Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

by Robert L. Moore

  Audience: We see that with Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Baker.

  Moore: One could argue that Jimmy gets so inflated into the messianic king that he needs to get clear with this prostitute that he is only a man after all. The messianic king in the psyche is an archetypal king-warrior with no interest in sex. The king is too busy for sex. Then, out of all the archetypal possibilities, the king's shadow arrives as the archetypal lover, and all of a sudden you get something that counters this particular king inflation, and he turns his back on his work as king to look at this woman. Very much like a man.

  Audience: What about the Zeus complex? You get the Gary Harts of the world.

  Moore: Yes, and you see it in J. F. K. and other powerful men who get so many idealizing projections that they are overwhelmed with grandiose energies.

  Audience: A priest who has all these projections of everyone else's god-complex and is overstimulated and wants to drink to deal with it but says, “I don't want to drink because I'm a priest,” what can he do?

  Moore: That is where the issue of spirituality comes in. A lot of people think prayer is something only spiritual athletes do, as if prayer were the esoteric fifteenth initiation, but if you really understand it, prayer is a survival technique. If you are in one of these helping professions where you get a lot of archetypal transferences, you do not pray because it is pious or sweet or nice or the fifteenth initiation. You pray to stay alive, to get help in dealing with your grandiosity. I gave a lecture this past week in North Carolina entitled “Prayer as Survival Technique” to deal with grandiosity. Prayer is one of the greatest antidotes to being flooded with the grandiose numinous energies of other people.

  If you cannot pray, if you do not pray a lot and you do not have a sense of how to pass on the numinous energy to a mythic vessel, you need to learn how. You can take that energy that is coming toward you and, through your prayer, pass it on. “Here,” you say, “this is really yours, Lord. Take it. It belongs to you.” If you keep it within yourself, you will soon be drunk with archetypal energies. Prayer is a process of passing on the numinous magical god-energy. (Chapter 10 examines prayer in more detail.)

  My basic argument is simply that humans need to get rid of the overload on their psychic circuits. There is a certain amount of this energy that you want to be connected with. It is a connection, not a separation. We do not want to lose touch with this energy because it is like an umbilical cord. It is a life-giving, nourishing connection with the libido for life. If you cut the connection, you will invariably get severely depressed. Your self-esteem will be lousy. Without a conscious connection to the archetypal Self, your ego's life becomes extremely impoverished. You can never get rid of the archetypal Self because it becomes more compulsively active the more you are unconscious of it.

  Without a good conscious connection with the archetypal Self, you deny it and split it off, and it goes into the shadow and gets you into trouble. You get depressed, your self-esteem goes down, you don't think you are important, and you don't take yourself seriously. You don't believe you are significant enough to do anything significant. You don't think you are beautiful enough to be loved. If someone comes into your life who wants to love you, you push them away because you have no sense of your own beauty. These are very subtle but powerful forces.

  It is like refueling a jet fighter from the big mother plane. Did you ever see pictures of that? They come up above you and have this boom hanging down, and they have to be careful when they plug in. You don't want to merge with the mother plane! It would be a fireball, right? But if you don't plug in for the refueling, you will soon run out of fuel. You have to be careful about that connection. That is the hard part.

  That is spirituality. Human spirituality, psychodynamically speaking, is being able to connect with the refueling source without crashing into it. This is the ego-archetypal Self axis.

  Audience: Is that another way of saying what Joseph Campbell means when he says to just “follow your bliss”?

  Moore: It is more than that, but “follow your bliss” assumes that you have the potential for joy, and if you do not have joy, you are flying too low. You have to fly up a little closer and get your nozzle into the receptacle, because it is your birthright as a human being to experience joy. In that sense, “follow your bliss” is good advice.

  Campbell's main contribution, however, was to show us the richness of world mythology as a resource for understanding the archetypal realm and also for understanding the dangers involved in relating to it. His book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) is a little manual on relating to the archetypal energies. The hero journeys deep down into the underworld to get the boon, the gift, the numinous energy, but you always have to come back to the human world. It is one thing to connect with the archetypal energy, but it is another thing to get back to being human. Here is your choice. You can stay at the surface and not seek connection with the god-energy, or you can go down and make connection but get so inflated that you are destroyed before you can get back out to the everyday world.

  Campbell's work explains what world mythology says about all this. This includes every mythology, every mythic world, not just the Christian tradition. Human beings before the modern era understood these things. The modern world has forgotten how all this works and turned instead to the idea that we can strip-mine this territory. We expect to go in there and get some of that god-energy by strip-mining. This is the heroic modern ego trying to take control of it. We think that we do not have time to make long heroic journeys down into the god-energy and then come back again. We turn spirituality into a West Virginia coal mine, and our fantasy is that we can just mine all this god-energy whenever we need it and then we can manipulate it. It does not work except as a contemporary expression of demonic sorcery.

  Audience: How does a shaman relate to the problems you described for priests?

