 Tonight, we will be doing some thinking about discerning, particularly in this area of understanding evil in the context of pathological narcissism, as you remember from my first presentation. I said that one of the contributions of Scott Peck has been to talk about the way in which pathological narcissism is related to what we know in theological reflections as evil. I also said to you that I think it's important for us to be very clear that the way in which he has divided this spectrum of personality issues and problems is problematic in which he has all of the personality disorders, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and difficulties, neurotic, and so forth. And then in one group of people who are very ill, he has decided to call those people evil, the ones that have extremely severe narcissistic pathology. I said to you that I think that is really misleading, and it misses the way in which all of us have to some degree some difficulties in terms of pathological narcissism. I do a lot of teaching on this type of area in my teaching at Chicago Theological Seminary. One course that I've been teaching a long time is a course called Psychopathology and Theological Perspective. I always use Scott Peck's People of the Lie as a bad example of how to do this. And what I suggest, and here again we've got 30 or more hours of material, which we're going to go over very fast. What I do is to take the diagnostic and statistical manual of the American Psychiatric Association, and I have my students take a syndrome and do a theological analysis of that syndrome looking for the particular way in which they might understand each syndrome to reflect what we might call in some way the demonic or evil or pathological narcissism in some form. It's very clear that when you understand the way in which narcissistic wounding is an important part in the difficulties of human beings and that you get to the point that you can see how everything from obsessive compulsive or compulsive personality disorders to histrionic personality disorders right across the board, you can, if you understand enough about narcissistic pathology, you can see the way in which that syndrome also reflects this wounding and this difficulty or we might say it manifests evil in this way. So in other words, rather than making a handful of very troubled people carry the brunt of being evil, it's kind of like more like what we might say about sin. You don't ask, are you a sinner? You ask, how am I a sinner? And you try to get some sense about how your life has been compromised in some way by the forces of evil or the demonic. In the context of this lecture tonight, I just wanted to start out by saying that I was particularly appreciative of the way in which John Doerle characterized spirituality, the nature of spirituality and particularly his emphasis on the importance of spirituality in accessing the forces of life, accessing the energies of life so that life might be lived with joy and be lived with fullness because that is precisely the kind of area we get into when we examine what narcissistic pathology is really like. And what I'd like to do tonight is to talk with you about pathological narcissism, give you some of the understanding of how wounding in one's narcissism happens, some of the marks of that, some of the current theories about how that is treated. And I'd like to relate it then to some of the things that I think that Jungian psychology offers us in terms of understanding the varieties of expression that this kind of wounding can take. And so when we speak of discerning the way in which pathological narcissism or the expression of evil and psychological forms affects us, we will take a look at the different ways which it can be understood to afflict us and the way in which Jungian psychology helps us understand that. Let me start out by having us reflect a little bit on the mythology of Satan. Together, we're doing a psychological reflection on evil now. And I recommended that you look at those books by Jeffrey Burton Russell on the history of Satan, and they have a number here in the bookstore. One of the interesting things that becomes clear from Jeffrey Burton Russell's research is that the way in which Satan is talked about in mythology and in history makes him sound like someone that we would talk about today as a person with a with a severe narcissistic personality disorder. Some of the things that are emphasized about Satan and some of the legends are that Satan is very envious of the place that God holds and that he feels that his beauty is not being seen and appreciated. And one of the stories has him waiting until God leaves the room and going up and sitting down on God's throne and having his particular group of angels, this is before they leave, you know, have this particular group of angels come around and see how he looks sitting on the throne. And he says something to the effect of, I think my beauty is even more outstanding than that of God. And they all agree. And one of the stories that Jeffrey Burton Russell tells is the chagrin and shame when God walks back in the room and confronts him about this. It's very interesting that this idea of Satan as being someone who wants to be seen and wants to be celebrated and wants to be noticed and wants to be seen as beautiful is a theme which is repeated throughout a lot of mythology about Satan. And one of the reasons why people think that Satan represents a good that needs to be integrated is that Satan in some ways seems to represent our exhibitionistic self, the part that wants to have a little glory. You know, you've heard of Sola deo gloria, you know, to God alone be the glory. Well, the picture of Satan is that he can say, well, why not a little bit for me? Why not a little glory for me? And when we get into a look at narcissistic development in a moment, you will see why this image of Satan as somebody who is longing to be seen, longing to be noticed, longing to have just a little bit of that glory or what you and I glory is a word that somehow parallels what we might call numerosity. You know, when we speak of archetypal energies, when we speak of numerosity, that special magical energy that the contact with the archetypal self gives us, it gives you a little sense of glory. You shine a little bit like gold or like diamonds. And so as we look at narcissistic development, we will see that it's a very normal thing for a person to need to develop a capacity to accept being seen, to accept being celebrated, to accept their own drive toward exhibitionism. And when we get into difficulties in our development on the what is known as the narcissistic line of development, we get to where we have problems about this. We might say we have Satan's problem about this. And so what I'd like to start with tonight is talking to you a little bit about some of the current understanding of narcissistic development, what we mean by that in psychoanalysis today and how that differs from what it used to be thought about. And then talk a little bit about the current understanding of what is needed to heal difficulties with narcissistic development, so that we can get some sense about the geography that we're operating in here in the psyche. So let me start a little bit about what we know today about narcissistic development. You