Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

by Robert L. Moore

  The magician is like a sophisticated technician who understands technical knowledge about how things work. If you are inflated in the magician and not balanced by the other archetypes, you would be like Sigmund Freud, who said he was more interested in developing a scientific psychology than in healing individual people. Think about that now. “I want to know how things work, and whether you get well is not as important to me as using the data to design a scientific psychology.” This kind of inflation would tend to make you schizoid, unattached, and untouched emotionally. You might not care very much about specific people, but you sure would know a hell of a lot. You would understand it if your analysands self-destructed. You would be wonderful at psychological postmortems. You wouldn't walk across the room to help someone, but you would be able to write the most wonderful case study for the institute after they had been carried out (see Moore and Gillette 1993b).

  THE LOVER

  Where the magician is more introverted, the lover is more extroverted. With enough inner structure, the lover is usually sensitive to others. For the inflated lover, if it moves, you adore it, and you compulsively seek union with it.

  If you are inflated with the king or queen (connected to them in an immature way), you want others to bless and care for you. If you are inflated with the warrior, if it moves you want to fight with it and make war on it, because a warrior always has to have an enemy. If you are inflated with the magus, if it moves you want to understand it and interpret it. You don't necessarily want to do anything about it. You just want to understand it and penetrate its secrets.

  If you are inflated with the lover, if it moves you want to lick it or put it in your mouth some other way. Babies manifest this. That is the body talking. That is embodiment. That is Freud's “polymorphous perversity,” but there is nothing particularly perverse about it. It is just the lover manifesting. It is the sacramental human.

  For the lover part of the psyche, everything gleams with beauty and luminosity. It is the sensation function. That is why so many intuitive personality types have the sensation function in the shadow. They act out in the realm of love and sexuality because it is so numinous for them. This part of the divine Self is in their shadow. They don't assume they know all about it, so when it appears, it truly seems to them like a manifestation of the sacred.

  That is why the inflated lover can get into so much trouble, acting out and into addictions. An analyst from Montreal explained for one of our workshops how addictions were related to disorders of love. She was absolutely right about that. Addictions are disorders of the lover quadrant, because it is all very sacramental. You cannot get enough of whatever it is – food, alcohol, cocaine, sex, or you name it.

  If you are a poet, or some other form of artist, this is what burns you out so often. You get burned out on this intense energy. This is why so many artistic people and poetic people self-destruct through self-medication, because the intensity of their perceptions is so powerful.

  People plugged into the lover cannot pay much attention to the content of what is going on around them unless they can see an aesthetic beauty in it. They probably would notice how beautiful you are and look at each person in turn, and just go on looking at you. After this lecture today, a person who is in touch with the lover archetype might say something like, “Did you see the woman with that incredible necklace?” I would say, “What?!” but they would know what everyone was wearing, what their eyes were like, whether they were trim or tall. The lover in them appreciates each person's particularity.

  It is amazing to be with someone like that, because they are like the Frenchmen on the curb watching the women walk by. A woman can go by who might not seem attractive to an American male, but a French male might say, “Wow. Look at those ankles over there!” Or he might say, “Look at the eyes of that woman!” People joke about that a lot, but in thinking about these things culturally, I think the French are much more comfortable with the archetypal lover than, say, people in German or English culture. English culture is more uncomfortable with the archetypal lover. That might have been what fueled a lot of the antagonism between the English and the French, the conflict between different archetypal configurations. The English think that the French are so decadent, and the French think the English are so much more ascetic. You can go to England and have an ascetic spiritual experience just eating a meal.

  Audience: What about the difference between the different lovers in Hamlet? How would they fit into your outline?

  Moore: They would be varieties of the lover configuration. Each archetype has many possible differentiations to the extent that the ego masters its potential. You can have higher forms and expressions of it, or regressive forms and expressions. An inflated person is possessed by its deepest and most powerful forms. For example, a really promiscuous person may have been terribly wounded in the lover part of their personality and now gets compensated by its grandiose energies. If you tried as a little child to love your parents, and they rebuffed you and hurt you, then your capacity for mature human love will be thwarted, and you might act this out sexually. Think about the Jungian theory of compensation here. Promiscuity often occurs in a person who experienced tremendous pain in the lover quadrant of their personality.

  We have to understand both the archetypal loving couple and the polymorphous perverse lover, which is the archetypal lover. Krishna, the divinely incarnate teacher in the ancient Hindu poem Bhagavad Gita, makes love to everyone indiscriminately. That is the archetypal lover. Christ, the divinely incarnate teacher in the New Testament, also loves everyone indiscriminately. You may be the most ordinary lump of coal in the world, but Christ will look at you and see a diamond.

  For the lover, if it moves, they just adore it. However, if you try to embody the archetypal lover in the real world, it doesn't work. It may work for a while. The movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) shows Diane Keaton as a borderline woman who is promiscuous because she was so hurt in her family that she acts out the Aphrodite pattern at night after work. Suffering and wounded in human love, such persons seek compensation, but compensation does not cure you without some sort of containment and interpretation.

