Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity Read online

  Your unconscious grandiosity still functions beneath your repression, but you regulate it through the psychological prosthesis of splitting it off onto the group. This psychological tactic enables you to function more or less normally and appear more psychologically developed than you really are. Without such a prosthesis you would have to face the dragon consciously and either continue consciously the processes of individuation or become psychotic.

  A person in a group can say, “This group is a new cult, and everyone outside it is doomed, but me personally, I'm humble, and I'm just doing what God wants me to do.” In the context of this social group, I am humble, and so are all my fellow members. Everyone in the group is humble. We can be humble precisely because we belong to a group that has the only tickets available for seats on the great cosmic spaceship that is just about to come.

  A recent movie named Cocoon (1985) directed by Ron Howard told the fantasy story of a spaceship coming down to earth on business and giving some old folks a chance to go with them when they left. The folks at this particular rest home decide to get on it. That is a movie version of this archetypal fantasy.

  Regulating grandiosity is a universal human need, because everyone has to deal with this same great dragon within. We are not stupid. We have an inner magician, an inner magus, our Merlin or Gandalf, whispering in our ear, saying, “Robert, if you get any more great, you're moving toward a severe psychosis, so you need to get a bigger vessel for your grandiosity. You better join a more prestigious group to help you out with this, one where you won't be so great individually. Those people can help you carry your personal dragon. You can get together with them and line up and carry this great dragon together. It's much easier than consciously facing your own dragon alone.”

  The newly humble people still have to contend with the great dragon, but now it's a function of the overall group, not the conscious responsibility of any one member. By the way, sometimes the individual's little boy king and little girl queen get really angry about all this humility. Even though they are still allowed to exist, they no longer get enough conscious and direct adoration inside the humble person. That is why people who try to be humble unconsciously hate the fact of their humility at the same time. The little boy king and little girl queen within us really hate it when we stop acknowledging them consciously, and this fuels a lot of envy, hatred, and violence. This psychic process explains the politics of envy, why so many people with necrophilia out there would love to blow up the world. You have to understand how the little god within feels when it is not adored.

  Audience: Is that directly related to the theory that you are talking about? The exclusivity, the exclusiveness of each different group?

  Moore: Yes, but why do we do that? You see, if we didn't have the Soviet Union, Reagan's “Evil Empire,” it would be harder for Americans to deal with their own personal grandiosity. We wouldn't have such a demonic enemy to be superior to.3 We think the communists want to take over the world, but that peace-loving Americans don't want to take over the world or anything else. We don't want any of that world market! Note how easily our grandiose shadow traits become so invisible that we cannot confront our own arrogance.

  That is why Gorbachev's reforms are creating such a psychological crisis for the West. He doesn't act like Satan is supposed to act. We unconsciously wish he would invade another country, or act like the Chinese, for instance. Chinese leaders are far more helpful, because they act just like we unconsciously want them to, which gives us a wonderful focus for our satanic projections. We can say, “Oh, it is really evil over there in China!” If they stopped being difficult, we couldn't project the evil shadow upon them quite so easily, and that would force us to start dealing with our own emotional problems and shadows. America would face a psychological crisis. That is how it works. When someone refuses to carry your projections, it creates a psychological crisis for you. Your displacement mechanisms no longer help you regulate your own grandiosity, so your ego must look for another way to avoid the truth.

  What can you do about this kind of situation? Are we condemned to keep on acting out like this? Does it have to be this way? No, I don't believe that for a minute, but if I were Jimmy the Greek, and you asked me what the odds were that humans will keep this up until they self-destruct, I would have to say that the odds are pretty good.

  Suppose, for example, that you had to make that bet. Suppose there was a spaceship that could take you somewhere else, like the star Sirius, and let you escape from this world. Would you take the odds that the human species will keep on going the way it has in the past and keep escalating violence until it destroys human civilization? Or would you gamble that people will suddenly start learning just before it is too late and take dramatic action toward awareness and responsible behavior? Personally, I must be a gambler. I think there is at least a chance that we as a species can beat the odds against us, but only if we all do our part in facing the dragon of grandiosity.

  To win this gamble as a species, however, we have to start with a rigorous conscious look at the problem. A neo-Jungian framework can help us understand the psychodynamic origins of these problems. Contrary to what a lot of my liberation theologian friends seem to believe, no political ideology will solve these problems. We have to understand the plumbing.

  Everyone is wired with this same dragon of grandiosity, this same solar furnace, this same god-complex, but these inner realities find different outer expressions. The energies can be contained through conscious ritual practices or mythic forms or get displaced into relationships and create division, demonic splitting, and projection. When the energies have nowhere to go but onto the ego, they make you psychotic. When they go into idealizing another person, they make you masochistic and dependent. You can even play the role of masochistic slave if you can find someone willing to play the role of sadistic god. Displacing the energies onto a limited group results in a malignant tribalism where tribal exclusivity is important because it helps avoid individual psychosis.