know, in the history of the church, the idea that you might be narcissistic was considered sort of like egocentrism, and was to be a bad thing. That is to say, this is where we got our idea that that being selfless was good. And the idea that you really should be humble by which you would mean you would not want to put yourself forward. You would not want to toot your own horn, so to speak. You would not want to to show yourself as being too enthusiastic about yourself. That would not be humble. In current theory, however, and the feminists have picked up on this quite a lot, in current theory, narcissism is not seen to be a negative thing in itself at all. That is to say, they have developed an idea that there is such a thing as healthy narcissism. In other words, we need to make a distinction between healthy narcissism and pathological narcissism. Now, healthy narcissism is something that takes a lot of work to develop in the psyche. The school of thought that I want to recommend to you to look at is the school of Heinz Kohut, I've mentioned it to you before, H-E-I-N-Z Kohut. And the name of this school of thought is self-psychology. In Kohut's work, it is emphasized that the child comes into the world with a grandiosity which is normal and natural. And this grandiosity is a healthy grandiosity for the infant. And what it needs is to be seen by the parents. It needs to be welcomed by the parents. We Jungians would talk about this somewhere in the neighborhood of the archetype of the divine child. That is to say that when the child comes into the world, what it needs is to be seen and admired and adored. And the technical word is mirrored. That the child needs to be mirrored. It needs to be seen and all eyes need to be on it. If there needs to be no rejection of its little claim to being a wonderful little god. And the task of the adults in its environment are to provide that adoration. You can think it's almost like a crash scene. You know, everybody gathers around. What you're supposed to do is you bring the sheep in, the goats and the camels. And everybody adores the child. And this is normal. See this is supposed to happen according to Kohut. And as the child develops, it is very important for the parents to provide this kind of excited enthusiastic blessing eye so that when the child is feeling wonderful, the child will be met by an attuned response which will say, yeah, you are pretty wonderful, aren't you? It's like one little boy that was a neighbor of mine one time. He was in visiting. He and his dad were in visiting with me. And he came in and he said, dad, he interrupted his dad. He said, dad, I really feel good today. Yeah, yeah. I feel so good that I think that I can have a BM so big that it will go down the Mississippi River and it will knock down all the bridges all the way to the ocean. And my friend said, wow. Which was what the Kohutians would say. That was a very attuned response. Instead of saying, get out of here. You know, he said, wow, you must really feel great today. Yeah, dad. Now, what happens is that optimally, you know, I mean that's supposed to happen optimally. The parent is supposed to be attuned and in touch and notice this and give the gleam in the eye to that divine child and that little child. And according to the Kohutian theory, if the parents do that, then the child will be able to accept this wonderfulness. And when he falls down or stubs his toe or something doesn't work quite right and he is upset, the parent because the parent is attuned will pick them up restore the sense of self and gradually the child will integrate that wonderfulness that that godlike wonderfulness into a sense of self esteem, a nice normal sense of self esteem that if the parent works with the child is as they come down from this great throne of godness and the parent doesn't let the child be unduly traumatized in the encounter with life, that gradually that that that god claim will gradually be, here's the technical word, transmuted and internalized. And what that simply means is that gradually that child will increase in self esteem, increase increasingly have a sense of self in the face of the challenges of life experiences. And whenever disappointments come, the sense of self will be so strong that the person the child will not the child and later adult will not get depressed too easily, not not become enraged too easily, but will be able to handle the difficulties of life without losing a sense of self. And it's a gradual process. They talk about here's another technical word. And you parents, you've done this millions of times, but they talk about micro structuralization. And all by that, that means that that every time he stops his toe, you comfort. And every time they says, look how wonderful I am, they're seen. And you hope that they're seen well enough. And that there's enough parental enthusiasm and enough parental celebration, I call it parental blessing, so that that child gradually comes down off of the God claim into the human realm with a healthy sense of self esteem. Now, that's the way it's supposed to happen. But the problem is that a lot of the time, the person or persons who are supposed to be there paying attention or what, distracted, busy, tired, discouraged, preoccupied, drunk, whatever. Now, Colette says, you know, a child doesn't have to have this perfect mirroring, this good mirroring. If there's somebody in the environment that the child can idealize with and snuggle up to, that the child can can see is wonderful. So in other words, if you can either see the child is wonderful or you can be adequate enough for the child to see you as wonderful, and let the child come up and be close to you and share in your wonderfulness. So, Colette says you can the child can get enough sense of being good, either by being mirrored adequately or by you being capable of being admired. Well, you know, Dad may be capable of being admired, but he may not be there. See, he may be gone or Dad may be abusive. If Dad is abusive, it ruins the child's ability to admire Dad. So, in other words, there are things that happen in the life of early childhood that keep this healthy sense of wonderfulness from developing and gradually coming down to human size. Now, what happens if the child either is not mirrored enough? That is, if the child does not get enough attuned, careful attention in celebration, or there isn't somebody in the environment for the child to admire and snuggle up to. Does this mean that this grandiosity that the child comes into the world with goes away? Not according to Kohut. According to Kohut in the self-psychologist, the grandiosity remains present, but gets this in its primitive form. You get that? Now, stay with that a minute. I want you to think about it because it's important for understanding this stuff. The child has this normal God claim. I'm just a little wonderful package of joy. And it's natural. Normal, healthy, needs to be met with this welcoming crash. If it is, that stuff transforms gradually and the child comes down off the throne to join the human race with healthy self-esteem. If it doesn't happen, and there's no one to idealize and merge with adequately, then the path, the infantile grandiosity does not go away. It stays primitive. What happens to it then? Well, various things can happen to it, which