Rewriting Your Life Story

Because of the trauma we suffer as victims of narcissistic and emotional abuse, we tend to ruminate about our past long after the period of abuse is over. The past can dominate our lives, through such things as intrusive thoughts, so much that it’s as if the painful period was our life in its entirety.

How can we break free from the past? There are many methods that can help, such as meditation, putting our trauma into words, using self-hypnosis to treat the past as something no longer relevant to our present lives, or using auto-hypnosis to imagine a new, idealized family to replace, in our minds, the abusive family we grew up with.

Another method, suggested by Michele Lee Nieves in this video, is to rewrite one’s life story. Instead of rehashing the same old pain from before, now that we’re out of the abusive relationship, we imagine a new, positive end to our life story to give us a sense of hope and purpose in our new lives.

Photo by Lum3n on Pexels.com

To give an example, I’ll rewrite my own life story here and now. I’m going to parallel it with many points in the legendary life of the Buddha: this is not meant to imply that I’m in any way even remotely comparable to him in the saintly or enlightened sense (I’m quite the opposite, actually, and I don’t mean that in the dialectical sense!), but rather that both life narratives chart a course from the realization of suffering to a striving to end that suffering. I find such correspondences to be inspiring in my quest to be healed. Let’s begin:

I was born into a petite bourgeois, middle-class family who fancied themselves very capable. My parents imagined themselves to be the ultimate authorities of their world, like a king and queen.

My mother, as I’ve explained many times in a number of posts, was a habitual liar, gaslighting, triangulating, and doing smear campaigns against me and my cousins to the rest of the family. My elder siblings, her flying monkeys, helped her bully and emotionally abuse me. Because of her many needless fabrications, I can see her as the very personification of illusion, the māyā, or powerful, illusory magic, as it were, that addles the mind, deceives us, and thus causes suffering.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

It was as though she’d died shortly after I was born, for I afterwards felt little affection from her, just the illusion of maternal care masking an agenda to keep me in her control. I was a sensitive child, and the rest of the family had little patience for me. My father wanted me to get a high-paying job in something like business: I had no interest whatsoever in such things.

When I was a young man, I finally ventured out into the world and learned what it was really like, as opposed to the world my family had hoped to keep me inside, with superficially pleasant things to keep me distracted from the truth. A number of things I saw outside made me understand the illusions of home.

I realized that my mother, the personification of all those illusions, was getting old. Her ideas about me were old and outmoded, having no more usefulness in my life. In fact, they’d never been useful.

I realized that she, as that personification of māyā, was a sick woman. Sick with breast cancer, but more importantly, sick with some form of pathological narcissism.

Finally, she died, not only physically, but also as any kind of guide in my life. In fact, she’d never been a real guide. As I said above, it was as if she’d died only about a week after my birth.

A fourth realization came after her death, though: I learned of people who overcame their trauma, and who were able to live their lives in peace, in spite of their previous suffering. I thus decided that I wanted to achieve the same peace.

Photo by Oluremi Adebayo on Pexels.com

Naturally, there was resistance from the family, but I insisted on having my way. I renounced them as the toxic environment that they were and are. Even the inheritance money my mother left for me–a lot of money!— I gave up, insisting that the lawyers give my fourth in thirds to my older brothers and sister.

I gave the money up–an act most people would consider foolish, of course–because I felt it would be hypocritical of me to feel such animosity towards my mother on the one hand, and yet say, “Oh, but gimme-gimme the money!” on the other. I had to be consistent with my principles: if I was to renounce the family, I had to renounce everything, even sacrificing the good parts.

Also, giving up the money was my way of telling the family that my motives are far from always self-centred, an attribute they used to justify their bullying and demeaning of me. If all there was to me was selfishness, why wouldn’t I just take the money? I had a perfect legal right to it, and I could still say that Mom’s giving it to me came nowhere close to compensating for all the injuries she’d done to me. Still, I gave it up…because contrary to what the family believes about me, not everything in me is about getting more and more for myself.

Finally, I gave up the money because I didn’t want to feel in any way obligated to have anything to do with them anymore. I didn’t want to be beholden to them at all.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

My next move was to learn everything I could about the root causes of the abuse I’d suffered (narcissistic mothers), and about how to heal myself. I learned a lot of useful things, but I also turned a few bad corners (e.g. spending a lot of money on an online course that gave me only minimal help; also, sharing many of my blog posts on these topics on Facebook pages with unappreciative members…a.k.a. haters). I’ve found myself more inclined to find the answers I need on my own.

I’ve also found meditation helpful, though temptations distract me. I’ve been assailed by doubts about whether I correctly interpreted the meaning of what happened to me as a child; this is known as second-guessing. The guilt-tripping and shaming that that toxic family subjected me to, as well as all of their gaslighting, was the basis of my second-guessing. Overall, however, I’ve managed not to cave into these doubts.

Other temptations have not been so easy to resist. Feelings of anger towards my former abusers, sometimes in the form of intrusive thoughts, distracts me from focusing on what I call the Three Unities (those of Space, Time, and Action) that give me soothing peace if I concentrate hard enough. Other times, it’s lustful desires that break my concentration. Usually, though, it’s simply itchiness. In the long run, I manage to overcome these distractions.

Photo by Prasanth Inturi on Pexels.com

Now, outside of the healing power of meditation, I nonetheless struggle with my emotional pain, and it causes me to manifest self-destructiveness in the forms of sleeplessness, poor nutrition, and a generally unhealthy, irritable mood. Add to all of this my C-PTSD tendency to catastrophize any problem, and I can pull myself down very low.

