Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

by Robert L. Moore

  Some mentally ill people have found that keeping a rosary in their pocket during the day helps restrain them from acting out destructively. They may reach into their pocket during a meeting and touch the rosary that has been blessed by some priest or nun with whom they feel a deep spiritual connection. I say this purely as a psychoanalyst now. I have yet to see any research to show me that such a habit is not helpful, particularly for severely ill people. I would like to see any research evidence that such a practice makes people crazier. It doesn't exist! Such practices help people regulate and limit their chaotic tendencies. This should not surprise us, because you only have to know a little history to know that human beings have always found such things helpful.

  Consider, for example, all the current New Age talk about crystals and sacred stones. Having a sacred stone on your person is a very ancient practice. Why does it work? Because a stone archetypally carries the archetype of the Self. The philosopher's stone, lapis, is an image of God. When you touch the stone, you do not think the stone actually is God, but the stone participates in the being of God sacramentally, and it reminds you that God is there, and you are not alone. It becomes a “means of grace.”2 So the stone serves as yet another possible antidote for unconscious identification with the dragon and offers a soothing sense of connection to a great “other.”

  THE LIFE OF PRAYER

  This recommendation of prayer is perhaps my most radical. I can just hear people gasping, “My God! Is a professional psychoanalyst going to recommend prayer?!” Yes, in fact, I am. It is amazing how many people in our secularized world start complaining the moment you bring up prayer as something that might help people deal with their pathological narcissism. People have been overwhelmed by the assumption, based primarily on Freudian biases and little else, certainly very little research, about how destructive prayer is. They assume that prayer makes people more compulsive than they were before, that prayer leads people toward schizophrenia. I want to see the research that supports such views. Show me the empirical research studies. There is, to the contrary, a burgeoning body of research that shows how prayer can be helpful in both emotional and physical health (see Dossey 1993, Dossey and Borysenko 1999, DeBlassie 1990).

  People who have a regular prayer life ritual handle their compulsions and impulsivity better than those who do not. They are less fragmented than those who do not pray regularly. When you are talking with them, it is easier to disidentify with the king and queen within, even if you are not visualizing.

  Personally, I prefer visualization. The commandment to “make no graven images” didn't mean you shouldn't try to visualize God. If you know how to do this, you don't make graven images, but you visualize them as they present themselves in visionary experience. Some people are obsessively Protestant about this and have a Protestant hermeneutic that claims it is bad to see God. That misreads the whole meaning of the deeper tradition. I'm a Protestant myself, so I can say these things. The Protestant protest was a revolt against literalism and idolatry, not against the use of imaginal resources in prayer.

  Audience: How would you define prayer?

  Moore: Prayer is any spiritual discipline that enables you to be connected with the basic energies of life and keeps you from an unconscious fantasy that you yourself are God or the God king or queen. Prayer is anything that enables you to disidentify with the God king or queen and yet remain connected to their life-giving energies. So if you hear me say, for example, that sexuality is prayer, that is what I mean, because if you are in true harmony with your body, you will not mistake yourself for the Godhead. You know you are a creature.

  People sometimes say, “What about all those promiscuous people?” But promiscuous people are not actually in harmony with their bodies. Listen to the line in the musical Les Misérables where the prostitute says to the man, “You do not know that you are having sex with someone who is already dead.” Crazy sexuality does not get acted out by someone who is in harmony with their body.

  Audience: Can you distinguish between prayer and meditation?

  Moore: I consider prayer any form of meditation that helps the human ego know it is not identical with the archetypal Self, for example, the Tibetan Buddhist tankas, the prayer images. I would consider meditation on a tanka as prayer. I agree with the Tibetans when they put up a prayer wheel and call it prayer. When they see the wind blowing the wheel, they say that is prayer. I agree that it is prayer if you understand it.

  In my own consulting room, I keep images that I can see with my peripheral vision to remind me of God in different traditions, to remind me that I am not the center. I do not have to say a thing. All I have to do is be aware in my peripheral vision of that image and it reminds me that I am a creature. So it helps me deal with any idealizing transferences that might tend to stimulate my grandiosity and tempt me to claim ownership of the dragon energy.

  Certain forms of meditation teach you to focus on some mandala or other external center that lies outside the individual. However, those forms that make you think you are “the great one” can be very dangerous for some people. If you start depersonalizing and start merging into “the great one,” you may become psychotic. Some forms of meditation can loosen your connection to a nonego center. You have to look carefully to see whether any particular practice actually helps the ego deal with grandiosity. Some of them do, some of them do not.

  We have not explored these areas enough. Only now are we finding psychotherapists who know enough history of religions and anthropology to begin to look at the whole use of objects, of rituals, of gift-giving, things we were taught were dangerous. Only now are we beginning to educate a group of therapists informed enough and bold enough to take a fresh look at these things for potential use in healing ritualization.