is what we want to talk about tonight. What happens to it is that it remains the grandiose self-organization in the psyche, or sometimes called the grandiose exhibitionistic self-organization. It remains an entity in the psyche. It is not transformed. It remains loaded with numinous energy, powerful energy, powerful claims. With some persons who we call, technically, narcissistic personality disorders, this numinous, powerful, grandiose self-organization takes over the conscious ego most of the time. This is the diagnostic and statistical manuals category called the narcissistic personality disorder. This is the person that acts as if they think either their God's gift to the world or their God giving a gift to the world. It is the person who believes that you exist to serve his or her whim. It is a person who makes all sorts of claims on others without feeling any need to reciprocate. It is the person with a compulsive need to be adored uncritically, uncritically. Now, this is the case, now stay with me on this, this is the case when that grandiose self-organization has not been transformed, it has remained primitive, and in this person it stays in control of the ego of the person. But that's only one way that this works. It also works another way. It can remain intensely present, but because of the parental environments not being welcoming to it, it is split off from consciousness. In other words, just because you don't think your God's gift to the world consciously, it does not mean you do not have this grandiose exhibitionistic self-organization rattling around in there in your psyche. What other forms can it take? Well, one form that it takes is chronic depression in a person. That is to say, the person is not aware at all of having any sense of Godlike claims or feeling Godlike. What you do notice, however, is that the individual feels himself or herself to be the object of perfectionistic attacks in their own thoughts. You see? Whatever they do, they may say, this is not good enough. I shouldn't be here, I am unworthy. Every time they have a creative project to do, they may start it and tear it up. Why? Not because the ego really feels this, but because behind the ego's consciousness, the grandiose self-organization in this primitive Godlike way is attacking every effort of the human ego. And there are many, many other forms that this takes. In other words, the important thing to get is that when the child has not been helped to come down from the high chair, this organization remains according to the self-psychologist. We'll get to the Jungian view of this in a little bit. But this organization remains intact. It either possesses the ego, in which case you have the narcissistic personality disorder, or it remains out of the ego's consciousness and influences the personality and life experience of the person from, so to speak, behind the scenes. And what I would like us to think together a little bit about is some of the ways in which this manifests, especially the one that's behind the scenes. How does this manifest? Well, it manifests in a number of ways. I have mentioned depression, chronic depression. Another way it manifests itself is in chronic, powerful, compulsive envy of other people. In other words, if you find yourself having a lot of struggles with the problem of envying other people, this is one expression of this grandiose self-organization within the psyche, not being accessible to your conscious mind, but creating in you envy attacks on other people. What in effect we're doing is we project the great self out there on others and envy it, as if we don't have connection with it. In other words, if we don't have connection with our own grandiosity, we do not have self-esteem. We don't have connection with our own grandiosity. We feel like we are nothing, and that makes everyone else around us look as if they have the good and we do not. We can't get to it. There is another important group of behaviors that we normally do not associate with this pathological narcissism, but which also manifests the presence near the ego of this grandiose self-organization, and that is the behaviors that we know as compulsive behaviors. In other words, according to the point of view of self-psychology, all addictive behaviors are an expression of the energy, the grandiose energies coming off of this grandiose self-organization and the individual ego or self-structure of the individual not being able to integrate this. The compulsive behaviors are in effect the psyche's struggle, you might even say it or I might even say attempts to ritualize, attempts to come up with rituals to contain this enormous God energy in the psyche to try to keep it under control in some way. In other words, compulsive behaviors are equally manifestations of this pathological infantile grandiosity. It's very important to see in this case that you cannot in any simplistic way moralize or blame this individual for the struggle that they're in. Can you see that? This is not their fault. They cannot be blamed for this at all. The compulsive behaviors that they engage in whether they're like me and they tend to be a workaholic or whether they have eating disorders or whether they have some form of addictive compulsive behavior. According to this self-psychology, this is all manifestation of a struggle with an unconscious grandiose self-organization which is not being adequately related to by the individual ego or conscious mind. It's very important, yes? Yes, it would. Now we need to get a little sense. I'd like for you to think about this in the context of trying to become much more aware of certain types of behaviors that we all experience. That is to say, here is the assumption that I want you to entertain tonight. I want you to entertain the assumption that all of us had less than perfect childhoods. Right? And I want you to entertain the possibility that we didn't have enough camels and sheep standing around and admiring us at various times. And it's just possible that in every one of us in this room there remains some rather primitive aspects of this childhood grandiosity still around. Now if it is, there will be little signs of it. And I'd like to take just a little bit of time right now for us to work together on what some little clues may be that you may notice. Well, let's start. The self-psychologists are really wonderful in being empathic to people's struggle with their grandiosity. And what I love about the way they do this, they are not moralistic about this. They don't moralize at people about their struggle with their child, their infantile grandiosity. They are capable of being a good example for us Christians on this issue. There are a lot of these little signs. One, let's just go through a list. I'm going to give you a list of marks of recognizing this residual, untransformed, the way they talk about it. We'll talk to Jungian about it in a minute. But they talk about untransformed, untransmuted, primitive grandiosity that remains influencing you. Depreciation tendencies. That is, if you notice yourself spending a lot of energy depreciating yourself or other people, it's a dead giveaway. Now, people normally think that that is my eye. That's Robert, criticizing Robert. According to the self-psychologist, when Robert says to Robert, oh, you're never going to