  Audience: Linda Leonard (1986) writes about the woman “on the way to the wedding,” on the way to the sacred marriage, and she often talks about the sacred marriage of the animus and anima. Is that the same thing?

  Moore: Yes. It is important to realize that the archetypal lovers are the king and queen of the other world, and they deal with each other lovingly.

  If you want to understand the dynamics of the Oedipal problem, it is when the human male becomes the consort of the divine woman projected onto a human woman. Think about that now. The Oedipal problem for a woman is when a human woman becomes the consort of a divine male, projected either onto the father or onto other men. In this way you can understand Freud's classical teaching of Oedipal conflict archetypally.

  When we are not clear that we are not going to be the consort of the king or queen, we have severe problems in our human relationships with men and women. If you are a woman and you project too much of the archetypal king onto your father, you will never turn away from him to an imperfect human man. If you are a man and you project too much of the archetypal queen onto your mother, then you will never be able to turn from her and form a committed love relationship with an imperfect human woman. You may have all sorts of human relationships, but you will not commit to them, because your commitment is to an archetypal personage that is being carried in projection by your parent (see Moore and Gillette 1993a).

  SUMMARY

  My purpose in this chapter was to show how a neo-Jungian approach using archetypal structures based on mythological resources can take analysis beyond the Kohutian understanding of the grandiose exhibitionistic self-organization. What the Kohutians do not know, and cannot know because they lack the theory for it, is that grandiose self-organization manifests differently in different people according to the archetypal configuration invoked in the
ir family experience. Each individual's personal experience invokes or constellates particular archetypal patterns in the psyche and sets up the ways they will become inflated and grandiose when life experiences bring them to that point of regression.

  The cornerstone of Jungian theory is the assumption that the human psyche is structured in a way parallel to Noam Chomsky's theory of linguistics. Jungians believe the human psyche contains deep structures. Contrary to what the ego-psychologist type of Freudians think, the unconscious is not just a chaotic cauldron of energy that has to be totally dominated by the ego. The archetypal unconscious, the objective psyche, is structured in a very clear way.

  This project of mapping the inner geography of the archetypal unconscious seeks to improve our understanding of the central processes of human personality. The eightfold structure is part of my work on that mapping. It is similar to what Jean Bolen is doing but is not as dependent on particular culture-bound gods and goddesses as her work is. It is more of a role theory and draws upon a larger database of cultural and scientific sources.

  NOTES

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

  2. For some of the revolutionary research unavailable to Jung that supports my decoding of these structures, see Robert Moore's taped lectures on Georges Dumézil and “The New Comparative Mythology.”

  3. See Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine Personality (1990). This introductory volume was followed with four other books, each describing in great detail how one of the four archetypes manifests itself in a man's personality.

  4. See the taped lectures by Robert Moore, The Collective Unconscious and the Shape of Psychopathology and Archetype, Compulsion, and Healing.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Combat Myth and the Archetypal Enemy

  CARL JUNG WAS CONVINCED THAT EVIL IS REAL AND A powerful malignant force in human life. Any adequate human spirituality must deal with the reality of radical evil, not just the personal shadow. We start with cross-cultural expressions of the myth of the combat with evil. The psychology of evil is not grounded in only one spiritual tradition, but in a comparative mythology of evil that we now have access to for the first time in history. Jungians specifically look for continuities between these cross-cultural mythologies and the issues of human illness and health.1

  As shown in the previous chapter, my decoding of the structures of the archetypal Self delineates four inner couples presiding over different psychic inner spaces: the king and queen, the warriors, the magicians, and the lovers. Mythologists throughout history have placed evil in the combat zone with the warriors who are always fighting the enemy, archetypally speaking. Neil Forsythe is not a Jungian, but he might as well have been, because his book, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (1987), provided light years of progress toward understanding the universality of the combat myth. He has a chart that shows this cross-cultural layout of the combat myth and maps the field of archetypal warfare, what I have called the “plain of struggle” (Moore and Gillette 1992; Moore 1996). Sam Keen's book, Faces of the Enemy (1986), describes how humans always dehumanize and demonize people they perceive as the enemy.

  My argument is that the combat myth is archetypal. It is in everyone's hard wiring. It is in the second pair of the four couples. It is inside all of us, and we must face it. When you are in the warrior mode, something will come up demonized, consciously or unconsciously. When you do not understand how the archetypal psyche relates to the ego, you will project the image of the archetypal enemy onto a human “other.” It might be onto Reagan, or Bush, or the “Evil Empire,” or the Jews, or the Muslims. In any case, you are acting out an archetypal shadow projection. Once you demonize someone, you load that person with demonic numinous energy. There is an interesting parallel phenomenon. Since you are hardwired for this archetypal enemy, when you identify with it you are colonized by it. Not the personal shadow that we are all supposed to integrate, but the archetypal enemy. You begin incarnating it in the world.

  Can you think of anyone in the world today who might be identifying with the archetypal enemy shadow, with the very archetypal evil?

