Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity Page 18
In our context here, we need to realize that jealousy, envy, and hatred leading to violence are some of the most toxic by-products of this splitting, and thus toxic by-products of human environments that we ourselves have either created or allowed to develop. We have not faced honestly enough that we ourselves are responsible for those environments that are non-nurturing, nonempathic, and nonsupportive of the human soul and thus create this splitting and result in these by-products. This is a new psychological way of thinking about an old human problem. Psychoanalysis today uses a new technical term for this: “disintegration products.” Think about that. Say it to yourself: “disintegration products.” If you can get your thoughts around that, then you will understand a lot of what I mean. We all need to think seriously about what is it that we do, or avoid doing, that leads our brothers and sisters to become so fragile and so ready to fragment in their emotional life and therefore behave in ways characterized by jealousy, envy, and hate.
Let me just run through a few of these great pioneers and thinkers, and a few of their terms that you can study later on your own. As many of you know, I am a Jungian analyst, and I teach here in Chicago at the Jung Institute, but I will save Jung for last. Let me begin with Sigmund Freud (1865–1939). I am not a Freudian, but Freud knew a lot of important, true things, and one of the things that he knew and emphasized was the enormity of the difficulty of human beings learning how to overcome hate and how to love. That is the center of Freud's genius in every aspect of his work. He knew how difficult it was for all of us to learn how to love, to get beyond our narcissism, to learn how to love physically, to learn how to love interpersonally. He gave us deep insights into these tasks, into our ambivalence, and into how even our loves tend to get us into trouble. When we get to jealousy, we will see an example of that.
Freud's early colleague, Alfred Adler (1870–1937), the founder of Adlerian psychology, pointed out that our troubles result from a superiority complex that strives for power over other people. People who are psychologically immature engage in what Adler called the “depreciation tendency.” Rather than organizing the world horizontally in terms of community, they organize the world vertically so they can step on others to become higher, better, and more acclaimed. Alfred Adler had a simple way to explain this. Behind every claim to superiority he found an underlying sense of inferiority. Every superiority complex has an inferiority complex holding it up. Conversely, every inferiority complex has a superiority complex beneath it.
What then, according to Adler, is psychological health? How can we get beyond jealousy, envy, and hate? We must first locate the source of our inferiority feelings. Why do we feel so inferior? What do we need in terms of encouragement so we can participate creatively in the human community? Adler said that the mark of emotional health was gemeinschaft Gefühl, that is, community feeling or social interest. We become healed psychologically to the extent that we reach out to other people and feel connected to them and cooperate with them, in spite of our differences. You can cooperate if you keep your mind on the task at hand rather than on your own superiority. The inability to cooperate comes from a pathological superiority complex. We can thank Adler for that idea in the context of the great task that we face here together.3
Another one of Freud's great successors, Melanie Klein (1882–1960), was a child psychologist who did some of the earliest significant work on jealousy, envy, and hate. Melanie Klein traced the roots of jealousy and envy back to very early experience. She emphasized how fearful the infant is even at an early age, and how much anxiety there is in a world where you cannot be sure you will be able to maintain your connection to something good, your mom. You cannot be sure whether your feelings toward your mother will be able to keep you connected to her or whether they will destroy her. So we all have a fear about being able to find the good, what Melanie Klein called “the good breast.” By this she meant all the good in life, to connect with it and to maintain connection with it, and to deal with the feelings of rage when it is sometimes taken away (see Klein 1984, Vladescu 1997). These fears continue to haunt us as adults and often intrude when we are attempting to form meaningful and trusting relationships with others.
Let me call your attention to a New York psychoanalyst, Ann Belford Ulanov, whose book, Cinderella and Her Sisters (Ulanov and Ulanov 1983), is a revealing study of envy that I recommend in the context of our work here. Ulanov points out that envy appears when you feel disconnected from the good, when you feel that you have no good in you. It manifests when you feel you do not have a sustainable relationship with what is good in the human community or the human family. When I feel that I am not connected with the good, or not connected with the good as much as you are, then my reaction is one of hatred of you, and it can be an implacable hatred. Most of the implacable hatred in our world results from malignant envy. It comes from the feeling, “If I do not have the good, then you shall not have it either.” If you will think about how much behavior in our planet has to do with trying to destroy that which others have, even their lives, then I think that you will understand how significant envy is in this context.
Another person who helped me understand this was Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949), an enormously influential and important theorist for this context. Harry Stack Sullivan distinguished between envy and jealousy. He saw a fundamental difference between envy and jealousy in the interpersonal situations in which these processes occur. We cannot go deeply into this, but we can say in summary that envy usually occurs between two people, you and me. Jealousy never occurs within a dyadic situation but only between three or more people. It works something like this. I love you (the first person), and I also love and esteem you (the second person), and the two of you have a relationship with each other, and I fear that I am not worthy enough, or I am not significant enough, or I am not important enough, or I am not beautiful enough, or I am not wise enough, to hold your attention and your relatedness.