amount to anything. That's not the true self of Robert speaking to Robert. According to the self-psychologist, that is a voice coming off of the grandiosity. The grandiose self-organization in effect has a voice in my psyche. And it says to me, and conceivably, that was a lousy book that you published. Or you should have published two books, ten books, a hundred books. They all should have been better. You notice that split infinitive. Whatever. You put your own version of this. One of the things I like to do with groups of people is to have them write down these thoughts that they have about themselves. I will never blank. Or, you know, you're never going to ever learn so and so. You know, when you think fill in the blank with your own thoughts. According to self-psychology, these things are normally coming off of the grandiose self-organization. The punitive self-rejecting, discouraging thoughts are normally coming off of that. So anytime you notice depreciation of self or others, if there's a lot of energy going into depreciating other people, it's probably coming off of a primitive organization of the grandiosity. Why do you say that? Because if you've got your grandiosity in harness, according to the self-psychologist, you're spending it in creation. You're doing something useful with it. It's going into productivity. You don't have time to be criticizing other people. You're too busy doing something useful. So that's one form. We've talked about eating disorders. If you have any problem with eating disorders, overeating or bulimic kinds of patterns, this would be understood by self-psychologists as a direct expression of the struggle that you are have dealing with this thing in your psyche that has not been digested in effect. In other words, when you see someone struggling with a diet, you have right before you there a person that's struggling with the appetite of a giant within. It's not the true self of that individual that's that hungry all the time. It's the grandiose self-organization. Because see, the grandiose self-organization within is insatiable. You can't feed it enough. You can't feed it enough food. You can't feed it enough booze. You can't feed it enough drugs. You can't give it enough sex. So behind all the compulsive behaviors, the self-psychologists see see that organization insomnia. The self-psychologists see sleep difficulties as often directly related to this grandiose organization. And it can be related in this way. There are a number of things that happen to you when this thing is when the grandiose self-organization within is not adequately transformed and integrated. It tends to over-stimulate you. I think about this. It tends, when you're in touch with it, it tends to over-stimulate you. Insomnia, the self-psychologist would say is a mark of the fact that that the grandiose self-organization is getting you revved up too much. And you have not learned ways to calm yourself and to soothe yourself. Because this thing is too big. It's like I like to say to people that are trying to understand this. It's like a big excited Saint Bernard that smells the food and he starts lunging against the door. And so what you've got to do is try to find some way to calm him down. And a lot of people drink too much at night because they're so over-stimulated. They can't get down. They can't calm down so they can go to sleep. A lot of people in this country is full of valium junkies. People are taking enormous amounts of valium to cope with their unintegrated grandiose self-organization. But there are other ways in which this thing manifests besides over-stimulation. Now you can think of the various ways in which you may manifest types of over-stimulation of this thing within. But there's another thing that we see according to the self-psychologist and that is called defending against grandiosity. Now what forms does that take? For example, a person with extremely low self-esteem who does not feel that he or she is very important. Often the self-psychologist will say that person is defending desperately against the presence of the grandiosity. Why? Because there is a fear in the psyche that if they let themselves know anything about themselves being good or okay, this thing would roll in and take over. In other words, according to the self-psychologist, there is a fear of psychosis. When you see someone who is very meek and self-effacing, I have no self-esteem. Don't say anything good about me. Don't compliment me. For God's sake, don't notice me. According to the self-psychologist, that's very often a person, not a person who has no grandiosity within. But that's a person who's hold against it is so tenuous that if you pay too much attention to them, they begin to have enormous anxiety peaks. They start having enormous anxiety state. You may have noticed that some people you will try to compliment and they will push it away. They do not want to hear it at all. According to the self-psychology, these would be persons who have enormous struggle with this grandiose self-organization and you are actually threatening the structural integrity of their self by complimenting them. You see this? Now this has, you can imagine, this has enormous significance for spiritual direction because if you have such a person you're working with or you're trying to help and you are so eager to get them feeling better about themselves and so you start trying to say positive things about them. You start trying to build them up. You start trying to really give them good experiences that will make them not feel so bad. If you do not have some sense of the dynamics of this, you may be causing them enormous peaking in their anxiety state because they cannot stand you feeling good about them. One of the things that you as a spiritual director or a helping person once you understand this type of thing, you will know that you must be careful about overstimulating this grandiosity until the person can gain gradually greater and greater a sense of themselves, their own self structure so they can stand it. Now this is interesting in the light of our discussion about doing something with Satan. That is to say the redemption of that element, if that's an element in the psyche, that exhibitionistic part can't be fast. You've got to be, you've got to let that capacity to be seen, to be seen as beautiful grow very slowly. It can't be fast or it threatens the person with the disintegration of their self structure. Now this helps us to understand a lot of behaviors which are puzzling to us. A lot of creative personalities you may have noticed self-destruct when they get successful. You may have noticed successful actors, successful artists, successful musicians who either commit suicide or drink themselves to death or die young with drug overdoses. According to the self-psychologist this happens when people get too much attention, the success overstimulates them, the grandiose self-organization begins to threaten the integrity of their self and they start to medicate it or they start to act out which gets us to another form of expression of this difficulty. It is the concept that you've heard many times possibly acting out. When we say someone is acting out what do we mean? A lot of bizarre antisocial behaviors for one thing, violent behaviors, it often includes some sort of relatively