Thankfully, I have the love of my wife, who–despite how difficult she finds it to be patient with a man as irritable as I am–makes sure I get a reasonable amount of fruit in my diet, among other healthy foods. She is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Since her having helped me through my worst emotional period, just following my mother’s death and my estrangement from the family, I have shown more resolve in practicing meditation and in formulating a philosophy to help me heal. When it comes to the roots of narcissistic abuse, I’ve come to understand certain basic truths:

  1. While the experience of a kind of, so to speak, psychic mutilation is common and universal, some have it far worse than others.
  2. This psychic mutilation is a lack that gives rise to desire, which in turn causes more suffering; and those whose psychic mutilation is more severe (as among those with NPD or other Cluster B personality disorders), causing in them even greater desire, those people in turn cause ever more suffering.
  3. This suffering and psychic mutilation can be healed.
  4. It can be healed through the following: having the right understanding of the above three truths; making a firm decision to heal; speaking with kind, rather than violent, words (to oneself as well as to others); acting with kindness and selflessness to others; writing, with the most vividly descriptive of words, about all of one’s pain; making an effort to resist the old, painful habits, while striving also to revive and sustain new and healthy habits; always being mindful and remembering to strive for the goal of healing; and meditating with the most focused of concentration.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

In the process of moving towards this goal of healing, we must remember to strive with diligence, but also with moderation. We mustn’t expect too much of ourselves too soon, and we mustn’t beat ourselves over the head with shame when we inevitably fail from time to time. At the same time, we mustn’t be lazy or complacent, lest we backslide into our previous, mutilated emotional state.

One thing to remember is that the ego is an illusion, the narcissistic looking at oneself in the mirror or pond reflection, a defence against psychic mutilation. This fake ego, taken to extremes, leads to pathological narcissistic states. We aren’t permanent entities unto ourselves; there is just the infinite ocean of the universe, and we are all just drops of water in it.

As difficult as this all will be to understand and achieve, we can take refuge in the notion of our universal potential to be at one with the peaceful, oceanic state of what I call the Unity of Space, what Hindus call that identity of Atman with Brahman. We can also take refuge in all the teachings we have learned from, these written here above and those from outside sources. Finally, we can take refuge in the community and empathy of fellow sufferers, fellow victims of narcissistic and emotional abuse (whether online or in one’s immediate physical vicinity); and we can take refuge in the internalized parental system as discussed here.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

In life, I will continue to face difficult people, and will face challenges; there is no escape from problems, but if I face those difficulties with the philosophical ideas laid out here, I should be able to cope reasonably well. Happiness doesn’t consist in an absence of problems; it consists in the ability to deal with them.

Along with problems, though, life will sometimes give us blessings. We should always be grateful for every good thing that comes our way, and never take blessings for granted. Besides, gratitude, felt regularly, increases happiness.

I have a lot to be grateful for, especially during the past twenty-four years. Instead of being the absurdly wrong things the family claimed I would be (My mother wondered in her lies if I, an ‘autistic‘ child of about nine or ten, would ever even make a good garbageman; my bully-brother F. growled that I’d be “a loser for the rest of my life” back when I was a teen), instead of me being any of that nonsense, I have become a successful English teacher, one who not only teaches the language, but also aspects of Western culture, as well as political concepts.

I have a wonderful wife whom I love dearly, one who also suffers my ill temper with far more patience than I deserve. Now, if I can fully heal from my early traumas, she’ll see how much of a good man I can be. My wish for her to see the very best version of myself should be plentiful a motive in me to strive hard for that healing. This success would give a much-needed, and much-deserved, happy ending to so sadly-begun a life.

************

Photo by energepic.com on Pexels.com

As you can see, Dear Reader, I started my narrative with the sad, inauspicious beginnings associated with the family’s narcissistic abuse. Then I moved into a gradual transformation of the bad beginnings, through my reflections on all that was wrong, into a growing sense of knowledge of myself and the world surrounding me. I ended on a happy, encouraging note, one that would inspire me to continue down the good path.

When you rewrite your life story, my suggestion is to write in a similarly transformative narrative arc. Good luck with it! 🙂

Another Poem by Clelia Albano

My Facebook friend, poet Clelia Albano, whose other work I have written about, has recently written a poem inspired by the work of poet Stefan Markovski, whose work, Promised Land, can be found here (and which has also been raved about by Albano in the comments).

Here is the text (again, I’m putting it in italics to distinguish it from my own writing):

Inspired by Stefan Markovski

And the poet descends down
into the chthonic realm
to meet his
Eurydice – inspiration –
and as he finds the words by extracting them
from the magmatic earth
surrounded by shadows,
like a miner he breathes dust.
Chewed and kneaded with
his divine saliva,
Orpheus brings them back to light
after he had madly turned his
head back for looking at the source
of what he creates, and he
embeds them in his chant and caresses them
with his fingers as he would caress
his beloved whose lament “heu”
feeds his blood.

And now, for my analysis.

In her tribute to Markovski, she compares his search for poetic inspiration to Orpheus in his search to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld. Albano is imagining Orpheus’ lover to be his Muse, just as Markovski is, in turn, Albano’s male Muse.

The search for poetic inspiration is a painful one: it doesn’t just come to the writer as a fluke. The writer must work hard at his or her craft, and in the process of doing this work, then the ideas come. The Muse helps those who help themselves.

Apart from the pain Orpheus feels in his desperate yearning to get his Eurydice back–understood here as symbolic of the poet’s painful search to retrieve inspiration–we see in Albano’s poem a comparison of the poet to a miner: “he finds the words by extracting them/from the magmatic earth/surrounded by shadows,/like a miner he breathes dust.”

