"Once Upon a Time" — a Fairytale to Bring us to Ourselves

Post #2 on January 31, 2011:  There is a reason that the new TV series “Once Upon a Time” is immensely popular.  The show’s popularity is not just a result of clever marketing or the fact that it is exceptionally well done and visually stunning.  We are fascinated by it because there is, collectively as a society and as individuals, a psychological “hook” that snags us.  We are fascinated by it because it is us.  It shows us an image of our own unconscious dynamics.  More than that though, it shows us an image of a psychological process/struggle that is going on not just within individuals but within the collective unconscious.  It is fascinating stuff, and I would not miss a single episode except under great duress.  For me, this show is one of the more hopeful signs of our collective situation, because it is about the business of soul that has been lost in our patriarchal culture.  The business of soul is the business of the feminine — whether of the feminine ego personality or of the development of the anima, the feminine within a man.

“Once Upon a Time” has the potential to make us aware of the enormous split in Western culture.  Whenever there is too much one-sidedness, the psyche (collective or individual) seeks to balance itself.  The worse the imbalance towards one pole becomes, the stronger the reaction will be from the side of the unconscious in an attempt to balance the psyche.  We need to rediscover the immense psychological value of fairy tales, especially the fairy tales of our current era, which are absolutely chock full of witches, dragons and devouring dominatrix figures.  In the imaginative creations of broadcast and cinematic media we see snapshots of the collective unconscious. These modern fairy tales are full of clues about where consciousness is deficient, and the direction where the unconscious archetypal forces are pressing us to go.

Becoming aware of the split in the psyche is the sine qua non, the prerequisite for awakening consciousness and the development of a new world order.  We are made aware of the split-ness of our situation by the appearance of the image of twins, one good, one evil.  (See Post #1 of this date.)  In “Once Upon a Time,” the split is in the feminine:  Emma, whose last name significantly enough is “Swan” J! — (See my comments on the symbol of the swan in “The Black Swan:  A Three Part Psychological Analysis of the Film”.)  Emma and her “good mother,” Snow White/Mary Margaret Blanchard, are on the positive side of the equation, while the Queen/Regina is on the negative side of the equation.  But our situation is even more complicated than that, because as “Once Upon a Time” tells us, there is also a split in the masculine between the Old King and the new Prince.  Indeed, everyone in “Storybrooke” seems to be split, even Mr. Gold/Rumplestiltskin, the Mephistophelean figure who represents the archetype of choice.  Choice means awareness of two opposites.  We are of two minds collectively and individually.  At least we are perhaps becoming aware of the split.  From week to week, there is usually one character or another who begins to have a slight dawning awareness that something, their “opposite half” is missing, that something has been forgotten, e.g., Mary Blanchard’s dawning realization regarding Prince James/Charming.  This intimation of something that has been lost but might yet be found once again develops through a kind of “dance” between the male and female aspects within the soul of each of us.

In “Once Upon a Time”, all the characters except the protagonist, “Emma”, are trapped in the town of “Storybrooke” where they have forgotten who they are.  Emma, who is representative of both the feminine ego and the more differentiated/developed anima of the male writers of the TV series, is the only one who is not trapped.  She alone, because of her dawning consciousness, can leave and return to Storybrooke.  The rest of the populace is trapped in unconsciousness.  It is as if they had drunk the waters of the River Lethe and forgotten who they are.  Only the young boy, Henry, abandoned by Emma shortly after his birth, realizes what is going on.  He knows who his true mother is.  He is the possessor of the story book with its fairy tales. This story book amounts to a “history book” of the feminine in the psyche — a virtual history book of the soul with its multitude of characters (archetypes) that affect and press themselves upon ego consciousness.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator and statesman said: “Forgetfulness is the root of all evil.” The motifs of “forgetting who we are” and forgetting our “other half” with whom we were once joined has the psychological meaning of being unconscious of our own inner heights and depths, of not recognizing all aspects of our personality, not being aware of the various unconscious contents of the psyche that need our attention and seek inclusion in a more comprehensive personality.  This type of forgetting is a matter of the soul becoming diminished and shallow.  What is at issue here is the breadth and depth of the soul.  In the matter of soul, the motif of forgetting refers to losing track of what is important, forgetting one’s soul’s purpose and being sidetracked time and again from looking at the soul, from paying attention to the soul — whether because of workaday matters, greed, ambition, pleasure, or out of fear or laziness.  If we look to the history of classical literature, the theme of forgetting is one of The Odyssey's great themes.  The business of the soul is the business of the feminine, whether in a man or in a woman, or in the culture at large.