bizarre interpersonal behaviors often including violence or bizarre sexual behaviors or other kinds of acting out conflicts that can't be understood in terms of the person's own grasp of themselves. But according to the self-psychologist people act out when they cannot stand the pressure of the grandiose self-organization anymore. Give you an example. If someone is struggling with a drug addiction and they are getting a handle on it and they're being able to function fairly well, if there is a disturbance in their relationships this will often lead to the grandiose self-organization becoming destabilizing again for them. And this is the time, according to the self-psychologist, that the individual will go back for more drugs. If you're working from this point of view with an alcoholic the alcoholic will not fall off the wagon until there is something that causes a disturbance which causes the grandiose self-organization again to destabilize the ego or what they call the self-structure of the individual. So the difficulty takes many forms. The ones that you and I see the most are the ones that we've talked about. Intense envy, depressive states, heightened anxiety, insomnia, compulsive behavior, what we know as manic phases, sleeplessness, that sort of thing. According to the self-psychologist, the integrity of the human ego of the person, because the grandiosity was never integrated and built up in the self-esteem and self-structure the person is very very subject to splitting behaviors of all kinds. Often your so-called multiple personalities will be individuals for whom the grandiose self-organization is so powerful that they cannot maintain the structural integrity of oneself. And we'll see in a moment when we turn to the Jungian way of thinking about this the way in which from a Jungian point of view we split into archetypal configurations at these times. That is to say when the grandiose self-organization is still primitive and raw we will tend to become archetypes not persons. Any self-soothing kinds of compulsive rituals in some way that we might do there are people that that can't do anything but come home and read at night. They sit there and read. Other people can't read because of the overstimulation. One of the things that we do in self-psychological treatment of persons is to help them recognize when their grandiosity is becoming overwhelming. You begin to help the person tell when they're getting to the point that they're about to come apart. Let me just say a word about their view of how this is healed the self-psychologist view of how this is healed. Very simply the person gets into therapy with an analyst who understands this business. The analyst tries to provide for the individual a mirroring of this grandiosity, an attunement to the grandiosity, a non-attack on it. You try to welcome the awareness of this grandiosity into the consulting room. Very interesting. The therapist tries to help the person get in touch with an awareness of these grandiose feelings. In other words it's not good for them to stay out of awareness because if they're out of awareness you can't do much about them. So the therapy proceeds in trying to help the individual become more aware of this grandiosity and a finding ways to be more accepting of it and to be able to deal with it in constructive ways. To get the energy, now get this, this sounds familiar to Jungians doesn't it, there is energy in that grandiosity. There is energy for life. This is what I was thinking about when John was talking about the energy for life. There is energy for living in that grandiose self organization and because of the failures in parenting that person has never been able to plug in to that grandiosity in an adequate way and to have that grandiosity fuel their life with zest and vitality and energy toward actual human endeavors, toward realizable human ambition and that sort of thing. And so what the self-psychology therapy tries to accomplish is helping the individual not to feel bad about their grandiosity. That's not the idea at all. It's really kind of amusing. You try to help the person feel good about their grandiose fantasies. Yes, yes one particular example that I thought was very interesting. After a long time in therapy with a self-psychologist, this one woman who was 52 finally felt accepted enough and mirrored enough to bring out her fantasy. Her fantasy was that she wanted to be a rock star. 52 she wants to be a jenis jumpin. Now it took her a long time to get to where she could admit this to the therapist. And so what their therapy attempted to do was to have her stop feeling so much shame about that fantasy. Think about the Batman movie and all that stuff in this light. All these hidden away superheroes, Batman, Superman. But to help her feel good about her fantasy about wanting to be a rock star. And what she started to do is figure out ways that she can bring some of the energies off of that jenis jumpin into the workplace. So she went to work and gradually she announced to her co-workers, look out now. I'm coming down here in a new way. In other words, she began to bring in a lot more of her grandiose exhibitionistic energy into her personality and expressing it at work. And you know the interesting thing is people usually enjoy you a lot more if you're a little bit in touch with your grandiosity. If you're not in touch with it, you're kind of boring. So the idea is to help individuals plug into that, not feel shame about it, but to plug into that and to learn to do now what they didn't learn to do as a child, learn to feel okay about this grandiose fantasy, and to gradually try to find ways to embody this. Now let's turn to look at a way, a Jungian way of thinking about this very same business. Now again we talked a little bit about the importance of the relationship between the ego and the archetypal self. And we talk about how Jungian's eddinger in particular has helped us talk about the need for the formation of the ego self-axis. Now you should be able to think about what a Jungian would say about some of the things we've been talking about. That is to say the archetypal self carries that grandiose energy that we've been talking about. You see the archetypal self like the grandiose self-organization according to the self-psychologist is full of fuel, but you can get in trouble with the archetypal self just as you can get in trouble with the grandiose self-organization. You can either be too close to it in the sense of you can become identified with it like the narcissistic personality disorder, you could say that the narcissistic personality disorder is identified with it, or you can be in terms of your ego out of touch with it consciously. Now what we ought to be able to see however is just because the ego does not know itself to be in touch with the archetypal self it doesn't mean it isn't. In other words when you're not plugged in adequately to your archetypal self it doesn't mean that your archetypal self is not in there. What is going on? Usually the archetypal self is in your shadow much more. The archetypal energies are in your shadow and you will normally project those things. You will either project them onto someone else or you will act them out in some way unconsciously. We can talk about manic depression as an individual who sometimes will get