  VISIONS OF THE OTHER WORLD, PARADISE, AND THE LIFE BEYOND

  Audience: I believe it was Marx who said rather cynically that religion is the opiate of the masses, and in a sense, he was right.

  Moore: Certainly. Religion in some of its forms tends to be more destructive in some places than in others. Some kinds of religious fundamentalism that legitimate your inflation against other people can cause a destructive acting out. Religion itself, however, is clearly psychoactive. Jungians understand religion in a very different way than did Marx and Freud and the traditional Freudians.

  Audience: Do you think the notion of a literal hereafter has been destructive? Should we consider heaven a destructive “pie in the sky”?

  Moore: There is a lot of talk about that. I personally tend to be an empiricist who considers what actually happens to people with these various points of view. For example, some of my students minister in African-American churches where some of the members might have less energy and incentive for the struggles of this world if they did not believe in a literal hereafter. My guess is that belief in “the other world,” the homeland, probably gives many people more courage to deal with this world, rather than giving them less courage and thus weakening them. I know that many people say it weakens us, but I have not personally seen any proof for that statement, and I do not believe it.

  Audience: Even if some people need it, how can you get them enthused about the idea of preserving this planet when they have better things waiting for them in heaven?

  Moore: Tillich would say that one can participate in history and time in a fragmentary experience of the fulfillment of eternity. Such a partial, anticipatory participation can fuel courage and action now in anticipation of an eschatological great celebration when the prodigal children all come to a great homecoming.

  In the processes of prayer and active imagination, you do not necessarily have to visualize the king and queen in a literal, physical place called heaven. Some might say they are in mythic sacred geography, and others might think they are “no place at all.” I prefer that people rediscover their imaginal mythic consciousness. Like Joseph Campbell, I suggest people get their own myths going and operating and having imaginal access, as Robert Bly (
1990) says, to “the other world.” Bly is a poet, and he can get away with it. Perhaps we should all just forget about theology and become poets.

  No matter how you conceptualize it, practically speaking we still must talk to the king and the queen in the other world. We need to establish contact and make this relationship an inner mythic reality.

  But back to the issue of how it effects courage to face this world. Does knowledge of a homeland with a king and queen in it make you less hopeful or more hopeful? It depends on many other factors. It might make some people less hopeful, but that is not my experience in working with people. My experience is that once people have some sense of a king and queen in the other world, they tend to be calmer and work harder. I have never investigated whether they were working hard to get there, or whether they were working hard just because they wanted to serve their king and queen. Perhaps I will start asking my students and analysands, “Are you doing these things because you want to go and be with the king and queen after you get through here in this life? Or is it just because you want to be faithful to your inner king and queen?” Check in with me in a few years, and I will tell you what they said.

  Audience: Mario Jacoby has a book called Longing for Paradise (1985) that traces the archetypal root of the desire for a hereafter.

  Moore: Certainly there is an archetypal root, but we must ask how it helps us regulate our energy and anxiety. It has probably evolved because it was useful to our species in the “struggle for survival.”

  CREATING MYTH FOR TODAY

  What we need is not more demythologization, but re-mythologization. We need to play with myth and get it out of this academic idiom. We need to ask, “What would an adequate planetary myth be like, one that would adequately contain us as a human family?” We need some serious play about that. So I recommend to people that they start writing myths. Why don't individual people just start writing their myths and sharing them with others? Write myths that might be adequate for the whole human family. Experiment and draw upon your own mythic resources. That is what I would like to see people do.

  Why do we have to have a homecoming? Isn't this just a Heideggerian fantasy? The answer to that is “why shouldn't we have a homecoming myth of how we go back and reconnect with the king and the queen, of how all of us prodigal children can go home together?” We can have all kinds of psychologically helpful myths. You can work with myth until you find the way it feels right for you, extending the same privilege to others, of course. Then, if you care, you can ask the theologians to deal with the myth later. If they cannot do it in a helpful way, then you do not need to waste your time with them.

  According to Eliade, people need to have an image of a homeland. That is a myth. We do have a classic myth of a homeland, the story of Ulysses in the Odyssey, Homer's epic poem. It is a universal human myth that there is a homeland.

  You can work with ontology and metaphysics and theology if you wish, but it is also useful and fun to play with these inner mythic realities and go exploring within yourself. Maybe you will come back and tell us something important from which we can all benefit. Perhaps we should have a contest to write the best science fiction screenplay for the film “Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: The Human Journey Home.” That would address this deep longing within us.

  Most important of all, however, to come full circle, we must get all this mythic numinous god-energy contained and into mythic vessels. Then we can work together on bringing it back in creative and useful forms. Together we must create in imagination an adequate inner temple, an effective chalice, the true Holy Grail. Because until we do, we will continue to cannibalize and destroy the earth!

