So we have a number of unconscious ways to defend against being overwhelmed by our grandiose energies. Remember that according to Kohutian self psychology, grandiosity is not a bad thing in itself unless you do not manage it well so it fuels your ordinary life. The self psychologists are less judgmental about grandiosity. They want to help people relate to it consciously. I have heard a number of stories about people who were practicing from that point of view who helped people get their grandiosity under control. Self psychologists try to get the grandiose fantasies out in the open where you can see them and then help you find some way to relate to them and to embody them. They do not judge them. They help you get that energy connected to life. If the energy splits off, the grandiose fantasies get stuffed into the unconscious, one's life is impoverished, and symptoms begin to proliferate.
This parallels a Jungian point of view. We don't want to eliminate archetypal energies, but neither do we want them to destroy us. We want and need these energies to fuel and enrich life. That is the true meaning of human spirituality on the psychological level, to facilitate productive and creative contact with these sacred energies. That is why Jungians are uniquely able to diagnose grandiosity and the threat of pathological narcissism as spiritual problems that no one in the modern secular world can avoid having to deal with.
NOTES
1. This chapter is an edited account of part of the afternoon sessions 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. Jung developed the concept of complexes before the period of his association with Freud 1907 to 1913. See Coan (1984).
3. See Robert L. Moore's audiotaped lectures, “The Collective Unconscious and Psychopathology” and “Archetype, Compulsion, and Healing,” available from the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago.
4. For a sophisticated discussion of the ego-Self axis, see Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche (1972).
5. Robert L. Moore, audiotaped lecture, “Archetype, Compulsion, and Healing,” available from the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago.
CHAPTER 6
Decoding the Diamond Body
Archetypal Structures Provide a Framework for Analysis
THE SEARCH FOR DEEP STRUCTURES
This chapter presents an introduction to my decoding of the major archetypal structures in the inner geography of the psyche. It provides an important new framework for analyzing and understanding the forms through which grandiose energies manifest themselves in the human personality.1
Many complexities arise when trying to analyze how these phenomena of grandiosity and narcissism shape the personalities of different people struggling with various archetypal forces. My own research has given a great deal of attention to how one might model these diverse interactions in a comprehensive geometric code that extends Jung's own work on the topic.
Diagrams 1 through 4 in the appendix show the different structural configurations and lines of development indicated by my research on the archetypal Self. These configurations may be considered as inner spaces in dialectical tension. Depending on which archetypal configuration dominates the psyche, any one of four different kinds of space may open up.
Jung's studies of alchemy led him to believe that the archetypal Self was imaged in what he called the coniunctio, the mysterium coniunctionis, the sacred marriage, the marriage of rex and regina, the king and the queen. I think he was right about that and more right than even he realized. Today we have much more comparative scholarly and general knowledge about world religion and mythology than existed in Jung's time. He was a great student of mythology, but since his time anthropology, comparative mythology, and the study of the history and phenomenology of religion have gone much further.2
Two good places to start are Jean Bolen's books, Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) and Gods in Everyman (1989). She worked mostly with Greek myths, however, and remember that even though psyche is a Greek word, the psyche itself is human, not just Greek! That means that we have to look at the comparative perspectives of Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and other comparative mythologists to broaden our data base. The fullness of the feminine and the masculine is much richer than we had realized before.
The reason Jung had some problems getting past Victorian stereotypes of the male and female psyches was thus partially informational. With access to more of the myths, he would have understood better, and many other classical Jungians would have understood better, that goddesses are good at some things other than being traditionally Victorian females. Jung's narrow view of masculinity and femininity was consistent with his times, for he tended to identify femininity with Victorian images of the feminine.
My own research has shown that the masculine and the feminine are much more complex than Jung and classical Jungians realized. The spectrum of the manifestation of both femininity and masculinity is more rich and balanced.
The goddess is not just identical to Mother Earth, and in fact, I think that idea is really a misreading. All this Gaia talk is nice, and I like it ecologically, but the goddess is not the earth to be walked on. She has capacities for domination and aggression as well. There is aggressive, agonistic femininity as well as passive, receptive femininity, and there is gentle, receptive, loving masculinity as well as aggressive, nonfeeling masculinity. The old classic Jungian idea that “man is Logos and woman Eros” is dated now and no longer adequate to our information.
My theory argues that world mythology contains eight basic images of male and female in their divine forms. My first geographic representation of this inner space naturally started where I myself was the most inflated, which as a therapist was in the magician area. Lee Roloff, one of our analysts here at the Jung Institute, has a saying that I think is so true, “In every re-search there is always a me-search.”