too much of a dose of archetypal energy and then also laid away and get too little of it accessible to the ego. Very similar to the way the psychoanalytic self-psychologist talked about the energies of the grandiosity. But one of the things that I think is important for us to see about the contribution of Jungian thought is that from the Jungian point of view you can see that the human personality is very very creative about ways of being grandiose. You can be grandiose in a lot of different ways not just one. You don't just have the narcissistic personality disorder if you think about this from a Jungian point of view. You can be grandiose and be acting out in any one of a number of configurations and what I want to do with you before we stop and discuss I want us to go through some of the different configurations in which the infantile grandiosity you might say can be expressed in different archetypal configurations in different psyches and let's go through them now and then we will discuss all this stuff. What they talk about is the narcissistic personality disorder the one we talked about about the person that thinks they're God's gift to the world is in my view an example of an individual who is experiencing an archetypal inflation in the mode of the king or the queen it's very interesting to think about the narcissistic personality disorder as sort of a boy king sitting on his high chair expecting everybody to adore him expecting everybody to mirror him expecting everybody to bless him for himself to become the center of the world the the narcissistic personality disorder is said to be incapable of love and in this case you would say that the individual expects the energies to come toward him not to go out he's not to be giving out yet attention normally he's saying that he's observed this in a case that he's that he's worked with if the individual has been you know you can get to be a narcissistic personality disorder and kind of think you're the boy king or the boy the girl queen in a lot of ways you can be pampered see pampering will do it because one of the important things that these people uh that work with us talk about is that you have to be let down from your little high chair thrones gradually if they knock you off your high chair thrown by hitting and beating you up as a child it doesn't it doesn't transform this stuff it doesn't integrate as self-esteem you have to be let down gradually and uh when they don't let you down gradually and they uh knock you down you can continue to be this type of personality or if you are so wonderful to your parents that they never let you think you're anything but a little god then you haven't learned from your parents that you're not a little god you haven't learned it in incremental doses so if you've been extremely pampered by a doting parent you have had that grandiosity not gradually transformed into self-esteem it has remained raw you're still a little god on the high chair or goddess on the high chair so this is the one that they know most about in terms of the literature you see this this form of the narcissistic personality disorder most clearly but it can also be expressed if the warrior archetypal pattern is loaded with archetypal energy and in that case it doesn't come out as a little lord fontleroy on his high chair how would you suggest that an inflated warrior the grandiosity coming out in the form of the warrior would express itself like ramble in violence the violent personality who is go who goes into rages a lot and who acts out violently a lot uh you see the the boy warrior or the girl warrior sometimes i've helped i've worked with a number of people who've been battered by their wives he says uh couldn't that also be people who get fanatical about causes and that would be absolutely an expression of that uh you can talk about the way in which the the messianic warrior comes out in this uh when a person gets into some particular uh social movement or social cause and it takes the one of the interesting things about it you can always tell when it's an inflation because it's so one sided in other words that consumes the individual's life and this is one of the things another form it takes that's not as bizarre as that the one i'm more subject to is workaholism see the obsessive compulsive personality is in many ways just as inflated as the narcissistic personality disorder it's just that the obsessive compulsive the in the obsessive compulsive it's going into the warrior configuration see the warrior is into working carrying out the mission and nothing is important but the mission the family is not important feelings are not important the family the children are not important nothing is important except the mission when you see people that are into professional careers uh to the exclusion of all relationships you see an inflation and what i would consider a grandiose pathologically infantile inflation in the warrior configuration uh this is a very common one among uh professionals particularly among the you know yuppies today i mean you'll see a lot of them who get totally fixated upon this and somehow don't understand what's happening when they cannot get shifting any gears into building a family for example there seems to be no energy for having a family life and no energy for any kind of intensive committed relationships now what about a grandiose inflation in the magician or the priest or priestess how would that manifest itself anybody take a stab at it could be a pseudo messiah although messiahs tend to be more activist they tend to be more kind of warrior kings but uh uh there are some aspect the the the religious nowhere the one who has the religious message would be an example of that i think that may be what you're getting at other other examples of that yes you could go see when you're inflated when you're inflated in a grandiose way in in the magician you want to know everything and you don't want to do anything see you want to know everything before you do anything and this is like you know you see this a lot in us professors because you know if there's any kind of crisis going on in society or anything you know somebody gets hit by a car we will have a commission to study it we won't call an ambulance we'll study it there's something can be learned by this you know it's like it's like what we do in chicago we got all these homeless people you know we got we got people in terrible straits but by academic colleagues we're in the studying it and it's a magus inflation that's one form it takes what are some other forms that a magus inflation will take back here when the therapist or counselor gets into a power trip with the patient and and and is locked into the counselor's own agenda rather than being empathic with the person they're working with uh this is one that the self psychologists talk about a lot that is to say just because you think you know what the the patient feels doesn't mean you do and they they put a great deal of of emphasis on empathy trying to feel your way into the to the actual states feeling states of the individual if you're really into a power trip as a therapist in this magus inflation you won't do that but there are other things that you talk tell me more about therapists here in this this is a this is one that we therapists major in we therapists