  Response: Hitler?

  Moore: Yes, of course Hitler thought he was a kind of messianic savior of his people. He modeled the S.S. troops after the Jesuits. That is clear from historical research. I am not knocking Jesuits, because I have an inner Jesuit myself. I am not a Roman Catholic, but I have this inner Jesuit that is always harassing me. A historian wrote a historical and biographical work calling Hitler the “psychopathic God” and documenting his rituals, how he had his own cathedral, and so on (Waite 1977). His identification with a messianic king was an aspect of his inflation, and in connection with the many other negative aspects of his grandiosity, it had demonic results. Grandiosity experienced unconsciously forms a “Lucifer complex” that becomes incarnate in our homes and communities as well as in world affairs. We become the actual enemies of cosmos or creative ordering.

  Satanic groups actually consciously identify with the Lord of the Underworld. An interviewer recently asked a group of teenagers in a large city, “Why are you worshipping Satan?” They replied, “The end of the world is near, the final battle is very close, and we want to be on the winning side.” So they worked on developing all the lore they could find about Satan.

  If you study Jeffrey Burton Russell's books on the history of the mythology of Satan, and then study the psychology of narcissistic difficulties, you will see why so many people are attracted to Satan. People who have a problem befriending their grandiose energies in a conscious healthy way tend to admire Satan and identify with Satan. A lot of the old myths present Satan wanting to be seen as beautiful. That is exactly what we want.

  Recent psychoanalytic research has helped us to understand this longing with more empathy. There is a healthy part of us that wants to be seen as beautiful and wants to be celebrated. Many traditions have given all the “glory” to God, which is fine for God, of course, but what if you also want to be seen as beautiful? What if you actually need and deserve a little of that glory? This is what Matthew Fox (1991) addresses with his “Creation Spirituality,” that the creation has glory too. If you study sacral kingship and sacral queenship, you will find that the true king or the true queen always shares the glory. In fact, they are the source of glorification. They bless you. That is glorification. That is what makes you shine as a human. It makes you shine in your essential, beautiful, wonderful humanness. That is what Matthew Fox is trying to get at, and he is right about that. Religions have unwittingly fueled the attractiveness of evil by teaching that becoming more spiritual requires a depreciation and diminution of the human, and particularly the feminine. This widespread mistake has fueled both sexism and our current environmental holocaust. The great philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich counters this prevalent interfaith Manichaeism by asserting that the divine glory is present in every manifestation of being in a sacramental way.

  If we set things up so that wanting to shine is demonic, then most people will want to be demonic. But Kohut made a great step forward in making it clear that grandiose energies were not necessarily demonic or bad. Your craziness is not because you have grandiose energies, but because you have not learned how to incarnate them in a conscious and healthy way that helps you become a radiant personality with healthy self-esteem. We have a lot of work to do in this area (see Lee et al. 1991).

  Audience: You mentioned projecting onto the other the very thing that you hate in yourself, but isn't that just a phenomenon of psychology in general, that you become what you hate? In other words, isn't this why CIA agents use KGB methods to do their job. Or why we support dem
ocracies until they go socialist, as in Chile or Guatemala, and then suddenly we're not for democracy any more? Or we won't allow the burning of the flag and thus abrogate the very thing the flag stands for. In other words, it is becoming what you hate.

  Moore: That is right. I recently saw a sign that said, “Your hate becomes you.” You see this a lot now in Israel. One of these days we will have face what is going on in Israel. It is not anti-Semitic to criticize the Israeli army for using excessive force on Palestinians. We need to deal with that. We usually look the other way and do not deal with it very much, but it's the same type of thing. The entire conflict in the Middle East is being fueled by warrior inflation on both sides which is issuing in malignant tribalism.

  This is unfortunately very human in an archetypal sense. Humans act out this archetypal inflation all the time, but it is not a conscious and morally serious expression. I am amazed at those people that say that Jung's thought does not deal with moral issues, because his whole psychology emphasizes the radical moral challenge of consciousness, and the challenge of withdrawing these archetypal projections. We must wake up and withdraw these things. Without awakening, we will never become more truly human and humane in our dealings with each other, other species, or the environment.

  FACING THE GREAT DRAGON

  We have to recognize that this inner reality becomes a terrible monster if it is not faced consciously with good will and intentions. It is archetypal, not human. It is not out there, but in here. It is often imaged as a giant, monster, or dragon. In many myths, you have to slay this monster. There is some monster you need to slay. In patriarchy it is usually imaged as a female monster. It is interesting that men would rather slay a female monster than a male monster. It is always easier to deal with the other gender's problems and put all of your shadow projections on the other gender. That is what the Oedipal concept is about. If you read Freudian Oedipal theory and get underneath it, you find this tendency for the boy to want to marry the goddess. This is the Attis myth. Down with the god. Take the god's place. In other words, there is a hidden god claim on the part of the boy. The girl wants to marry the god and displace the goddess. This is the hidden goddess claim on the part of the girl. Unresolved, these grandiose claims always lead to havoc.