In my first book (Moore 1979), I psychoanalyzed a priest, an inflated priest, John Wesley. Why? Because I had a lot of that in my own psyche, and I did not quite get it. I started doing a psychology of the occult and all the inflated magi. I spent ten years going around the United States doing field interviews with all kinds of occultists: ritual magicians, occult leaders, gurus, witches. It was really a personal quest trying to deal with my own magus inflation, but I did not know that at the time, and if you had told me, I would have been very offended. This is only one of the four major forms of inflation but a popular form among therapists, the one we naturally go to. It is the same with professors, priests, and other clergy. We naturally get into the magus inflation (see Moore 1996).
Then I became aware of John Perry's work, The Self in Psychotic Process (1953), Roots of Renewal in Myth and Madness (1976), and his book on the myth of the royal father, The Lord of the Four Quarters (1966). I thought I was just going to study the magician, but John Perry's work led me into studying the role of royal arche-types in transformation. Later I realized that sometimes the king does not just sit on the throne but goes off like Julius Caesar and leads an army. He becomes a warrior and commands warriors. The first time I taught from this format, I had three masculine archetypes: king, warrior, and magician. At that time I still could not see the quaternio, or fourfold nature, of the underlying structure. The “me-search” in my “re-search” was still leaving a major factor out, which I soon realized was the lover!
We have long known that integration of the “missing fourth” is a difficult psychological challenge. Most men in our culture, and possibly in many other cultures around the world, typically keep the lover part of them in the shadow, and they let women carry it for them. The typical agreement in a lot of old-fashioned marriages was that no matter what important things the man might carry, it was the woman who carried responsibility for the love dimension of the relationship. I had overlooked the poet aspect of my psyche that I had split off away f
rom myself many years before. Before going to graduate school, I had been a rock musician, but then I split that part of myself off. Now I realized that I had to buy a Fender Telecaster again!
Thus I came to realize that Jung was right about the quadrated psyche, that the four major configurations did, in fact, exist, though he had not understood the contents of the quadrants. At that time I had not studied the ancient Egyptian concept of the self, so I didn't know that the ancient Egyptians thought the self had an eightfold nature and that one of the eight was your physical body. I also did not realize that sexuality and embodiment, and both the positive and negative qualities of the lover, usually come out in bodily forms. It is kind of a shock when you realize that people 3,500 years ago had some of these things figured out better than we do today. At the same time, it served as a helpful confirmation to find that some people in the ancient world also understood the eightfold structure of the archetypal Self, what Jung called the double quaternio. All these configurations exist within Jung's coniunctio, the inner sacred marriage of king and queen, and they are held in balance in the deep psyche, all symmetrically balanced in the deep archetypal Self of every individual.
Now let us look at the qualities of each of these configurations, the various qualities and kinds of space, and how inflation and grandiosity manifest themselves in the various quadrants.3
THE KING AND QUEEN AT THE CENTER OF THE COSMOS
First, there is the cosmos, the world, in the space that emerges between the king and queen. For the best treatment of traditional concepts of cosmos, see Eliade's book The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954). The ancients were always trying to find a cosmos as opposed to chaos. Chaos is all around, on all sides of the cosmos, and always impinging upon it (see diagram 5 in the appendix). So the king and queen on their thrones provide the archetypal center of the psyche, the axis mundi, that enables the world to be ordered against the forces of chaos (see Moore and Gillette 1991).
This is true in the individual psyche as well as in myth. If you carry a lot of anxiety, it probably means that you are not adequately connected to the king-queen aspect of your psyche. A narcissistic personality disorder identifies with the center, so if you look at them superficially, they will often not seem very anxious. They tend to think that they are the center.
The main problem with a narcissistic personality disorder, technically speaking in terms of the syndrome, is sensitivity to criticism. If you are a narcissist and people criticize you, you may experience great anxiety and fragmentation. When they are not criticizing you, and especially if they are constantly mirroring you, you may feel pretty calm with little fragmentation anxiety. You do not have to vibrate a lot as long as people are mirroring you, but people dominated by the king-queen configuration are usually very sensitive to criticism. Your anxiety level will stay fairly low only as long as you can arrange for everyone to adore you, because that serves as a camouflage and no one can detect how easily you become anxious and subject to fits of rage.
That is why so many of these narcissists rise to positions of leadership. They get a lot of adulation, and as long as they get uncritical adulation, they can look very calm and self-assured. They are calm because they are getting adored, but when criticism comes, their world begins to disintegrate. When the truth comes out, then everything begins to fragment.
THE WARRIOR
What diagnostic category might the warrior be centered in? There are a number of possibilities. The warrior is not sitting down there on the throne. What are warriors doing? They are fighting, yes, but warriors do other things in addition to fighting. For every fight that you get into as a warrior, you do a lot of other things.4
Audience: Strategize?
Moore: Strategize, right.