really get inflated in the magician thing a lot what are some other expressions of that schizoid absolutely that is to say that that if you're locked into this in an inflation you may not look at all arrogant to somebody looking at you but if you are if you are grandiose in the magician form you will pull out of relationships emotionally that's what he means by schizoid you will not be experiencing much energy in your feeling function with individuals you will get you you will get more into that knowing business you see others yes supermom or super dad i think supermom and super dad more more come in this in this one the person who is locked into mothering and can't do anything but mother oh i see i see having all the answers anybody that anybody that is into just always having all the answers has got a lot of this there's no question about it but i'm thinking when you've got somebody that if it moves they mother it you know they mother the husband they mother the kids they mother the car you know they're in this one and of course with the warrior if it moves they fight it we won't talk about this one yet oh yes let's do now let's get to the inflated the grandiose lover what are some of the forms that this takes when the grandia okay promiscuity is one and that's the one we talked about the other day in terms so many men or women in so little time there's never enough opportunities to engage in seduction or sexual activity that's one but there are other expressions of grandiosity in the lover what are some of the other expressions of the pathological grandiosity as it manifests in this configuration never enough relationships that's kind of a form of promiscuity there are a lot of people who you know they they develop a lot of of intimate relationships and they're very they're very quick to tell you that that they're not genital relationships but i mean they're very faithful to their spouse it's just that they have all of these intimate relationships all over the country and they get very upset when the spouse is jealous uh this this constant seeking out new exciting relations this is Aphrodite this is an expression of the Aphrodite energy the thing about you read bejean boland's book on Aphrodite see Aphrodite really loves every man she sees she really loves him just that's when another one comes along he's beautiful too and she loves him she just she just sees all this beauty but what are some other expressions of inflation or grandiosity in the lover configuration yes now that would be he says the what about the sexual abuse appliance or patience i would think that that could be argued to be an expression of this coming blasting through the shadow side of the therapist a lot of therapists you know don't tend to their personal lives enough in fact uh some of the people they've written about therapists say that they that therapists tend to be for yours and they don't spend enough time developing their personal life and therefore this side of their personality is not getting enough energy normally consciously and so it's in the shadow and so often the the lover will come blasting through uh with these uh with these grandiose energies and uh one of the interesting things about there was a very prominent uh uh therapist who who was acting out in the way you're talking about and the amazing thing was that when confronted about it by his colleagues he could not he couldn't understand what they were upset about that's one of the one of the uh expressions of grandiosity see when when when confronted he couldn't he couldn't what's wrong with you people i'm you know i'm this is this is important for these people you know i'm helping them see uh and it was a clearly a possession state so that would be a good example co-dependence is a clear one one of the things that that that i had pointed out to me about this was that a lot of the time you can see the addictions as disorders in the lover as a grandiosity in the lover because the individual comes out and and falls in love with some substance or falls in love with really loves boots really loves food and uh there's a there's a lot of talk about about uh addictions as disorders of the lover other examples yes falling in love with love yes that is this this energy is so powerful you see it's numinous it's sacred when it's expressed in this when it's expressed in this form yes right here he's don says would child sexual abuse be in this category uh in my in my view i tend to see it there because uh a lot of people say you know a lot of people will say that there is no there's no love or affection and child sexual abuse i'm not sure they're right about that i think maybe you see the lover when it is in a grandiose form grandiose state it's polymorphous perverse if it's a dominant if it's a big domination thing it would be the warrior to be the warrior but uh but a lot of the time you see this when one is in this state this is the this is the part of the self that is uh is uh capable of being sexual with anything you know persons places things you name it or the demanding of elaborate gifts and in order that the offering or or demanding i think it would be more the offering of of of elaborate gifts uh the uh the compulsive expression of loving the important thing to see and let's just discuss this now a little bit more the important thing to see is that there's not one form that a grandiosity will take the grandiose energies the archetypal press can be expressed in any of these patterns and so rather than just seeing it as as a narcissistic personality disorder if you take a Jungian point of view then you can see that when you're when you're mainlining these energies like this they can come out in any of these ways now let's do something a little different before we stop we've been emphasizing what happens when you're mainlining when you're shooting up this archetypal energy and it comes out in one of the other forms what about when you're not getting enough of the archetypal energy in these different configurations remember when john was talking about spirituality is putting you in touch with the energy for life what happens when you don't get enough energy to light up these configurations let's go through them again what would you say what happens to an individual how would you tell an individual who was out of touch with archetypal energy in this one give me an example well how so she says mr. milk toast how so what how is that not getting energy here no okay she says not doing anything being flat one of the things that uh that you you could argue is that an individual who has no power drive probably has no no energy going into this configuration of the king no power drive no expression of attempt to build anything if an individual has no no impetus to build anything at all then this is not being fueled by archetypal energy child abandonment is very interesting that is the individual simply is not experiencing any of their king or queen circuits i think this happens a lot today when the career takes all of the energy or this takes all of the energy and the children are left yes in other words dependency will often be a manifestation inability to stand up to some other initiative would be an example if you have a lot of king or queen energy it's not easy to run over you you got you know you have your own if you