Facing the Dragon

by Robert L. Moore

  Audience: You go find yourself another therapist?

  Moore: Yes, you can find another therapist, or what?

  Audience: You become psychotic?

  Moore: Yes, you may become psychotic, but at the very least you get sick again. There are many forms this sickness can take.3 What are some of the forms it can take? Suppose that I have been in therapy with you for six years, and in my relationship with you, I have gotten so much better that I no longer have any large symptoms. I am not acting out, I am not overeating, I am not into compulsive drinking, or any other kind of compulsive behavior. So I quit my therapy, but all of a sudden I go back on the sauce, start drinking again, more heavily perhaps, or I gain thirty pounds, or sexually I start acting out promiscuously, or I get a divorce and remarry. All because of what?

  I have not taken my archetypal transference – my projection of grandiose energies – off of you, my therapist who had become my false center. I had put my Aphrodite goddess transference onto you, and though you would not have sex with me because you knew you might get sued, I put onto you all the goddess transference I had to give. That made you magical and wonderful, and I felt so wonderful in this relationship with you. My wife looks at me, and she is always criticizing me, and she does not always think that I am so wonderful. She thinks I did not balance my checkbook, or I did not take out the garbage. So I do not feel so good with my wife, but with you, my therapist, I feel whole again. Now I know that what I needed after all was not therapy. What I needed was you. Maybe I can talk you into a divorce and marry you. But just as soon as I marry you, you will not be able to contain my idealization any better than my ex-wife did, and soon you will start looking just like her. I thought I got away from her, but I find out that I did not get away from her. This can go on and on.

  It continues to work this way until finally I figure it out and realize I have a problem. I probably need to go back to school, get another degree, become more wonderful! Then everything will be all right again. Almost everyone can elaborate on this from their own experience. If we had enough time, we could look at all the various ways an analysand might act out after leaving this kind of therapy. I may think that I could not internalize anything when I was working with you. It was all there in you. You were the god or the goddess, or I probably projected both sides of the Godhead onto you. The psychoanalytic self psychologists make it clear that as long as I am in a satisfactory selfobject transference with you, I will often not have any symptoms. Why not? Because I am containing my grandiosity in you. It is often called a “transference cure,” but it is no cure at all.

  The analysand's grandiosity is contained in the analyst who serves as god or goddess or both, while the analysand, by contrast, is nothing. I am much better when I am with this analyst, but why? Someone tell me why I am better when I am with her.

  Audience: It is a symbiotic relationship.

  Moore: Symbiotic, that is absolutely right, but it is not just that it is symbiotic. It is more subtle than that. There is some specific thing happening here. I am putting something into her. I am putting a projection onto her or into her, but what is the content of that projection? This is the genius of Jungian thought. Freudians are good phenomenologists who see a lot of this micro-plumbing better than Jungians do, but they do not understand the nature of the content as well as Jungians do. I am putting a specific content into her. It is an aspect or sector of the god-imago.

  Audience: It is embodied in the relationship.

  Moore: It is unconsciously contained in the relationship. You want to think “containment” because it relates to ritual. It is embodied in this, but it is in the field. It is in the relationship. As long as I have my relationship with you, I will not be as crazy in my behavior. My acting out will be limited.

  Audience: What about a negative transference?

  Moore: It depends on how severe the negative transference is. If I come to see you and it is not very good, then I may have difficulty projecting an archetypal transference onto you in spite of any longings I may have. That is not an archetypal negative transference. It is ordinary. You are just ordinarily uninteresting as a therapist. When I am with you, I do not feel very interesting myself. At least you are not interesting enough for me to pay your large fees, and that means I'll not be coming back to see you. I'm just checking out therapists anyway. I've seen four this month and not one of them has been all that interesting. What does that translate out as? No archetypal transference is occurring despite my archetypal longings.

  On the other hand, suppose that when I first come to see you, the moment I come into your office I know that you are the therapist I need to see. When I visited all those other therapists, something told me they were not the right ones, but when I came in here with you, something told me that you were the answer. You are the person I need to work with. I have a positive archetypal transference and you carry the light side of the god and the goddess for me. Everything is fine and dandy as long as you make me feel wonderful by blessing me with those beautiful eyes. Oh, I just feel so good when I am with you and you see and recognize me.

  That lasts for a short time, and then one day I display my grandiosity to you in what we call a mirror transference. You will gaze upon me, and I will be the divine child in the manger, and I will ooh and ah and you will smile, and I will feel as if this were a crèche (the tableau of Mary, Joseph, and others around the crib of the baby Jesus in the Bethlehem stable, often built for Christmas display). Right here, this is a crèche. You (the analyst) are looking at me, and we have the cow, and the goat, and the shepherd and all, and the little squirrel up there, and you are all gazing at me (the analysand), and I just feel so wonderful displaying myself to you, and everything is fine as long as I am the Christ child in the crèche.