Audience: Questing?
Moore: Yes, you are always on a quest, but it is not like the mystical quest of the magician trying to find answers. If you are a warrior, you have your mission. You are not searching for your orders, because you already have your orders. Everything you do relates to your mission and your orders. What kind of personality do you recognize there?
Audience: Paranoid?
Moore: Well, it could be paranoid. The paranoid syndrome indicates a person who is being flooded with archetypal warrior energy. Warriors provide vigilance against the enemy, so a paranoid person who feels the enemy everywhere is shooting up warrior energy. The paranoid person is a grandiose, inflated form of the warrior.
But what else is there that is more of a garden-variety version? It probably applies to a number of us here today.
Audience: Obsessive compulsive?
Moore: The obsessive-compulsive neurotic is probably too ritualistic and too interesting.
No, I am thinking more of a compulsive personality disorder like that of the workaholic. Workaholics usually do not have any interesting obsessive symptoms; they just work all the time. Inflated compulsive people do not think they are God's gift to the world. That is more the style of the narcissist. What do they do? They just act as if they think they are God's gift to the world. They work all the time, because if they stopped working, the world might stop. Do you see the warrior inflation in that?
By contrast, if you are possessed by the king or the queen, you have nothing to do but sit there on your throne. You sit and you look at me. The Hindu traditions call this darshan. You look at me, and I look at you. I come into the ashram here and sit cross-legged on the floor. You sit on your dais over there so you can look at me, and I can look at you. The Hindu religious literature talks a lot about this experience. When I look at you, I can just feel the energy flowing. I feel myself being bathed in the love flowing from the guru. It's like getting an audience with the pope at St. Peter's. Archetypally, it's like going before the king and queen who offer me the eyes of blessing. The person in royal space doesn't have to work. You aren't running around all over the country giving lectures. You just sit there relaxed and cross-legged on your throne, offering me an opportunity to receive your royal gaze with all its constitutive blessings.
The workaholic warrior, by contrast, rides his charger off to do battle with the forces of death. That is my own natural mode. Many people who are compulsive in the warrior mode may not have great self-esteem, because it all depends on working all the time. If you do not work, you feel that everything will go to hell. You do not have much sense of peace. You feel a lot of hot, anxious energy. The warrior is a doer, not a be-er. You have heard the distinction between being and doing. People give workshops now on the theme, “Be here now.” Well, that is exactly what a lot of people like me need to do. We need to learn to just sit and be (see Moore and Gillette 1992).
Audience: The warrior is the one who wants to save the world, right?
Moore: It is always the warrior, the one out there on the charger. Remember the Greenpeace environmental action group with a policy of nonviolent direct action based on scientific research? They didn't put the name Rainbow Magus on their ship protesting nuclear tests in the South Pacific in 1985. Nor did they call it the Rainbow King, or the Rainbow Lover. They called it the Rainbow Warrior. If you're going to take a little speedboat out to challenge a Japanese whaling vessel, much less the whole French Navy, it takes a Rainbow Warrior.
THE MAGICIAN
What about the magician? The magician doesn't sit on a throne like a king and give out blessings, and he doesn't accept mission impossible like a warrior and charge out to do battle with the forces of chaos. The magician tends to be more introverted in pursuit of gnosis, knowledge and wisdom. The magician is the archetype of understanding and hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation. This covers psychoanalysts, scholars, and interpreters of all kinds.
Do you realize that just to read all the books written in the academic world in one year alone on the subject of hermeneutics would consume thousands of hours? If you tried to read all the technical books by Ricoeur, about Ricoeur, about the people who follow Ricoeur, whether Ricoeur is right about this, or whether so-and-so is rig
ht about Ricoeur, and then the relationship between Ricoeur and Gadamer, and the relationship between Derrida and Ricoeur, it would take you an awesome amount of time. But that is what academics do. They sit around and get ready for their annual meetings and worry about who is going to read what paper about what theory of hermeneutics.
Academics live in this world, and it is a wonderful world. I've spent much of my life in that kind of magician space. I love the search for detailed knowledge and understanding. That is where I started off early in my life and career. It is a beautiful and wonderful pursuit.
The creative people in archetypal psychology are excellent at this kind of pursuit of knowledge, the most prominent being James Hillman. Archetypal psychologists learn how to deconstruct everyone else's argument, because an inflated magus always has esoteric knowledge that is more incisive than yours. They always know better than you. Their hermeneutics are always more sophisticated than yours. They can always show that your methods of analysis are too literalistic or too simplistic, and they can go on forever with this. If a world problem comes up, an inflated magus will form a new study commission. When the world finally gets polluted to death, you will find an enormous number of scholars all tied up with study commissions studying toxic waste.
Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity Page 12