have a lot of king or queen energy you've got you you you're pretty centered one thing about you even if you have it in a pathological form it's awfully hard to run over you okay what about what about not having enough of the archetypal energy going into the warrior configuration what will an individual be like yes you're all very good tonight she says passive aggressive behavior absolutely right and then if you've got somebody that's passive aggressive this is not being fueled enough with archetypal energy and one of the things you have to work with i gave a series of lectures on the warrior archetype recently and that was one of the points that i made that there is so much passive aggression around i mean it's just like it drives you nuts especially if you're if you're if you're trying to be aggressive and you're in a room full of passive aggressive people a committee you know what else would you say about that besides passive aggression yeah yeah laziness that is what we would call laziness if i feel lazy you know laziness doesn't tell you anything it doesn't just a kind of a description of what you're not doing but so you say sloth so called the the sin of sloth would be an example of just this not being fueled in other words if this is being fueled you won't have a feeling of aimlessness because the warrior part of you will find the mission and if you don't have a sense of mission this is not being fueled see anything else you can see there apathy would be another example depression can often come under that i think depression is a manifestation as a manifestation can come off of of all of these because the depression to me is is is a clear manifestation that the individual is just not i got the speaker turned on enough you know they're not they're not they're not lighting up enough you know yeah back here excuse me non-competitive she says in other words if you tend to be a person that just has a hard time understanding why anybody would want to compete in anything the chances are this is not getting fueled the uh the warrior spirit uh enjoys it kind of kind of gets off on it procrastination is another example uh in other words if if you're having trouble completing things uh i know nobody here has that problem but but if you have trouble if you have trouble getting projects completed this would not be getting fueled what about this one yes would would would manipulation come under lack of fuel for the magician well i i don't know what do you think being manipulated might be and and they say allowing oneself to be manipulated see what would happen is you would not you would not be very reflective if this is not being fueled you won't think a lot about what's happening with you and other people see you won't be this is the archetype of awareness you will not be very aware of what's happening in your environment you know there are a lot of people who are surprised when their spouse walks out they didn't notice anything wrong see well that's because this wasn't receiving any fuel uh if this is receiving fuel one is very aware of the dynamics of everything and everybody around okay what else did you say that would be one way see if you didn't if you don't have this fuel that means you have to have somebody else be your magician well the she says hypochondria uh that would be not being able to figure out what all these physical symptoms about that is to say people tend to somaticize when they're not very aware psychologically so that's a very subtle point you see that that is you'll find that people who are not very psychologically aware whose magician is not getting enough fuel they would just have a lot of body symptoms nothing's wrong in my life but i just have all these bodily symptoms that's what they call in the literature of somatization and what about a person who's not having the lover fueled yes she says sexual dysfunctions like impotence or fragility absolutely very interesting to work with people who were who are living their life as if this was not even a configuration in their psyche it's very interesting you know they can so there are many many marriages that have that make no place at all for the lover configuration and it gets no energy by either part of the couple in fact they come into therapy and they'll often say well i just don't know what's wrong i just i just don't guess i know how to to be a lover and the thing that always fascinates me is when they get an extra marital relationship going they learn awfully fast take a crash course in this but that this is this is an excellent point there's just no energy going into that the person is completely tone deaf about buying flowers they can't buy flowers they can't go away for the weekend they can't get a lock on their bedroom door it's just amazing they can't think of any of those things any other expressions of of this there are a lot of expressions of this yes now how would isolation be an expression of not having that fueled in other words if this is being fueled the person is enthusiastic about the world and they're going out to it this is sort if this is if this is not being fueled by any archetypal energy the poet in the person won't be online see they won't be they won't be feeling poetically about anybody or anything the the writer in them won't be online what else okay now that's interesting she says she says bad choice of a love relationship or perhaps going after someone that's already involved in another relationship it would be an example of that because a lot of the time if a person has edible conflicts this is an example of someone who is very conflicted about this they're they're afraid to put much energy into this and what they will do is they'll be so insecure about this that they will always arrange to be with people that won't really challenge them much and always go with quote safe people married people you know they think that they won't get a divorce you know they think that the other person won't get a divorce yeah okay yeah don nobody's big boredom no but that's a wonderful example boredom that is if you're if your lover is getting any fuel any archetypal energy then you're never bored with with things things are exciting to you you you're constantly interested in things and the world is more like the garden see for you I mean it's a delightful place and you just you just wish you had four or five more lifetimes so you could enjoy everything yes she says that a lot of the time uh due to the compensatory dynamics in the psyche of person that's that's not getting enough would look like they're getting too much energy that's right see one of the things you got to look at in this is that wounds in one's narcissism can result in either too much fueling or not enough and so the pathology will express itself in different forms and the goal of course in what we've talked about is spirituality certainly from a Jungian point of view is to have contact with these energies for life but have contact with them in a way that fuels and serves life and doesn't destroy life doesn't disintegrate the personality doesn't lead them to have to act out but enables them to have enough of this energy so that life can be full and life can be joyful uh I think we're out of time I want to thank you and I'll stick around a little while if you want to discuss this further thank you very much