One “descends down/into the chthonic realm.” On first glance, the word down seems superfluous, but when one considers the additional meaning for down, that is, ‘sad,’ we can see its use as justified. Also, “chthonic” adds to the dark sense of dread of being in the Underworld (“magmatic earth/surrounded by shadows”), since searching for inspiration can be a kind of Hell for a poet.

There is a vivid sense of the unpleasantness of the endeavour to find inspiration in how Albano says “like a miner he breathes dust./Chewed and kneaded with his divine saliva.” The use of the word dust, by the way, is also noted in her review of Markovski’s book of poems (link above). In it, she says, “his poems are populated by angels, wings, the Moon and the Sun, rain, wind, dust, ashes, powder, war and peace.” (My emphasis) So we see here how she was inspired by his writing to the point of using his imagery in her own poem, using it to express the discomfort of extracting that very inspiration. (I love, by the way, the melodious assonance in “divine saliva.”)

The poet “brings…back to light” his (or her) sources of inspiration, though in his madness he looks back at his Muse, Eurydice, dooming her to return to Hell. The pain in never getting that coveted inspiration back is the cross the poet must always bear.

He caresses those pieces of inspiration as an expression of the love he feels for them. That caressing is meant to soothe the pain of his doomed love, whose heu “feeds his blood.” This Latin expression of lament is an allusion to Book IV of Virgil‘s Georgics (line 498), in which Eurydice tells Orpheus of how his mad looking back at her has doomed her, and their love.

I’m sure all writers out there (me included, of course) can relate to Albano’s painful search for the right words to express one’s inner feelings. The excess of pain that Markovski has felt in producing his fine poetry is something she has noted and appreciated…and fortunately for us, her readers, been inspired by.

Bombs

The war machine

d
r
o
p
s

b
o
m
b
s

d
o
w
n

on the cities of the innocent.
***************************************************

Moms’ eyes

r
a
i
n

t
e
a
r
s

d
o
w
n

their despairing, reddened cheeks.
*****************************************************

Sons’ and daughters’ bodies

f
a
l
l

d
o
w
n

d
e
a
d

to the stony ground.
*****************************************************

Civilizations’ pillars

b
r
e
a
k

a
n
d

c
r
u
m
b
l
e
,

leaving pebbles on the earth.
**************************************************

Proud, towering trees

t
o
p
p
l
e

o
v
e
r
,

l
y
i
n
g

in beds of smokey black.
****************************************************

When will the fighter jets

b
e

b
r
o
u
g
h
t

d
o
w
n
,

leaving the earth to grow in peace?
*******************************************************

Analysis of ‘True Romance’

True Romance is a 1993 romantic crime thriller written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott. It stars Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette, and has an ensemble cast with Dennis Hopper, Michael Rapaport, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, Val Kilmer, Saul Rubinek, James Gandolfini, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Bronson Pinchot, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Though the film got positive reviews for its dialogue and characters, it did poorly at the box office. Still, its positive critical reception helped it gain a cult following, and now it’s considered one of Scott’s best films, as well as one of the best American films of the 1990s.

Here are some quotes:

“I had to come all the way from the highways and byways of Tallahassee, Florida to Motor City, Detroit to find my true love. If you gave me a million years to ponder, I would never have guessed that true romance and Detroit would ever go together. And to this day, the events that followed all seem like a distant dream. But the dream was real and was to change our lives forever. I kept asking Clarence why our world seemed to be collapsing and everything seemed so shitty. And he’d say, ‘That’s the way it goes, but don’t forget, it goes the other way too.’ That’s the way romance is. Usually, that’s the way it goes. But every once in awhile, it goes the other way too.” –Alabama, voiceover

“In Jailhouse Rock he was everything rockabilly’s about. I mean, he is rockabilly. Mean, surly, nasty, rude. In that movie he couldn’t give a fuck about nothing except rockin’ and rollin’, living fast, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse.” –Clarence, on Elvis

“I always said, if I had to fuck a guy… I mean had to, if my life depended on it… I’d fuck Elvis.” –Clarence

“Please shut up! I’m trying to come clean, okay? I’ve been a call-girl for exactly four days and you’re my third customer. I want you to know that I’m not damaged goods. I’m not what they call Florida white trash. I’m a good person and when it comes to relationships, I’m one-hundred percent, I’m one hundred percent… monogamous.” –Alabama

“I eat the pussy, I eat the butt, I eat every motherfuckin’ thang.” –Big Don

Drexl Spivey: No thanks? What does that mean? Means you ate before you came down here? All full. Is that it? Naw, I don’t think so. I think you’re too scared to be eatin’. Now, see we’re sittin’ down here, ready to negotiate, and you’ve already given up your shit. I’m still a mystery to you. But I know exactly where your white ass is comin’ from. See, if I asked you if you wanted some dinner and you grabbed an egg roll and started to chow down, I’d say to myself, “This motherfucker’s carryin’ on like he ain’t got a care in the world. Who knows? Maybe he don’t. Maybe this fool’s such a bad motherfucker, he don’t got to worry about nothin’, he just sit down, eat my Chinese, watch my TV.” See? You ain’t even sat down yet. On that TV there, since you been in the room, is a woman with her breasteses hangin’ out, and you ain’t even bothered to look. You just been clockin’ me. Now, I know I’m pretty, but I ain’t as pretty as a couple of titties.
Clarence Worley: I’m not eatin’ ’cause I’m not hungry. I’m not sittin’ ’cause I’m not stayin’. I’m not lookin’ at the movie ’cause I saw it seven years ago. It’s “The Mack” with Max Julien, Carol Speed, and Richard Pryor. I’m not scared of you. I just don’t like you. In that envelope is some payoff money. Alabama’s moving on to some greener pastures. We’re not negotiatin’. I don’t like to barter. I don’t like to dicker. I never have fun in Tijuana. That price is non-negotiable. What’s in that envelope is for my peace of mind. My peace of mind is worth that much. Not one penny more, not one penny more.