  All these things have been going on for a long time, but our satanic, Faustian refusal to wake up and consciously face these great inner realities has more ominous implications today than ever before. We not only have weapons of mass destruction now, but the human population has grown so large that rapacious consumerism threatens to destroy the planet's ecology. Deforestation, like the destruction of the rain forests, proceeds at such a rapid rate, I think, because of the grandiose, rapacious appetites of people who have become secularized and modern in their cultural viewpoint. This is an important argument to understand. Culturally modern people who retreat into secular individualism have fewer places to contain their grandiosity, so they tend toward self-medication excesses like consumerism, the cults of beauty, celebrity, or addiction, or some other kind of addictive pseudo spirituality. Prophetic voices from all the world's religions rightfully criticize these forms of malignant narcissism.

  To stay with the ecological problem, our planet simply cannot sustain the current rate of archetypally fueled, compulsive consumption. There is massive denial on this subject by both spiritual leaders and political leaders. They think they have accomplished something significant when they get together with a group of world leaders and say, “We must do better at this!” Just the ecological issue by itself should be enough to make us realize that we have to address global grandiosity or face some very unpleasant consequences. That should be more than enough to make us face up to the dragon of grandiosity.

  Another issue just as large, however, is the problem of proliferating weapons of mass destruction in an age of terrorism, which in my view is a ritual phenomenon. Our species is preparing unconsciously for a transformative ritual that will try to kill the dragon. We unconsciously intend to “nuke” our own grandiosity! The unconscious orchestrates this. Douglas Gillette and I have an unpublished manuscript entitled “The Last Rite” that brings together the apocalyptic myths of the world in this context. This drama of a great burning is in the human psyc
he.4

  World leaders need to learn about these archetypal pressures toward either transforming or destroying our global grandiosity epidemic. In my view, we must either have a new spiritual revolution that consciously confronts global human grandiosity, or we will soon engage in a literal but unconscious sacrificial ritual that seeks to cure this human cancer by self-destruction. In other words, if humanity will not consciously face its problem of grandiosity and spiritual narcissism, then the unconscious alternative will try to cure the malignancy by nuclear cauterization. We must either face the global initiatory task consciously or be doomed to act it out unconsciously.

  Audience: Would you say that God wanted us to push the nuclear button? Or does he give us a choice?

  Moore: That is a theological question, but I personally believe the choice is ours. Unconscious grandiosity always carries a terrible price. The scriptures of virtually every religion clearly identify human grandiosity as a major problem. Even evolutionary psychology is beginning to recognize that religions evolved as a tactic to help humans regulate their grandiosity (see Wright 1994). We must accept the challenge of awareness and regulation of these dragon energies.

  Audience: Do we not have the Garden of Eden with its tree of knowledge?

  Moore: You can do a lot with that myth, and many other similar ones reflect the difficulty of handling the seduction of grandiosity. Men, of course, love to blame this seduction on women, and vice versa. Everyone wants to put the responsibility on someone else for succumbing to the temptation of unconscious infantile grandiosity, because this temptation is the hardest thing to deal with and sacrifice. In the Babylonian epic of creation, the local male god Marduk was the only one who could defeat Tiamat, the great female dragon of chaos who personified the primeval oceans. This was viewed as a great heroic feat, but it would have been more impressive to me if he had killed a male dragon, because men have more trouble facing the great male dragon. In real life, as in Beowulf, one must face both male and female dragons.

  NOTES

  1. This chapter is an edited account of part of the morning sessions 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 overall program was entitled “Jungian Psychology and Human Spirituality: Liberation from Tribalism in Religious Life.”

  2. These matters are also discussed in my unpublished lectures, The Collective Unconscious and the Shape of Psychopathology, audiotape 597, and Archetype, Compulsion, and Healing, audiotape 655 (Evanston, Ill.: C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago).

  3. We should all notice how much anxiety levels (even in utero) have increased since the “end” of the Cold War. This is no accident. It makes a great deal of sense if put in the framework being discussed here.

  4. See Edward Edinger, Archetype of the Apocalypse (1999). I totally agree with Edinger's assertion that it is futile for humanity to try to repress the unconscious imperative toward individuation.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Psychological Sources of Religious Conflict

  IT IS A PLEASURE FOR ME TO BE HERE AND TO WELCOME YOU. This symposium is a labor of love and cooperation of a number of institutions: the Chicago Theological Seminary, the Institute for World Spirituality, the Center for Jewish- Christian Studies of the Chicago Theological Seminary, the Organization for Universal Communal Harmony, and many other persons and contributors who have contributed their funds and their time and their devotion to the importance of this topic.1

