and they are just nothing, you will not be psychotic because you do not have to deal with your grandiosity. You have a social vessel for holding your grandiosity. You will not become psychotic because you have institutionalized the grandiosity into a social ritual where you can act like a complete jackass and people will just say, “Thank you! Thank you!”

  Audience: It is not just toleration.

  Moore: That is right. The masochistic position is just as inflated as the sadistic position. In a symbiotic partnership, we manage for both of us to be crazy without either one of us going psychotic. If you stop your end of the partnership, what will happen to me? I will get very crazy. If you stop your masochistic end of the partnership, then I will be threatened with psychosis.

  The borderline personality differs in not being identified with the king or queen. Borderlines know that they are not the king or queen, but they also know that you are not either. Borderlines cannot find the king or queen, which means they have difficulty forming a stable idealizing transference. The life of a borderline consists of wandering around the world in search of a king or queen, because the king or queen is at the necessary center. They search for a vessel to contain their god-complex, but with little hope.

  On the other hand, the borderline is very smart. Let me put it delicately and technically: their inner trickster works very well. That is why therapists hate to work with borderlines, because a borderline can see right through them. A borderline personality will not automatically see you as Mr. Wonderful or Ms. Wonderful. A lot of therapists do not want to face this. They don't like to treat borderlines because borderlines can see the negative truth about them. They will look at the therapist and say, “You don't really care about me,” and often they are right. The borderline's intuition is sometimes so accurate that the therapist's denial of the accusation doesn't work. They experience the therapist as a shadow magician who doesn't care about them.

  Therapists in their own grandiosity often display a narcissistic personality disorder. No one can stand criticism less than a grandiose therapist. It becomes countertransference when the analysand looks at the therapist and doesn't see a king or queen, and the therapist responds negatively by concluding that the analysand is a case of borderline personality. Here is how it works. The analysand thinks, “This therapist is bored with me and doesn't care about me.” The analysand doesn't mirror the therapist by thinking, “This is my great and wonderful therapist, her Majesty the Therapist.” The therapist picks up on that attitude and decides, “This analysand is sicker than I thought,” and makes a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, even though the interaction may simply reflect the analyst's own incompetence or bad faith.

  A recent conference that I attended with Goldberg and Basch, the leading Chicago self psychologists, made this clear. Whether someone gets diagnosed borderline or not often depends more on whether the therapist can manage to have an empathic connection with them. If you come to me for therapy, and I am too narcissistic to attune to you and your needs, then I am more likely to diagnose you as borderline. But if you come to me and mirror me and make me feel good enough about myself as a therapist, then I may be able to like you enough for us to “make a connection,” and you will feel attuned to me. Then, of course, I will know that you are not a borderline and, because you are treatable, I can diagnose you as a healthier person, one with another personality disorder rather than the more difficult borderline personality (see Basch 1988, 1992).

  Audience: Does the term borderline mean the borderline of something?

  Moore: The designation used to be called “borderline psychotic.” It referred to a person who tended to be unstable but not as unstable and chaotic as a multiple personality or schizophrenic. That means archetypally that the person does not feel connec
ted with the center, the axis mundi that is the locus of the thrones of the archetypal king and queen. Many primitive mythologies have two thrones. Whose thrones are they? The king's throne and the queen's throne. In patriarchy, of course, you get a king, and people can't figure out what that other throne is for! Why does Pharaoh sit on two thrones? This is not true in later developments, but the archetypal realm always has two thrones.

  We have these thrones at the axis mundi, but people are still searching for a connection to those thrones if they have no spiritual life, or do not believe in God, or do not otherwise participate consciously in myth. Remember, this is not religion, this is psychology. You are looking for a place to put that grandiose projection. So we put the analyst's chair over here for a throne, and I become your Freudian psychoanalyst, and you become my analysand, and you can worship me for as long as you like, five days a week. You may have such severe narcissistic pathology that you are never able to terminate the relationship. You may see me for twenty years or more and still not be healed. “I really am sorry that you are so sick. Your mother was so bad. It is all her fault.”

  This is usually not an intentional cynicism on the part of the psychoanalyst, but some of the most destructive people in the world meant well. When your therapist, whether Jungian, Freudian, Adlerian, Rogerian, behaviorist, cognitive, or whatever, unconsciously accepts your god transference and laments how crazy you are and how wonderful it is that you have found him, you have just managed to find a way to deal with your need for archetypal transference of the king and queen.

  As long as your analyst carries your archetypal transference for you and is not aware that you need to be dealing with it in some other way as soon as you can, then your situation is interminable “analysis.” You may quit therapy, perhaps because you get sick of paying, but then an interesting thing happens. What happens if you quit therapy before you find a spiritual solution to your problems?