Clifford: You know, I read a lot. Especially about things in, uh, about history. I find that shit fascinating. Here’s a fact, I don’t know whether you know or not, Sicilians … were spawned by niggers.
Coccotti: Come again? [laughs]
Clifford: It’s a fact. You see, Sicilians have black blood pumpin’ through their hearts. If you don’t believe me, you can look it up. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, you see, the Moors conquered Sicily. And the Moors are niggers.
Coccotti: Yes…
Clifford: So you see, way back then, uh, Sicilians were like, uh, wops from Northern Italy. Ah, they all had blonde hair and blue eyes, but, uh, well, then the Moors moved in there, and uh, well, they changed the whole country. They did so much fuckin’ with Sicilian women, huh? That they changed the whole bloodline forever. That’s why blonde hair and blue eyes became black hair and dark skin. You know, it’s absolutely amazing to me to think that to this day, hundreds of years later, that, uh, that Sicilians still carry that nigger gene. Now this…[Coccotti laughs]
Clifford: No, I’m, no, I’m quoting… history. It’s written. It’s a fact, it’s written.
Coccotti: [laughing] I love this guy. This guy.
Clifford: Your ancestors are niggers. Uh-huh. Hey. Yeah. And, and your great-great-great-great grandmother fucked a nigger, ho, ho, yeah, and she had a half-nigger kid… now, if that’s a fact, tell me, am I lying? ‘Cause you, you’re part eggplant. [All laughing]

“Do I look like a beautiful blond with big tits and an ass that tastes like French vanilla ice-cream?” –Clarence, to Elliot Blitzer

“Now the first time you kill somebody, that’s the hardest. I don’t give a shit if you’re fuckin’ Wyatt Earp or Jack the Ripper. Remember that guy in Texas? The guy up in that fuckin’ tower that killed all them people? I’ll bet you green money that first little black dot he took a bead on, that was the bitch of the bunch. First one is tough, no fuckin’ foolin’. The second one… the second one ain’t no fuckin’ Mardi Gras either, but it’s better than the first one ’cause you still feel the same thing, y’know… except it’s more diluted, y’know it’s… it’s better. I threw up on the first one, you believe that? Then the third one… the third one is easy, you level right off. It’s no problem. Now… shit… now I do it just to watch their fuckin’ expression change.” –Virgil, to Alabama after beating her

“If there’s one thing this last week has taught me, it’s better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.” –Clarence

Cody Nicholson: [to Elliot] You just made it big time.
Nicky Dimes: You’re no longer an extra…
Cody Nicholson: …or a bit player…
Nicky Dimes: …or a supporting actor…
Cody Nicholson: …you’re a fucking star. You are a fucking star. And you are going to be playing your one-man show for the next two fucking years for a captive audience. And listen to this, you get out in a few years and meet some old lady, get married, and you’ll be so understanding to your wife’s needs because you’ll know what it feels like to be a woman.
Nicky Dimes: Of course, you’ll only want to fuck her in the ass because that pussy wont be tight enough anymore.
Cody Nicholson: Good one detective, right you fucking faggot?

While the title of the film is rather bland (inspired by the titles of such romance comics as True Stories of Romance), it nonetheless introduces a crucial theme running throughout the story: the dialectical tension between reality and fantasy, and how the latter is an attempt to escape from the former, but one which ultimately fails. I’m using the word romance here to mean more than just “love stories,” or “fiction about idealized or sentimental love,” but “a feeling or quality of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.” It’s an escape from the world of the true.

During the credits, we see visuals of a freezing cold winter in Detroit, with a group of homeless black men huddling around a fire. This is the kind of harsh reality one wishes one could escape from, for example, running away to sunny Los Angeles; but even in a warm, pleasant California environment, harsh reality inevitably follows.

That’s the way it goes, but don’t forget, it goes the other way, too.

Clarence Worley (Slater) begins the movie by chatting (with a woman in a bar he hopes to take to the movies for his birthday) about his idol, Elvis. In fact, Elvis is such a hero to him that he sometimes has conversations in his head with the King as his, as it were, imaginary friend and mentor (played by Kilmer). Clarence speaks of Elvis in Jailhouse Rock as “rockin’ and rollin’, living fast, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse.”

(Actually, Elvis’s character, Vince Everett, doesn’t die at the end of Jailhouse Rock. What’s more, anyone who knows about the real Elvis knows that he, overweight, did anything but die leaving a good-looking corpse. He was on the toilet, then fell off and lay on the floor in his own vomit. The King fell off the throne and died, but I digress…)

We see in these representations of Elvis the stark contrast between what’s true and what’s romance. (Speaking of romance, Clarence even has suppressed homosexual feelings about Elvis.) Capitalism sells us all kinds of commodities–in the forms of rock stars, movies, prostitutes, comic books, drugs, etc.–as a way to escape into a world of fantasy…but reality always catches up to us in the end.