  Let me just tell you a little bit about my method here, what we hope will be “the method in our madness.” I want to thank especially the people in psychology and psychoanalysis whose work I will be sharing with you in an ecumenical way. While I am a Jungian psychoanalyst, my first book was a Freudian book, and my first psychoanalytic diploma was an Adlerian diploma, so I am not here simply to represent my own work, but to try to speak to the changes, the discoveries, the knowledge in the psychological sciences that has developed since the first World Parliament of Religions in 1893. I want to bring some resources to you, as Paul Tillich would say, “to frame the human question,” and we are going to proceed in this symposium on what he would call “the method of correlation.” I will speak as a human scientist, as a psychoanalytic scientist, reporting to you on some findings on the human condition that have occurred since 1893.2

  We will cover here some material that is difficult but extremely important for understanding the seriousness of what we face today in terms of jealousy, envy, and hatred, and what I call “malignant tribalism” among human ethnic groups and, in our context, among religions. We will first contextualize this as a specieswide problem. Then I will share with you some relevant insights from psychoanalytic traditions since 1893. Finally, I will frame some questions that persons from the great spiritual traditions in this symposium can respond to later.

  Our first task is to face the shadow side of our species. Many forces today seek to deny the human tendency toward malignant tribalism and genocide. Some persons and groups around the world, for example, seek to minimize the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust or go so far as to deny that it ever happened, ever existed. Some have rewritten textbooks to deny the degree and severity of the evil perpetrated on fellow human beings through racism, sexism, and blatant genocide.

  A recent book by Jared Diamond entitled The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1992) traces the evolutionary background of genocide. It severely challenges the common denial that humans have engaged for a long time in genocidal behavior. We know more about familiar recent examples, and they perhaps frighten us more because of how we have put the highest technology into the service of genocide. We need, however, to understand that genocide has been a human tendency for at least thousands of years, and that specialists in primate studies can describe sociobiological roots of this kind of behavior.

  This tendency to create a vision of the “other” that depreciates it and legitimates murder, and even genocide, is a widespread phenomenon, not just in our species but in other primate species as well. The idea of the “noble primates” that never hurt anything is a fantasy uninformed by the facts. One of my colleagues who has researched this more completely than I have tells me it is a good thing that we are more closely related to chimpanzees than to baboons, because if we were more closely related to the baboons, we would already have had the final nuclear holocaust. So we need to get serious about looking at the evidence about the tendencies that come with the species that we are.

  What is this tendency that we have as a species? It is this. The problem we face is that we rationalize malignant tribalism and genocide. We put the forces of our intellect and all our other resources into rationalizing, helping ourselves accept these types of behaviors on the part of human beings. There are two fundamental ways this kind of behavior has been rationalized in the history of human genocide.

  Our first rationalization of genocidal behaviors is based on self-defense, the classic picture. We feel ourselves in a dangerous position. There have been attacks upon us, and those attacks are utilized to dehumanize our attackers to the degree that we lose touch with any sense of their humanity, and therefore lose touch with any sense of limits on our responses or reactions. Diamond's book goes deeply into examples of that. The chief result of this tactic is to deny the humanity of the other people. It may even go so far as to ascribe nonhuman languages or nonhuman essences to them. So you can insert the name of the religion that you prefer to hate when you say, “the so-and-so swine,” or “the so-and-so dogs,” or “the so-and-so wolves,” or “the so-and-so rats.”

  Diamond points out that this use of language actually works to facilitate the necessary psychological mechanism operating here, what psychology and psychoanalysis know as “splitting,” the capacity for a trick of the mind that helps us forget that the problematic other person or group still belongs to our species. This is why it is so hopeful and encouraging to us at this conference to see conscious attention be
ing given to the need to create a specieswide ethic or, to use Vice President Gore's language, to create a global ethic that recognizes a common human unity and respects other species as well.

  We also tend to use religion as a resource to rationalize malignant tribalism and genocide. Every serious student can cite examples of how people of all different races and traditions have used religion to rationalize torture and murder. You can fill in your own knowledge at this point.

  When we look for psychological and psychoanalytic resources to understand this situation, the person who understood these phenomena most deeply was Erik Erikson (1902–1994). He called this problem a human tendency to pseudo-speciate by which he meant falsely creating a new species category to account for the existence of those people you hate and no longer want to treat as human beings. This is the psychological dynamic. Because of failures in our own psychological development and maturation, or because of arrested development in what we might call our psycho-spiritual maturation, we tend to split the other off from ourselves and see them as nonhuman.

  Now to achieve our goal of preparing to hear from spiritual leaders later in the symposium, we need to focus in on this issue of splitting. What is it? What causes this splitting? From Freud, the first great psychoanalytic genius, to the present, the testimony of the psychological sciences has been pretty constant on this, that the human psyche is extremely fragile. It is much more fragile than people tend to realize, and this applies both to human individuals and to human groups. Anytime the human family faces a nonempathic environment that is not supportive of its worth and sense of significance, it tends to start becoming disorganized in what Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) called the “self-system.” It begins to come apart, to fragment, and that is the root of what we call splitting. There are many excellent psychoanalytic treatments of this topic.