To take an example, suppose I am a Christian, and I see that you as a Muslim have begun to have a relationship with a Hindu in my community. As I see the two of you gaining in esteem and love for one another, then I become subject to feelings of jealousy. This is very important for us today. Here we are all gathered together at the World Parliament of Religions, and we may think, “Isn't it wonderful that we are all here together?” Yes, of course, it is wonderful, but there is also jealousy. I see the Sikhs relating to the Jains, and the Jains relating to the Hindus, and I wonder, “Will they be interested in me? Or will I lose out here, and they will only love each other, and not me?” We speak of “the human family,” but my friends, we are the human family, and we have just as much envy and jealousy in our human family as we do in the typical family. That is the bad news I bring.
Harry Stack Sullivan says that jealousy, like envy, is based on a sense of inferiority, that it comes from lack of a sense of worth. Either I am not worth enough for you to love me, or you will love someone else more than you love me. This reality impacts everyone – productive people, successful people, beautiful people, or personable people. The great psychoanalysts of the last hundred years have taught us that the more you shine, the more you will be the target of jealousy and envy.
Do I mean that if I manifest more religious wisdom, it will create more hatred of me by other religious people? Absolutely.
We must face the fact that envy can lead us to hate others because of their spiritual attainments. We must remember that we have spiritual gold coming from all these great spiritual traditions. We must be aware that when we see someone with spiritual gold, there is something in us that gets envious and says, “I have nothing like that” or “My gold is not as deep as yours.” This may never come to consciousness, but it is a human tendency, not a Jewish, Christian, Sikh, Hindu, or Muslim tendency. Envy is a specieswide tendency. When we see others with gold, to the extent that we have not flowered into our human maturity, we begin to hate it and feel that we are cut off from it. That is the fundamental dif
ference between jealousy and envy. Jealousy fears being left out in the cold. Envy leads to an empty despair that seeks to destroy the other.
One of the Chicago institutions I am grateful for is the local Freudian Psychoanalytic Institute, which was the home of one of the great revolutionary geniuses in psychoanalysis, Heinz Kohut (1913–1981). I recommend that we all study his work and the work of his followers, known as psychoanalytic self psychologists (Kohut 1971, 1985). One good reference is Ronald Lee's book, Psychotherapy after Kohut (1991). Another is by a social worker here at the University of Chicago, Miriam Elson, called Self Psychology and Clinical Social Work (1988).
Heinz Kohut was the analyst who helped us understand more sensitively than ever before the human need for recognition and affirmation. Now granted, Adler understood this need, of course, and Harry Stack Sullivan, and Jung, and all the other great psychoanalysts understood it, but they never understood it with the clarity of Heinz Kohut.
We like to talk about people's narcissism. “Oh, so-and-so is more narcissistic than so-and-so.” We talk about “malignant narcissism,” or the “narcissistic personality disorder,” and the tendency of people to want attention. Today, for example, we have all these spiritual leaders at the World Parliament of Religions who parade in their religious dress and want attention from everyone else. We say, “Isn't that awful? Isn't that just the ego showing? Isn't that malignant narcissism?”
Heinz Kohut's colleague and his collaborator Ernest Wolf (1988) once said something like this, “Religious people will forgive anyone practically anything except their legitimate need to be seen and recognized.” Kohut tried to help us understand the universally human need to be seen and recognized as significant, worthwhile, and meaningful. His work has helped us understand and have more empathy with this universal and fundamental human need.
What does this mean for us? My friends, I think we need to face how difficult it is for us to become empathic with other spiritual traditions and accept their legitimate needs for recognition and affirmation, their needs for being seen and given significant respect. Why? Kohut said that when we were children, we had not yet developed what he called “the cohesive self,” or what we would call a self-system that is integrated and stable. What we needed from others he called “mirroring.” We need to be seen. We need to be recognized and affirmed. You and I in our spiritual traditions would say we need to be blessed. We long for an experience of blessing.4
Kohut said that if we did not get enough of this affirmation and recognition as children, our self-systems would be unstable, like a building without any reinforced steel in it. Our infantile grandiosity is not adequately regulated and leaves us hypersensitive. So when the disappointments of life, which always come, hit us, if we have not had adequate nurture and blessing from the significant others in our life, then the house of our self will fall down. Lack of mature self-esteem throws us back into compensatory infantile grandiosity with its characteristic tendency to rage, hate, envy, and violence. Our capacity to function appropriately disappears as our personality fragments. Once the house of our self-system has fallen down, the result is jealousy, envy, and hate, and a willingness to join in malignant tribalism, violence, and genocide. We must understand that rage is always an indication of the failure of a human self. Rage is never the proper solution to any problem. Mature anger seeks cooperative solutions. Rage simply seeks the destruction of the other.