The girl Clarence asks out to the movies isn’t interested in seeing a triple feature of Sonny Chiba martial arts movies, so he goes alone; but Alabama (Arquette), a beautiful call girl whom Clarence’s boss has hired so he can get laid on his birthday, comes to the theatre and sits with him. ‘Romance’ has returned.

With her, Clarence spends what he feels is the best time he’s ever had with a woman. She is giving him his fantasy: not just in bed, but also in (often) pretending to have the same interests that he has (liking The Partridge Family is part of the act, and I doubt that she’s anywhere near as interested in the first Spider Man comic as he is, either.)

His romance (i.e., of the perfect, beautiful girl), however, is a true nightmare for her. Even though (or especially because) she likes him, she feels the shame of being forced into prostitution by Drexl Spivey (Oldman). She is a human commodity being sold for Drexl’s profit; small wonder she insists on being called a “call girl” instead of a “whore.”

The enjoyment Clarence has had with her has grown into a full-blown urge to rescue her from her life of exploitation. We go back from the true harshness of the capitalist exploitation of women to the romance of saving her from that life; she even says that his killing of Drexl is “so romantic.”

In “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,” Freud describes how a man may fall in love with, and thus wish to rescue, a prostitute; the very idea that other men have had her adds to his excitement because in his unconscious he is reminded of his Oedipal feelings for his mother, who he must accept is in a sexual relationship with his father. Clarence’s haunting wish to kill Drexl–even though he can easily just forget about the pimp, since Alabama is safe in Clarence’s home–can be seen as an unconscious transference from Clarence’s father to the pimp.

This transference would make Drexl into a mental representation, for Clarence, of the ‘bad father.’ Clarence obsesses in a fury about killing the pimp. When he confronts Drexl–who upon learning that Alabama is now Clarence’s wife, says this makes the two men “practically related”–Clarence is infuriated all the more. His killing of Drexl (part of the transferred Oedipal fantasy), which upsets his real, estranged father, Clifford (Hopper), causes more psychological conflict for Clarence; but when his father understands just what an awful man Drexl was, and he can accept his son’s killing of him, Clifford can now be fully the ‘good father.’ Clarence’s mentor, ‘Elvis,’ incidentally can be seen as a transferred mental representation of the ‘good father,’ one of the many romantic illusions in Clarence’s mind.

Drexl himself lives in a world of romantic illusions. A ‘wigger,’ he claims that his mother was Apache (Tarantino, pages 51, 65). Big Don (Jackson) and Floyd, two men who are actually black, and whom Drexl will kill and steal a suitcase of cocaine from, chat with Drexl, debating over whether or not it’s manly to perform cunnilingus. Floyd refuses to accept the modern truth that if a man wants to get oral, he should be willing to give oral, too. An extended version of the scene was filmed; the lines can be found on pages 7-11 of Tarantino’s original screenplay.

Drexl imitates blacks, yet he bosses them around (i.e., Marty), and he kills them (Floyd and Big Don). This is like when such musicians as Elvis (arguably) and Led Zeppelin steal the music of black bluesmen and make millions off of it. The white person who appropriates the cultures of people of colour; the man who expects women to service him without him needing to reciprocate–these people are in a fantasy world of romance. They need to be brought back into the world of the true.

Clarence, after killing Drexl, accidentally takes the suitcase of cocaine instead of one with Alabama’s clothes. With this valuable commodity, the two young lovers hope to prosper through a get-rich-quick scheme of selling it cheap to any Hollywood producers that Clarence’s friend, aspiring actor Dick Ritchie (Rapaport) might know.

Having commodities as exchange values in order to get rich is what capitalism is all about. The high that cocaine gives you, the temporary feeling of great confidence, is a romantic escape from the depressing truth of the world, a manic defence–against sadness–that’s in its own way as desirable as the pleasure gained from worshipping movie and rock stars, escaping into the fantasy world of comic books and Hollywood movies, and enjoying prostitutes. Capitalism sells fantasy, and denies us the truth. In True Romance, the suitcase of cocaine, as a coveted commodity, is the film’s MacGuffin.

The reality of capitalism, however, in its legal and illegal forms, is competition over who gets to have and sell the commodities. Hence, Drexl’s demand to “bring [Alabama’s] dumb ass back” to him and into his control. Hence also, the Italian-American mafia’s demand to get their stolen narcotics back.

As I’ve argued in a number of blog posts, the mafia as criminal businesses can easily symbolize capitalism and its exploitation of people. As with any Tarantino script, there is a preoccupation, on at least some level, with racism, which to a great extent is one of the many things capitalists use to divide the working class.

Apart from Tarantino’s fetishization of the word “nigger,” True Romance exploits a number of racial and ethnic stereotypes. The mafia is Italian-American, the blacks whom Drexl kills and steals cocaine from are ‘players‘ who objectify women, Asians are either into martial arts (Chiba) or are violently bloody Hong Kong mafia (i.e., the scene of a movie shown on TV with Chow Yun-fat and another man shooting each other), and the movie producer, Lee Donowitz (Rubinek), who buys the cocaine, is Jewish. [In Tarantino’s screenplay, Italian mafioso Lenny (played by Victor Argo) asks fellow mafioso Marvin, “What’s the Jew-boy’s name?” to which Marvin replies, “Donowitz, he said.” (Tarantino, page 118.) Indeed, Scott’s movie toned down a lot of Tarantino’s use of racial slurs.] Stereotypes are false beliefs about people, often used to flatter oneself at the expense of the stereotyped, and thus are an escape from what’s true.