Psychologically speaking, the young lad, Henry, represents both the youthful inner masculine (animus) of a feminine person and the renewal of consciousness in the man (and the dominant culture which is also masculine).  Henry represents the “new order” of consciousness that is coming into being.  It is this content of the psyche that rattles the cages of the collective consciousness and spurs the female ego to action in the outer world and will not let her give up the quest.   Emma is guided by the young animus who is her son, i.e., psychologically speaking, the child of the ego which has been “adopted” by the evil queen of the underworld.  This spurious “adoption” refers to the “entrapment” — which in fairytales is the equivalent to a case of “bewitchment” — of a youthful masculine content of the feminine soul by the negative mother principle.  Henry is the son of the positive image of the inner feminine (the anima) in a man.  However, his natural state (i.e., the normal activity of the anima as soul guide to the masculine personality) has been usurped by his adoption by the negative image of the inner feminine aligned to collective values.

Looked at from the standpoint of psychology, “bewitchment” refers to a condition where one factor in the psyche (in this case, the new creative idea/new world order that wants to manifest, i.e. Henry) has been hijacked by another content of the psyche (in this case the archetype of the negative mother, the evil queen/Regina, who — along with the Old King — represents the old order) and has been forced into servitude in a field not its own — the unconscious realm (“Storybrooke”) of the negative, devouring mother.  Thus, in “Once Upon a Time”, Henry and all the other characters (except Emma) are “trapped” in the town of “Storybrooke”.  This situation occurs in the life of an individual when there is an unchallenged, rigid bias towards a particular world view.  In our collective situation, that bias is our unquestioned grotesquely hardened intellectual rationalism and overly concrete materialism that will not admit of another creative possibility.  In fairy tales, this hijacking of one psychic factor by another is always represented as a bewitchment by a powerful evil wizard or witch.  For example, in the fairytale of “The Seven Ravens” the bewitched masculine figures are turned into a ravens by a witch.  In other fairytales they may be turned into some other animal.  This means that a content of the psyche that should be humanly related and integrated into the fuller personality can only act on the non-human, animal, instinctual level.

If we look at the thing from the standpoint of feminine psychology, the animus in Emma’s developing consciousness is still quite youthful — perhaps 11 years old.  So the animus is still in the realm of the mother, i.e., immature.  In real life this would show itself in the woman whose creativity has been limited by absent maternal influences and lack of nurturing.  Henry’s activities are limited by his step-mother, Regina, whose name means “Queen” in Latin.  As the mayor of the town of Storybrooke, she represents the leader (reigning dominant conscious standpoint) of the collective.   Thus, psychologically speaking, the power-driven, conniving Regina is the guardian of the dominant collective values within the psyche.  In Storybrooke, she is just slightly more human (on occasion we see some fleeting puzzlement on her face) than her fairytale counterpart, the Evil Queen, who rips out the hearts of her victims and squeezes to dust the hearts she has entombed.  That image is a metaphor for what the power attitude and our rigid intellectual rationalism, materialism, and adamantine concretism does:  it refuses to admit nature and feeling values, it tears out and desiccates our hearts, all feminine values of relatedness, intuition, faith in convergence, and love.  Rationalism cannot admit what it does not understand intellectually:  love and serendipity.  The soul — the heart which was made for those very things — withers. 