Kohut put two words together to help us understand how important this was, the word self and the word object. He said we have “selfobject relationships” with each other. We have selfobject relationships with other religions. What does this mean? It means that if you, my selfobject, my Jewish selfobject, my Christian selfobject, my Sikh selfobject, my Muslim selfobject, my Hindu selfobject, and so on—if when I look into your eyes I do not see any recognition or blessing, then I tend to go back immediately to the traumas and the curses of my childhood. Not to the blessings, but to the curses, and I begin to fragment and feel rageful toward you and your religion or tribe.
From the traditional indigenous cultures you have all heard of the evil eye. When we fail to get proper recognition, we tend to go back to the experiences of the evil eye that we all had in childhood, and we feel the anxiety and the fear, the insecurity, and the danger that we experienced then.
To sum up Kohut, what is the result of selfobject failures and disappointments? My whole self-system as a human being, my capacity to maintain a nonpsychotic state, is threatened. I fear that I am becoming disorganized. My anxiety begins to peak, and my paranoia begins to heighten. I begin to act in ways that see you as my enemy, and I begin to treat you in ways that will certainly tempt you to become my enemy. In Jungian analysis we call this phenomenon “shadow projection.” It is a major factor fueling the contagion of hatred and violence.
So from Kohut's psychoanalytic point of view, jealousy, envy, hate, and violence result as by-products of experiencing an inadequate selfobject milieu or developmental environment of significant others, whether in America, India, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe. Such an inadequate developmental environment interferes with our need to be seen, recognized, and respected, our need for support in the task of developing the golden flower of a mature human being. Jealousy, envy, and hate result from an environment that fails to recognize that there can be no mature psychological or spiritual selfhood without the community, the great community that gardens selfhood and seeks to be a gardener of human selfhood and maturation for everyone on earth.
What does that mean? Rage always results from injuries to the maturation of the self sustained in a non-nurturant environment. Human experiences of neglect and resulting chaos always breed rage, and rage always results in more chaos. That is why human mythologies from all over our world link chaos with hatred and consider it fundamental to the nature of human evil.
We know that all human tribal traditions and all the great traditions of religious and spiritual communities have seen these realities of good and evil, and they have all spoken about them within the context of their own communities. In 1893, however, psychological science had not yet developed enough for us to see how clearly this is not just a Christian problem, or a Muslim problem, or a Buddhist problem. Now we can see that the things these traditions have long noted are not just local problems but constitute a universal human problem, a specieswide problem that requires us to work together at this World Parliament of Religions with every resource from each other that we can find.
We need to raise these questions to each religious and spiritual tradition: What does your tradition have to teach us all about the development of empathy for others, for the stranger, for those without adequate nurture and blessing? We must remember that without empathy you get rage, and then violence. What does your tradition have to teach us about discerning and confronting human arrogance and grandiosity? What does your tradition have to teach us all about mutual respect, and how we can facilitate it? What does your tradition have to teach us about the facilitation of a nurturing, affirming, supportive community? Using the word from our own spiritual traditions, what does your tradition have to teach us about facilitating a community that blesses? What is it that your faith can teach us about an optimum human, selfobject milieu for the human community? These are the kinds of questions that bring us together at this symposium.
We can look at the New York Times today and see how poorly we are doing at helping human beings feel the kind of self-esteem they would need in order to put away their weapons and start rebuilding a habitat for humanity and our friends from other species all over the world.
Is there hope? I want to get back to the tradition of Carl Jung (1875–1961) before I close. The great Jungian psychoanalyst in England that I admire, Anthony Stevens, recently wrote a book called The Two Million-Year-Old Self (1993), in which he wrote about the increasing scientific evidence that we have a blueprint within us to love and cooperate with each other, part of our birthright that comes with being a human b
eing. It does not automatically build anything by itself, however, but requires a nurturing community to evoke that potential and unfold it into the golden flower of the human personality.
Carl Jung long ago affirmed the collective unconscious that unites all of us before we are Christian, before we are Jewish, before we are Sikh or Hindu or Muslim. It is deep in our DNA, with more than two million years of wisdom built into it that we should to try to nurture and evoke.
Jung also thought the human DNA had within it the capacity to allow us to experience what he called the “transcendent function.” When we run into a situation of opposition, where there seem to be conflicts and opposites, the “transcendent function” within us wants to aid us in overcoming the obstacles and bridging the conflicts. That is biological. There is something in us that wants to make a bridge and create solutions and relationships. Even when we do not have the kind of relationships with each other that we need in order to nurture solutions and enact them effectively, the “transcendent function” is still in there seeking expression. There is something in us as humans that longs for this bridging and the peace and reconciliation it brings.
So, is there hope? I believe this human “transcendent function” is functioning in Chicago here today, and that the human “transcendent function” in you is working, and we soon will hear what the great traditions have to say about the divine ground and presence in this human possibility.
Today we can see the innate potential of this two-million-year-old self as a priceless resource. If we do our work together in this symposium and in the rest of this Parliament of World Religions, we can take encouragement from each other, and learn how to deal with the jealousy that we have because “all of you are loving each other and I may be left out.” We might move beyond envy to a celebration of our mutual radiance. Then this conference may mark not the beginning of the end for our species, but the end of the beginning.