Speaking of racism, Clarence’s father, Clifford, uses the Sicilian ethnic pride of the Italian-American mafia to get them to kill him quickly; this way, he won’t live to tell their boss, Vincent Coccotti (Walken) where Clarence and Alabama have gone with the cocaine. Saying that “Sicilians were spawned by niggers” is meant to enrage Coccotti into shooting Clifford in the head instead of slowly torturing him into betraying his son. (Actually, though, the notion that the Moors were sub-Saharan black Africans [an idea influenced by such things as modern productions of Othello?], rather than swarthy North African Berbers, is more romance than “history” from Clifford.)

Clarence contacts Dick by payphone, quoting the Big Bopper‘s “Hello, baby!” This is yet another example of Clarence’s preoccupation with popular culture as an escape from the real world. In his hope to sell the cocaine and make a ton of money, we see a contrast with the Big Bopper saying “I ain’t got no money, honey!” This is an ironic contrast between the romance of getting rich quickly and the truth of being poor, as spoken by a rock star, of all people.

Dick’s dreams of being “a successful actor” are similarly a romantic fantasy, especially given how awful his TJ Hooker audition is. Dick’s roommate, stoner Floyd (Pitt) smokes bowls to escape the truth of his wasted life. In fact, Floyd likes to imagine that he can beat up Virgil the mafia man (Gandolfini), so far detached is he from reality. Virgil, in turn, has a male chauvinism that blinds him to the truth that Alabama’s fight reaction, to the trauma of a beating, is strong enough to kill him.

In Tarantino’s original script, after having killed Virgil, Alabama is reciting a version of St. Francis’s prayer while hitting dead Virgil’s head with his phallic shotgun (Tarantino, page 91). The prayer seems self-indulgent at first, but it is another example of the theme of contrast between idealized fantasy (e.g., unconditional Christian love) vs. reality (the need to kill a killer).

Shotgun-wielding Alabama in this scene is the strong phallic woman, the phallus in turn being a symbol of power, the lack of which gives rise to desire. In the capitalist world of haves and have-nots, there is plenty of lack to be desired, and the romantic fantasy world of pleasure generated by the commodities of drugs, prostitutes, and pop culture (Hollywood movies, Animal Crackers, burgers, etc.) is an attempt to fill that lack.

Sissy Elliot Blitzer (Pinchot), who can’t even go on a roller coaster without throwing up, and who is bullied by Donowitz, tries to escape his pathetic life by enjoying some of the cocaine while driving fast with a girl named Kandi. The truth of the world soon comes to ruin his romance in the form of a policeman stopping him for speeding…then seeing cocaine all over his face.

Two cops modelled after Starsky and Hutch (Tarantino, page 95), respectively Officers Cody Nicholson (Sizemore) and Nicky Dimes (Penn), put the pressure on arrested Elliot, who breaks down and tells them about the drug deal between Clarence and Donowitz.

As I argued in my analysis of Reservoir Dogs, cops represent the extent to which the state intervenes in capitalism. As such, there’s a hazy distinction between them and the mafia as far as personifications of capitalism are concerned. They’re as inclined to murder and abuse others as any mafioso would. All that matters is getting ahead…realizing the American Dream…

Nicholson’s and Dimes’s interest in busting Donowitz et al for the drug deal isn’t in stopping ‘the bad guys’: it’s in furthering their careers. Ruining the lives of Alabama and Clarence (the latter being someone Nicholson twice admits to liking because he’s “wild” and “crazy”) makes no difference to these cops: they just want the collar, that is, credit for the bust.

When Clarence, Alabama, Dick, and Elliot are in the hotel elevator, and Clarence points his gun at Elliot’s face, sissy Elliot wishes someone would take him away from this true, cruel world, would come to his rescue and take him to a safe, ideal world of romance, then “everything would be all right.” Instead, it’s Clarence’s threats that are not true.

When they all go into Donowitz’s hotel room, they meet Monty and Boris, the movie producer’s bodyguards, both armed with Uzis. Combine this fact with Donowitz’s involvement in drug dealing, and we see how the Hollywood business empire is a mafia unto itself (consider all the allegations of sexual misconduct, including pedophilia, against celebrities, to see my point). Liberal Hollywood is as capitalist and exploitative as any other modern business or institution.

Again, instead of facing this dark reality, Clarence would rather focus on talking about Vietnam war movies: Coming Home in a Bodybag, produced by Donowitz, is one of Clarence’s favourites. He tells Donowitz that he knows Vietnam veterans who have endorsed the film; Donowitz says “veterans of that bullshit war” praising his movie “makes the whole thing worthwhile.”

Here we have the typical Hollywood bourgeois liberal, paying lip service to acknowledging the horrors of capitalist imperialism while making millions from the war movies he produces. As Donowitz says to Clarence earlier, during the conversation on his car phone: “I am on this earth to make good movies. Nothing more, and nothing…well, maybe less.”

Clarence convinces Donowitz to buy the cocaine, and the bust finally happens. The Italian-American mafia, after having learned where the hotel is from stoner Floyd (who, having just smoked a bowl, must be having the paranoia high of the century from seeing all those guns pointed at him!), kick in the door to the hotel room, and now three groups of trigger-happy men–cops, Donowitz’s bodyguards, and the mafia–are in a Mexican standoff.

In sharp contrast to this true tension, Clarence is in the bathroom taking a piss and having another imaginary conversation with ‘Elvis,’ that is, he’s experiencing another of his romantic escapes from reality. When he comes out, though, reality will hit him in the head…or rather, scrape against it.