Precursor to Awakening Consciousness: The Appearance of Female Twins (Dominatrix/Bimbo) in Current Cultural Representations

Post #1 on January 31, 2012:  Pairs of opposites always erupt in the art, stories, legends and mythological representations of a culture whenever a new psychological content is on the borderline of becoming conscious.  When old attitudes, operating procedures, and the “usual” ways of relating to reality become sclerotic, they begin to rattle, clank and fall apart like an old car.  The old ways no longer suffice when a new consciousness begins to dawn on the horizon.  Throughout human history, the motif of twins, one good and one evil, has appeared in mythologies whenever society has become too one-sided and a shift of the dominant cultural consciousness is necessary.  To name just a few of the more familiar duos, there is Cain and Abel, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Osiris and Set, Jacob and Esau.  Myths, legends and fairy tales from every culture are filled with the motif of “twins”.  There are even male/female pairings of twins (e.g., Osiris/Isis of Egyptian mythology; Apollo/Artemis of the Greeks).

The doubling (twinning) effect is seen in products of both the collective and individual psyche.  It can also readily be observed in one’s own dreams whenever a shift of personal consciousness is imminent and/or necessary.  When the dominant ego function gets worn out and becomes sclerotic, the individual is challenged to adapt and change, to admit another possibility of functioning.  This is a difficult, awkward, painful process.  In psychoanalytic practice, the task of becoming aware of and relating to all the potentialities of the personality, conscious and unconscious is called “individuation.”  When an individual stands to this challenge, the process of individuation constellates the imagery of twins, which then appear in our dreams and fantasy material.  The motif of twins in collective fantasy material is a harbinger of an expanding conscious awareness which results in civilization at the macro level.  The motif of twins in dreams and fantasy material of the individual is the herald of a more expansive and comprehensive personality at the micro level of the individual.  This is because twins indicate the possibility for a conscious differentiation (realization) of opposites.  Differences between the opposites must be recognized before they can be integrated.  It is the integration of the opposites that results in an expansion of consciousness.  Symbolically, the twin represents the psychological fact that there is another within that is at once just like us, as a brother or sister, and yet not like us.  The twin is the metaphor for a psychological realization of the opposite within.

Today we see everywhere a pair of feminine opposites emerging:  the dominatrix and the bimbo.  The eruption of the “witch/dragon/devouring mother/dominatrix” motif we see today has its polar opposite “twin” counterpart in the simultaneous eruption in mainstream culture of the insipid, effete bimbo with her equally stupid and insipid partner, the “bimboy” of “The Bachelor/ Bachelorette” fame.  These bimbo/bimboy television shows are equal-opportunity degradations of both the masculine and the feminine because they do not represent real persons but typologies, generic archetypes.  That these figures (dominatrix/bimbo) represent two opposite unconscious feminine archetypes is undeniable, as they have no discernible differentiated human personality.  Is there anyone who actually knows someone who is like these stereotypes?  I don’t, and I cannot imagine that anyone else does either, but I worry that I could be wrong about that.  I worry that because of the media fascination and massive marketing campaigns for huge financial gains (unconsciousness makes for huge profits for marketers), some poor souls are so completely unconscious that they have become identified with one or the other of these archetypes and sunk into the triviality of embodying, incarnating these archetypes rather than living their own creative human lives!  That is a huge waste of human potential.  Yet, if one takes an objective view of the hold the media have on collective consciousness, one can learn a lot.

The bimbo exists on the TV and movie screens because, on the one hand, she is the reflection of the masculine script writers’ anima problems.  On the other hand, the bimbo lives because her opposite, the devouring lamia/dominatrix shows up all over the place today.  Both of these generic types have “arrived” on the cultural landscape because more positive, more nuanced feminine values have been shoved down into the unconscious by a culture that is overly rational and materialistic.  There is a crisis of soul, a crisis of feeling, a severance from our connection to the earth and the natural world.  Refused life and expression, the positive, nuanced feminine values of feeling, relationship, intuition, and nature turn dark and malevolent and come back screaming in murderous rage, infanticide and matricide.  The unconscious always seeks redress in order to balance the archetypal forces.  Ignored and denied an invitation the party, the fairy nature godmother has turned evil.