  But then one day, you (the analyst) stayed out too late the night before or you are preoccupied, and you do not manage to mirror me (the analysand) quite adequately. Suddenly it becomes clear to me that I was mistaken. You (the analyst) are not Mary at all like I thought you were. You are really Lilith (a female demon in ancient Near Eastern literature) or, if you are a male, you are really Satan. Now I see that you are just in this for the money, that you are just exploiting me. Now you are not just uninteresting, which means no archetypal transference at all, but you are evil. That is the archetypal satanic transference.

  Audience: Do not self psychologists say that the mirroring is the healing? Then what does the process of the rupture represent?

  Moore: It depends on why it occurred. If the analysand walks out of the room and never comes back, the self psychologists do not think that healing occurred at all. Why?

  Audience: Well, right, you are not there, there is no holding.

  Moore: There is no holding, and therefore the analyst cannot take the analysand down off the throne a little bit in a process of slow de-idealization. It cannot be done later, because the analyst really seems like Satan to the analysand. Here the analysand attacks the therapist for being a female version of Satan, and she may surprise the analysand by saying, “Just get out of here! I do not have to put up with this abuse!” All the analysand can do is just get away. Even if the analyst thinks, “No, I am not Satan or Lilith, you are just a borderline personality,” which is, in effect, what a lot of therapists do, then there will probably be a breach. Many therapists cannot endure such an attack. They retaliate against the analysand and effectively terminate them right there. It is much more common than cases of therapists who can contain an attack.

  Suppose, on the other hand, that the analyst says, “You must have really felt betrayed by me.” Now the analysand says, “What's this?! This Satan is worrying that she might have betrayed me?!” That kind of empathic response confuses the analysand who was expecting a negative response.

  Then the analyst says, “I hope at least that you will come back next Monday and let's talk about what just happened between us, because I think I understand something about how you are feeling now, and what I have done t
o disappoint you.” The phrase “What I have done to disappoint you” is just a euphemistic way of admitting “I have failed you.”

  What has changed in psychotherapy today is that it has become acceptable for therapists to admit that they are not always totally empathic. This makes it harder for the analysand to think that the disappointing analyst really is Satan. “It once felt wonderful when we were attuned, but today I feel terrible and I don't feel good around you anymore. I can't be sure that you are Satan, though, so I will come back next time and see what happens.” When the analyst can adequately interpret the break in empathy so that it feels accurate to the analysand, it may allow a new opportunity for healing to occur.

  Audience: What, then, is the role of the therapist. You say that all this transference of archetypal contents is an important human and natural part of therapy, but you also seem to say it is inappropriate for the therapeutic process.

  Moore: No, no, I think it is a necessary part of the process.

  Audience: In terms of spirituality, what is the relevance of all the conflict and different frames of reference of Freudian or self psychology? How does the spiritual aspect fit into all this?

  Moore: When self psychologists discuss mirroring and idealizing transference, they do not realize they are talking about the management of archetypal transference. It is possible to encounter these realities without knowing that they are archetypal. They talk about dealing with grandiosity, for example, and they help analysands gradually become more and more capable of relating to their own grandiosity and being much more accepting of it because their therapist accepts it. Nonetheless, I think it is important to point out the weakness of any theory of psychotherapy that does not clearly understand the relationship between the archetypal Self and the ego, how this influences analysand-analyst relationships and how the archetypal projection must be removed from humans. The archetypal transference does not belong on human beings. The spiritual resources of the mythic imagination are required to cope adequately with these powerful archetypal energies.

  Audience: So you are saying that many therapists remove the projection from themselves and put it back in the context of the analysand's personal life, and the problem is not whether transference and idealization exist, but that they don't separate the sacred and the profane world within their analysands. They take the analysand's idealizing projection, and the analysand is left with a sort of existential loss. So do you mean that the problem is not in the psychological structure of the projection, but in the placing of it in the physical environment?

  Moore: Yes, from my point of view, there can be no adequate termination until you find an appropriate vessel for an archetypal transference, but that vessel must not be human. It was the genius of Eliade to see that, but he did not have a psychology to explain it. He leaned heavily toward the Jungian viewpoint, but he could never admit it publicly, because in his university it was never acceptable to be Jungian. It still isn't to this day at the University of Chicago.

  Audience: So what would that container be?

  Moore: There are many different mythic forms in human history, and from a psychological point of view, you would not prescribe which myth would be most helpful to carry it. Jung would say if you can go to church, then go to church, because he thought many people could get this archetypal transference carried by a traditional religious form. From a psychological point of view, you cannot prescribe what is “the right myth,” but you can urge development of an ego-Self axis of separation between your ego and the archetypal Self which is the transpersonal, transegoic center in the psyche.4

  It will work psychologically for an individual to project and displace the grandiose energies onto a human ideology. If you become an ideologue, it does not matter psychologically whether you are a Reaganite or a Marxist, so long as the ideology is numinous for you. Psychodynamically speaking, if an ideology becomes the carrier for your archetypal Self, it will keep you from fragmenting as an individual in a way similar to how you seemed to get better through transference to a therapist. The ideology serves as a psychological prosthesis for the individual while the grandiosity continues having a toxic effect at the cultural and societal level.