Officer Dimes demonstrates something we all know too well: cops are just as inclined to murder as anyone else; he deliberately shoots and kills Boris in revenge for killing Nicholson. Dimes also shoots at Clarence, making Alabama shoot the cop in revenge.

When the shooting is over, the only survivors are Dick, Alabama, and Clarence…though in Tarantino’s original script, the bullet that grazes Clarence‘s eyes kills him, too (Tarantino, page 128). Before dying, he says he can’t see because of the blood in his eyes: this is how Mr. Brown, played by Tarantino, dies in Reservoir Dogs; for when he wrote the script for True Romance, he identified with Clarence (page x). Scott liked Clarence too much to let him die, though, so he arranged for a happy, romantic ending instead.

Now, Tarantino’s unhappy ending focuses on the true, rather than the romance, which is why I agree with him that his ending is better. Our fantasies are always interrupted by harsh reality, in how, for example, capitalism sells us fantasies to make us think we’re escaping a reality we cannot escape.

In the original ending, Alabama, despairing over Clarence’s death, leaves the hotel with Donowitz’s money and drives away in Clarence’s car (pages 132-133). She stops at one point, breaks down and cries, then puts his pistol in her mouth (page 133); but she decides instead to live after reading the napkin on which is written, “You’re so cool.” Then she gets out of the car, takes the briefcase of money, and walks away from the car forever (page 134).

Reality is harsh, but not hopeless.

Quentin Tarantino, True Romance, London, Faber and Faber, 1996

Bellies

The bellies
of the fat cats
are as swollen as
their pride. They
need to die…t.

The stomachs
of us First World
citizens, yes, ours,
are similarly
bloated. We
suck our guts
in, but still it
shows. Obesity

is
not
a
pro-
blem
in
the
glo-
bal
sou-
th.

The
pou-
ched
bell-
ies
of
the
poor
are
emp-
ty
sacks
of
air.

They
must
be
fed.
Deaf
are
we
to
the
cries
of
the
hun-
gry.

We waste
food that
they could
eat. Our diet,
so tied to their
dying, must be
tightened.

Only
then
can
all
the
poor
be
freed
of the
tight
grip of
empire’s
might.

Their full
bellies means
the end of our
emptiness.

The Legendary Life of the Buddha

undefined

I: Introduction

My commentary below is just a personal interpretation of the symbolism of the Buddha myth; furthermore, the focus here isn’t on the historical Buddha, of which little can be known for sure, but on the legendary narratives. I am neither a Buddhist, nor am I anywhere close to being an expert on the study of Buddhism. The following is just my thoughts on the meaning behind his legendary life story, for what they’re worth, so take it with a generous dose of salt.

The Buddha was known by many names, including Shakyamuni, “the sage of the Shakyas.” The Shakya people had a small kingdom, Kapilavastu, just south of the Himalayas in India; this was around the sixth century BCE.

Kapilavastu was a peaceful kingdom ruled by King Suddhodana and Queen Maya. Later legend claims that the Buddha was born into a royal family (though modern scholars doubt this), which should give us some idea of the political agendas behind such legends. The close association thus assumed to exist between those of high birth and those who are spiritually advanced is another example of how religious traditionalism is used to justify and perpetuate class differences and authoritarianism.

II: Queen Maya

One full-moon night, Maya dreamed of a white elephant with six tusks coming down from the heavens and entering her womb from the right side, prophesying the birth of a great man. The white of the elephant suggests spiritual purity, the god Indra has such an elephant (the animal being seen as a symbol of greatness), and one has often seen wealthy men riding in howdahs on elephants; so we see again the association of high spirituality with a high social position.

Pregnant Maya left the king and returned to her parents’ home, as was the custom of the time. On the way, she stopped in a garden in a park in Lumbini. Here, among the beautiful flowers, she gave birth to the prince under a sal tree. He would be named Siddhartha (“the All-Successful One,” or “He Who Achieves His Aim”) Gautama.

Soon after Siddhartha’s birth, a wise hermit named Asita came from the mountains to the palace to congratulate the king and queen for their new child. Yet he was sad, because as an old man, Asita knew he’d never live to see the baby grow into the greatness he was destined to have: to be a king of kings, or to be a Buddha.

III: Joy and Sadness

Again, we see the association of spiritual greatness with regal nobility, a justification of the caste system that allows the rich to stay rich and keeps the poor in squalor. Asita’s sadness also reflects the dialectical relationship between happiness and sadness: a great child was born, but the hermit would never see that greatness come to fruition. One is reminded of Verse 58 in the Tao Te Ching: “Misery is what happiness rests upon./Happiness is what misery lurks beneath.”

Added to this juxtaposition of joy and sorrow was the death, only seven days after Siddhartha’s birth, of his mother, Queen Maya. Though he was too young to remember her, he in his great spiritual development was greatly affected by her loss. Maya is Sanskrit for “illusion.” Illusion dialectically gives birth to enlightenment. The brief flowering of the sal tree symbolizes impermanence, so this combined with her death emphasizes the association between birth, death, illusion, and impermanence. The young prince would have felt all this.

Not being able to have the Oedipally-desired mother, Lacan observed, is a lack giving rise to desire for anything to replace her, a replacement that never satisfies, the objet petit a. The prince, in his wisdom, knew he’d never have that satisfaction, so he’d soon learn to give up desiring altogether.

Photo by David Bartus on Pexels.com

IV: Growing Up

He and his cousin, Devadatta, were skilled at archery. When the latter shot down a flying swan, though, the prince was full of sadness to see it in pain. Devadatta claimed it belonged to him, but Siddhartha, having pulled out the arrow and rubbing its wound to heal it, wanted it. They went to the court of a sage to decide what would happen to the animal. The sage, wisely knowing that the one who saves an animal has more right to it than the one who tries to kill it, favoured the prince, so it was his. Devadatta would resent this, and the cousins would be spiritual rivals later in life.