Looked at differently, the concurrent appearance of the dominatrix and the bimbo is a symptom of the demise of a patriarchy that sees itself simultaneously threatened (and sexually aroused) by the powerful cunning of the dominatrix and comforted (bolstered in its narcissism to maintain its rigid rationalistic standpoint) by the silicon-filled, non-nurturing breasts, weakness and stupidity of the bimbo.  The bimbo exists because she presents no challenge to the masculine to engage in the thorny territory of real human relationship.  Both the dominatrix and the bimbo versions of the feminine abound in cultural manifestations of late.  This “twinning” phenomenon in modern cultural expressions reflects the polarized situation in the collective unconscious prior to what must surely (eventually) be an increase in collective consciousness, if we pay attention to what is happening.

In the history of twins in mythology, the sacrifice of one twin (Cain murdering Abel, for example) frequently means that one set of opposite values has vanquished another set of cultural and human values.  A rigid “either/or” mentality is unhelpful when a society (or individual) is presented with the problem of the opposites.  In the recent film “The Black Swan” (2011), we see in the black and white swans yet another modern-day cultural pairing of opposites, another set of twins.  This pair of opposites has not yet differentiated for the film's main character.  By the end of the film, the girl, Nina, has been turned into a swan, unredeemed by her sacrifice because it was unconscious.  There is an inability to psychologically separate the black from the white swan, the shadow from the ego.*  The human person, Nina,  is swallowed up by the archetype.  Sacrifice consciously chosen moves consciousness forward.  Unconscious sacrifice, however, benefits no one.   Without conscious differentiation of the opposites, integration and fluidity between the opposites is impossible.

*(See blog post, “The Black Swan” of March 14, 2011, at Link to three-part analysis of the film, "The Black Swan".  The same article was published in “Elements”, the online journal of the Minnesota Jung Association in July 2011:   Link to Minnesota Jung Association article in "Elements".

Matricide

January 27, 2012:  There was a segment of CBS Morning News this morning previewing tonight’s “48 Hours Mystery” which features a recent case of matricide.  Guest, Richard Schlesinger, pointed to the rise in the incidence of matricide and, in particular, the increased incidence of girls who murder their mothers.  Hosts, Gail King and Rebecca Jarvis, were pondering over the cause of this alarming trend.  My question is:  Horrified and appalled — of course, but why is anyone surprised by this?  Why should we be mystified that children murder their parents when, with every passing year, we hear more stories about parents who murder their children?

A cultural milieu that starves the soul is a cultural milieu that provides tacit “permission” to engage in violence against women in general.  The wide availability of guns and other weapons provides a broad range of means.  Chemical dependency and family dysfunction provide the occasions to pull the trigger when a situation devolves past the tipping point.  Can there be any wonder that both boys and girls attack and murder their mothers when the feminine has been so devalued, damaged, ravaged and twisted by the overly concrete intellectual, rationalistic, rapacious capitalistic mindset of the  patriarchal cultural dominant in the last twelve years — despite the previous 40 years of feminism and “women’s liberation”?  When one combines chemical dependency, dysfunctional and sexually and physically abusive relationships which themselves are the result of the overly rationalistic bias of patriarchal culture, and add to this the “ignition” stressors in the home and cultural environment and the availability of weapons, you have the ingredients for matricide.

Two books come to mind:

“On Matricide, Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother” by Amber Jacobs (Google Books).  A description of the book on the Google website says in part, “Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, Oresteia, Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. . . She argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a post-patriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology.”

“Matricide in Language” by Miglena Nikolchina (Google Books) who writes of, “the enigma of the persistent suppression of women's contributions to culture. In spite of the efforts of feminist theory and history to turn the tide, this process is with us still.”