  Moore: This is not to disparage your question, but shamans make all the same mistakes as priests. It is all the same problem, no matter what tribe you are in. A lot of people think, “Ah, I went on a vision quest and now I'm a shaman,” but these self-proclaimed shamans are just as inflated as “individuated analysts.” A shaman is just one little subcultural form of magician that exists in every culture, whether they are called Baptist preachers, Pentecostal preachers like Swaggart, or Japanese Zen masters, or North American Indian shamans. They all have the same strengths and weaknesses. As for the ones who come and tell you that they have already found what you are looking for, if they are serious, what they have found is an inflated personality, a magician inflation.

  Remember, there is no such thing as a person who has completely transformed his or her own narcissism. There are only people who acknowledge the existence of their grandiose energies and try to learn how to relate to them consciously and regulate and optimize their contacts with them intelligently.

  Audience: Does not Eliade make the same distinction between the shaman and the psychotic, because the shaman can come back at will?

  Moore: Yes, absolutely, but he is talking about the true shaman. It would be the same thing with the true priest, or the true clergyman, anyone who can touch the god-energy, the numinous, and, because of their spiritual practice and wisdom, not be seduced or destroyed by it. When you touch the numinous without the wisdom to regulate the grandiosity, it blows you up like the cartoons of the person who cannot get off the air-hose, so they inflate like a big balloon and float away.

  Audience: Like the Monty Python image where the person ate and ate until they exploded?

  Moore: That's exactly what it's like. It was Jung's genius to see that all this is not cultural but in the hard wiring. This is the collective unconscious, a concept of enormous significance. All humans are alike at this level. Inside we are all plugged into the numinous. We all have the life-or-death problem of learning how to develop an adequate connection to it, one that can fill us up into our full humanity. This is a lot more wonderful than many people think. If you are really pl
ugged into that, the archetypal Self is able to fill you out so that you are fully inflated like a basketball. People who regulate and optimize contact with these energies often become quite awesome.

  Most people are not narcissistic personality disorders in the classical sense. They are not too full of themselves but more like basketballs without enough air in them. You bounce them and they are a little flat. That is not true if you are really in touch with the “Great Self Within.” That is the genius of the Christian imago Dei and the idea of the “mark of David.” Everyone has the stamp of God, and it is a real likeness, a divine likeness. It is not identical with God, but it is the divine likeness, the divine spirit, the god-energy.

  From a Jungian perspective, people plugged into that source of energy can “fill up” to the level that they were really designed for. How many pounds of pressure per square inch, I do not know, but when you are as full of yourself as you need to be to be fully human, you can be fantastic! This is where the Human Potential movement was right, and the humanistic psychologists were right.

  But staying in the context of my assumptions, what was the problem with humanistic psychology?

  Audience: They need the transpersonal.

  Moore: They need the transpersonal dimension to deal with the excesses of narcissism.

  Audience: Maslow did that in his own right, did he not?

  Moore: Yes, but the point is to get in touch with a healthy narcissism. The word narcissism is no longer always a bad word in psychoanalysis. There is a healthy narcissism that results in self-esteem and a healthy exhibitionism, in contrast to pathological narcissism, which results in an oscillation between arrogance and terrible self-hate.

  Audience: I am trying to understand archetypal experience. When people come up and tell the priest they think of him as God, is that a mental and verbal thing, or does it have more to do with the energy transfer from God?

  Moore: Suppose, for example, that Jim here is a fine priest. He has his own issues, but he realizes that he is human and imperfect. Suppose further that I am very hungry when I come to where he is doing a Mass, and I need to have what self psychologists call “an idealizing transference.” I need to idealize someone, because I feel so bad. I can't idealize myself, because I know what a jerk I am. To feel complete, I need to idealize someone in a selfobject experience, so I idealize Jim the priest. This makes me feel better, so I go to Jim and say, “Father, you gave a wonderful homily today. It made me feel so good. I really felt united with Christ. You are so wonderful. I wish I could hear you do the homily every week.”

  If I don't mean it, then he'll know it, but it probably won't bother him and he'll be okay. But if I really do mean it, and particularly if I'm believable, the human Jim still may not deal with it much, but it might stimulate the grandiose Self inside. Going back repeatedly with this same wonderful message will continue to stimulate the grandiose self-organization in there, and he may not be able to protect himself from that. Your human ego may not buy flattery, but your grandiosity will. You cannot stop it. You cannot prevent me from getting through to your archetypal grandiosity. As far as I can tell, that is something that only the most sophisticated scholars of transference and countertransference understand.

  Audience: Mothers know what it feels like. When a child idealizes you, you are “It.” Their entire life depends on whether or not you care for them enough to feed them or allow them to do whatever it is they want to do, and they look at you with those eyes like, “Ah, yes!”

  Moore: You are the goddess.

  Audience: Right. I think many mothers feel it a lot and have a hard time managing it and giving it back, letting their kids say, “Oh, what a terrific mom!”

  Moore: The Kohutian self psychology people in Chicago offer more on the nuts-and-bolts practical aspects of this than anyone else, much more than the Jungians do. The Jungians do not pay enough attention to this on a microdynamic level.

  Audience: It is structure building, though, the accretion of structure, as opposed to the content.

  Moore: That is right. It is extremely important to understand that we are all vulnerable to the overstimulation of this kind of idealization. Building the capacity to contain it and not identify with it is a big job. It takes lot of work. The more internal the structure, the more we can regulate grandiose energies.