  If anyone can figure out how to solve this problem without reclaiming myth, please let me know. This is why Joseph Campbell's work continues to be so popular and powerful. People sense they need myth to contain and enact these archetypal longings in a healthy way. This is undoubtedly also the reason for the resurgence today in the popularity of storytelling. We have storytelling festivals. Why not myth-sharing festivals?

  So we all need to sit around the global campfire once again and tell stories to each other, tell people what is happening. With people sitting around the campfire, and the fire burning away, we can say, “Okay, what have you heard about what is happening over in the homeland?” So the ritual elders, the people who perhaps are better storytellers than the others, will say, “I understand that such and such is happening in the homeland.” It is like that line in the play Camelot, “I wonder what the king is doing tonight.” It is that same type of mythic imagination. It may be play, but it is “high play.” If we will do it, not only will our children love it, but our species might begin to awake from its long sleep and repetitive nightmares.

  The next chapter presents a summary of practical tactics for facing the dragon of grandiosity. This list continues to grow daily, however, and readers may be able to think of some that I have not included. I will welcome hearing your suggestions as I begin work on the sequel to this book.

  NOTES

  1. This chapter is an edited account of part of the late morning session on Sunday, July 16, 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. On the role of symbols in mediating the sacramental reality of the spiritual presence, see Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (1957), vol. 3.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dragon Laws

  Insights for Confronting Grandiosity

  FREUD INTRODUCED THE CONCEPT OF INEXORABLE LAWS of the psyche that operate without the ego's knowledge or cooperation. In his articulation of the “law of the talion,” the lex talionis, the unconscious always “keeps score.” Whenever this unconscious entity perceives an injustice or other grievance, it starts an implacable process that seeks redress, often in horrifying ways.

  Freud's insight fits well into a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of the unconscious. This chapter uses a series of “dragon laws” to summarize the introductory fundamentals of these dynamics and their implications for personal, social, and spiritual life.

  Earlier chapters discussed in depth what is at stake in our capacity to wake up and face the dragon. Not facing our own unconscious grandiose god-energies keeps us from the creative challenge of “riding the dragon”: becoming a conscious partner of the archetypal Great Self Within and thereby moving toward our optimum best selves.

  We need the help of dragon energies to move toward a more radiant life, and the first step in getting that help is to awaken ourselves to their presence and relate to them consciously. The sequel to this volume, Riding the Dragon, will delve more deeply into what must follow after we become aware of the dragon's omnipresence in our lives; here we address the paramount need to achieve the initial consciousness.

  Remaining unconscious of the dragon's presence would insure that we spend most if not all of our waking hours experiencing what Paul Tillich called “existential estrangement” from our best, optimum potential selves. In traditional mythic language, unconsciousness of the dragon's presence invokes a Satan complex that mobilizes within us as an adversary to our own conscious ego. We guarantee, in effect, that we will live “in hell” without knowing consciously where and how we made that choice. We usually have no idea how it was that our unconsciousness served as a portal for this satanic energy to enter into our families, our communities, and the world in general.

  The starkness of this choice has a terrible simplicity: you can either become conscious or stay unconscious of the reality and presence of the dragon. This great turn from being asleep at the wheel to an alert knowing of the powerful proximity of the great Other is the most important gnosis you can ever possess about your personal, social, or spiritual life.

  The “dragon laws” that follow review and summarize how to awaken to the presence of the dragon and then con
tain and channel its energy.

  DRAGON LAWS IN PERSONAL LIFE

  We must always begin with the assumption that the dragon of grandiosity is present and awake within us. The question is not, “Is there any grandiosity in me?” but “Where are my grandiose energies manifesting without my being aware of them? If I am aware of them, do I disrespectfully think and act as if I own them?”

  1. To the extent that you are not aware of the dragon's presence, it is already manifesting in a satanic or Luciferian complex in your personality, usually without your being aware of it.

  The first absolutely essential task is to become aware of its presence and start watching for signs of its mercurial manifestations. These signs usually don't seem dramatic enough to be detected, so we must use the creative trickster of our inner magus to penetrate the cloaking mechanisms which, as Freud knew, are really defenses of the ego against knowing its real situation.

  2. We either identify with this inner complex of grandiose energies, or we repress it and project it onto others.

  People who identify with them tend to use them with arrogance and disrespect. Those who try to deny them tend to idealize others and give away their sovereignty and power, leading to envy and hate.

  3. In actual experience, the ego can oscillate between the poles of identification and projection, thus creating a cycle between (a) inflation and arrogance and (b) projection, idealization, and demonization.

  We need to begin a careful scrutiny that scans for telltale signs of where grandiose energy is entering into our personality and daily lives. Since it is a shapeshifter, we must comb through our experience carefully to discern the shapes it took when we were unaware of its presence.