  That is what happens in malignant human tribalism. You can view human religious tribalism or ethnicity in these terms. When your ethnic, or racial, or religious group become numinous for you as an individual, the group will carry the numinosity of your archetypal Self. That will protect your ego from the grandiosity, but it will not protect other people or the world from it. Note the devastation that has resulted from the numinosity of Marxist ideology.

  Audience: Related to my other question about renunciation in Buddhism and Christianity, if one becomes too sacred in relating to the Self, doesn't an imbalance occur in mortification and asceticism? Don't you need a middle ground? Would you comment on that?

  Moore: When you get into one of these holy configurations, archetypal energy invades the ego from that part of the archetypal Self that is shaped like a monk, but other archetypal structures look very different. The warrior aspect is one form that this asceticism can take. The monk is often a spiritual warrior who combines aspects of both the magician and warrior archetypes. It may look ascetic and selfless even when it is very inflated. Your grandiose energies can flow through various structures that glow with their own unique patterns of archetypal energy. You may not consider them inflated, but they are.5

  You can also take the grandiosity off your ego through different forms of tribalism to keep it from fragmenting. “I am not psychotic if I can project my grandiosity onto something else. If I project it onto you, you might become psychotic, but not me!” This is something you see in therapy a lot. In short, we appear to be more integrated than we really are.

  A lot of therapists, when they carry the archetypal transferences of other people, find themselves having disturbing symptoms. They might say, “I've had twenty years of therapy, and I feel just as crazy as I did when I started.” What they don't realize is that other people's archetypal transferences have overstimulated their own grandiosity. When people turn you into a god or goddess, it tends to make you more crazy, not less. They say, “I can get rid of my god-complex by putting it on my therapist,” but then the therapist has the archetypal energies of two god-complexes to contend with, his and theirs, which makes it doubly hard for the therapist to keep an integrated personality.

  In this light, we can see that clergy of all faiths have very dangerous jobs. On Sunday morning, for example, when the priest gets up there, if he is a good liturgist, he will elicit archetypal transference (see Randall 1988). On the other hand, if he is not good at it, the people in the audience will not experience archetypal transference. When the priest has a true talent for liturgy, what Victor Turner called “ritual genius,” archetypal transference will often occur. This is fine for the congregation, because it passes all its transferences over to the priest, but the priest now has to deal with them, and this can tremendously overstimulate his own grandiose self-organization. He may feel enormous anxiety and go get himself a drink. That is why there are so many alcoholic and pedophile priests. They have to self-medicate to deal with the overstimulation coming from all the archetypal transferences from the people.

  Substance abuse and sexual addictions are pseudo-ritualizations that people use to regulate their grandiose energies. It is not just psychotherapists who have this problem. In fact, it is harder for clergy, because they may have dozens or hundreds of people in the same room projecting upon them at the same time, while therapists only have one analysand in the room at a time to deal with.

  Audience: What is it that makes a narcissistic grandiose person fragment?

  Moore: The human ego cannot contain God.

  Audience: But if the human ego sees itself as God, wouldn't that be a substitute? Couldn't the human self-inflated ego be a substitute for God, psychologically speaking?

  Moore: It seems to approach that with some people. The narcissistic person
ality disorder is sometimes able to entertain a godlike fantasy because of certain ritualizations with certain other people who are comfortable enough with it not to cause psychosis. Nonetheless, on the other side of it, the narcissistic personality disorder can still have severe symptoms that are not psychotic. You may be identifying with the god-complex, but not so far out as to be psychotic, yet still enough to have significant symptoms.

  Whenever a person has that kind of delusional inflation, they will always experience symptoms that are trying to say, “Hey, you're still human, and don't forget that you are human.” What kind of symptoms? Perhaps they will masturbate compulsively, or look at pornography a lot. In fact, they may have a whole suitcase of pornography that they take with them, because they identify so strongly with the god-complex that they fear they will become disembodied or lose their humanity by losing their body. Sometimes they will not understand what the symptoms are, but they will notice that they have to masturbate, sometimes ten times a day. Why would anyone have to masturbate that much?

  Audience: The pain is so great.

  There is so much anxiety.

  To get balance with your body physically.

  Moore: You must get in touch with your body! The dragon in you is trying to get you to forget that you are human, so you masturbate to make sure you stay in touch with your body. You stay embodied that way.

  This is obviously a different view of masturbation. In a lecture to some conservative Christians the other night, I was talking about prayer, and I said that prayer was this, and prayer was that, but when I got to the idea of “masturbation as prayer,” that raised some eyebrows! But this is serious. Part of you knows that you are unaware that you are not God, and masturbation is a compulsive physical way of reminding you that you are human after all.

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