  Audience: Is not child abuse an attempt to deflate grandiosity and kill it? The parent just says, “I cannot live with that.”

  Moore: That is an important point. We have to make this idea more widespread, because otherwise we cannot understand the behaviors. When a parent attacks a child in this way, they are trying to deal with the very real issue of the grandiose energies in the child, though in a destructive way. They are responding to the real issue of their own shame at being deified. You have an involuntary shame response when someone idealizes you. You cannot stop. You cannot keep from having a shame response. It is automatic in most people.

  Your shame response will differ depending on your familiarity with the psyche in these issues. Lashing out at the child is one way. There are all kinds of other forms of unconscious acting out that we do to make it clear that we are not the god or the goddess. That is a form of unconscious ritual and spirituality. The only problem is that most forms of unconscious spirituality, that is, clinging to the human and not being god, are usually destructive of self or others or both.

  DEFENSES AGAINST GRANDIOSITY

  Audience: I understand what you said about the parent's shame at being deified, and they would experience more of it the more they put themselves up to be worshipped. But why wouldn't they want that, and why would they react to it with shame? I don't understand.

  Moore: We can look at the defenses against grandiosity. When your grandiose self organization, your archetypal Self, is overstimulated, you will try to defend against it because you instinctively know that it is not right. There is something wrong. You may not be able to write a Kohutian book on narcissism, or a Jungian book on the ego-Self axis, but you do not need to, because this is something in the hardwiring. Something inside you knows there is something wrong with this psychological situation.

  There are three kinds of defenses against overstimulated grandiosity. First, you can defend against grandiosity by just feeling overwhelmed by it and shutting down. It is one thing to have a little fun fantasy and think you are Batman. Not too many of us boys ever went through childhood without wanting to be Batman, but if you start thinking you really are Batman, or Batwoman, what happens is that now you have to take care of Gotham City. It is one thing to play like “Wouldn't it be nice to be Batman,” but if I actually were Batman and I actually lived in Chicago, I would actually have to deal with all the drug dealers in Chicago. There is not enough time in Batman's life to do this.

  So one defense against grandiosity results simply from feeling like the mythical hero Atlas who lost an important battle and was condemned to hold the earth on his shoulders for all eternity. You feel this enormous crushing weight of the grandiosity that you are experiencing, and you just cannot take it. It is just too much. This is another reason why the mother hits the kids, because sometimes even to acknowledge that she is your mother is overwhelming to her. So that is the first defense, the experience of being overwhelmed and the “shut down” that usually follows immediately.

  The second defense against overstimulated grandiosity is a fear of shame and ridicule. You sense that someone is pointing their finger at you and saying, “You are getting too big for your britches!” You start remembering all those disappointing times in childhood. No telling how many thousands of times each one of us came running in with pure wonderfulness but were met by a bored or irritable response. Any time a child comes in wonderful like that and is not met with a positive response like, “Oh, wow, you really are feeling wonderful today!” then the sense of wonderfulness tends to collapse into shame and become locked in the unconscious.

  We all carry enough shame in our unconscious from those earl
y experiences that we do not want any more of that kind of ridicule. When you start feeling contact with your wonderfulness again, you are always in danger of this kind of toxic shame response taking over. Then you fear the ridicule, because of what happened to you in your childhood when you were really in touch with your radiance and it was squashed.

  So the first defense against overstimulated grandiosity is to feel overwhelmed, and the second defense is to fear being ridiculed.

  The third defense is interesting but different. Connection with your divine energies can rapidly become overstimulating. Even if it doesn't overwhelm you, and even if you feel no shame, it may provide you with too much stimulation, like a perpetual orgasm, and thus generate what we call “fragmentation anxiety.” You can't cope with it because it makes you crazy, and it can rapidly morph into a prepsychotic state. You fear the psychosis that can come from the godlike intensity of too much energy flow from the archetypal Self. If you have ever been with someone who was in a manic phase or right on the edge of a manic phase, then you recognize this prepsychotic intensity. We say that they are wired. They have a certain look in the eyes, they are chain-smoking, or perhaps having a masturbation marathon. In the movie The Right Stuff (1983), they are flying right at the edge of the envelope, and it is so intense that it threatens fragmentation of the self structure and an incipient psychosis. To the extent that your ego structure, in Jungian terms, or your little “s” self, in Kohutian terms, is not fully reinforced, you may fear psychosis as a response to overstimulated grandiosity. This will often result in what we call a “panic attack,” which recruits outside help in containing the archetypal energy.

  Connection with your numinosity will not make you psychotic if you realize that you are a human being and not going to live forever, if you are oriented in the limitations of time and space, and if your self structure as a human is pretty firm. But to the extent that you are not well oriented in time, or not well oriented in gender, or not well oriented to much of anything, then it may not really be clear to you that you are going to die soon. You may feel as if you were bulletproof, and this increases your risk of a psychotic episode or acute depression, for you are channeling too much numinosity. Why depression? Because you must have the ballast, the heaviness of the depression to avoid a psychotic “flight into the sun,” an expression of the Icarus complex.