When the prince came of age, he wanted to know what the world outside his palace walls was like. His father, the king–worried that he would want to be a spiritual teacher rather than his successor to the throne–tried to distract him with indulgence in worldly pleasures: beautiful dancing girls, wealth and finery, etc. Siddhartha still wanted to go outside.

Here, instead of seeing the association between high spirituality and high social rank, we see the contradiction between the two. The prince would resolve this contradiction, to an extent, by marrying his cousin Yaśodhara and, by her, fathering a son, Rāhula; but he would still go outside.

V: His Four Trips Outside

On his first trip out, through the East Gate, he would see an old man. On his second trip, through the West Gate, he’d see a sick man. On his third, through the South Gate, he’d see a dead man’s funeral. This must have brought out feelings of his dead mother, his unattainable objet petit a.

Suffering is universal…especially for the poor.

On his fourth trip, out the North Gate, the prince saw something encouraging, for a change: he saw a holy man sitting in peace. This gave the prince hope that suffering can be ended…even in a world of poverty.

VI: Giving Up His Power

The contradiction between high social rank and high spiritual attainment is highlighted once again when we see the prince having made the Great Renunciation, giving up his position of regal power to help humanity and end suffering. Siddhartha’s decision to do this should be an inspiration to all in positions of political or financial power: give it up, and end class conflict. Sadly, far too few of them heed the message this inspiring renunciation gives us.

Siddhartha was twenty-nine years old when he chose to go from prince to mendicant, going from holy man to holy man for spiritual guidance, and practicing strict asceticism. None of the teachers had the answers he sought.

His asceticism grew more extreme; first, he ate only one grain of rice a day, then he stopped eating altogether. Five men became his disciples. It had been six years since he’d left the castle. His extreme self-denial was harming his physical health.

Photo by Emily Hopper on Pexels.com

VII: From Suffering to Enlightenment

Just as Siddhartha’s ventures outside the castle walls showed him visions of increasing suffering, then a glimpse of holy inspiration, so would the increasing suffering he felt from his extreme asceticism lead to the holy inspiration of discovering the Middle Path.

The dialectical relationship between this increase of suffering, leading to greater spiritual awareness, can be compared to the points on a circular continuum that I’ve used the ouroboros to symbolize: the point of departure is the serpent’s biting head, the increasing suffering is movement along the length of its coiled body towards its bitten tail, and the enlightenment is a return to the biting head. I’ve written of the ouroboros as a symbol of the dialectical relationship between opposites (which meet where the serpent’s head bites its tail) in many other blog posts.

A girl named Sujata gave almost-dying Siddhartha some rice pudding and milk, and helped restore his health. His five followers, though, disappointed at his ‘weak resolve,’ left him.

VIII: Meditating Under the Bodhi Tree

Now better, he sat at the foot of the Bodhi Tree to begin meditating. He was determined not to get up until he’d attained enlightenment. This hard resolve of his is an interesting parallel to his previous, self-starving effort, with the crucial difference being one of success instead of near self-destruction. Of course, nirvana is a kind of destruction…that is, of an illusory self.

Mara the demon tried to tempt Siddhartha from finding enlightenment through pleasure (i.e., the devil’s three beautiful daughters) and through guilt (i.e., from having abandoned his kingdom). He resisted these temptations.

He was assailed with the temptations of Mara again, whose devils rained arrows on him; yet in his growing power, Siddhartha either transformed the arrows into flowers or had the arrows fly back at the devils. Turning arrows into flowers symbolizes the wise way to deal with hate: to turn it into love; one is reminded of Verse 197 in the Dhammapada: “Indeed we live very happily, not hating anyone among those who hate; among men who hate we live without hating anyone.” Also, there is Verse 5: “For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an eternal rule.” The arrows flying back at the devils symbolize bad karma.

Mara claimed that only he could be the greatest, and that Siddhartha had no claim to greatness. Siddhartha responded by touching the earth, an appeal to the mother goddess, who acknowledged him as a great sage. Mara knew he lost.

IX: Becoming the Buddha

Finally, at the age of thirty-five, Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. From now on, he would be known as Buddha (“the Enlightened One”), Shakyamuni (“the Sage of the Shakyas”), the World-Honoured-One, or Tathāgata (“the One Thus-gone”).

He now understood the Four Noble Truths: the universality of unhappiness in the world; the cause of unhappiness, being desire; the way to end unhappiness, being the extinguishment of desire; and the following of the Eightfold Path to end unhappiness.

He got up from the Bodhi Tree and went to Benares to teach others how to end suffering, for his compassion for all–those who didn’t know the Dharma–necessitated his helping them. Mara tried to tempt him away from sermonizing, too, but of course the demon failed.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

X: His First Sermon

The Buddha found his five old followers who’d thought he’d given up on trying to find enlightenment. They quickly realized how wrong they were about him, and they became his disciples again. To them, he preached his first sermon, in the Deer Park in Benares.

He taught that one must avoid the extremes of indulgence in pleasure, on the one hand, and of self-mortification, or enduring extreme pain, on the other. Doing neither is useful or worthwhile. The Middle Path, avoiding the extremes, is useful and worthwhile. He also taught the Four Noble Truths.

One must follow the Noble Eightfold Path, in which each part builds on and reinforces the preceding and succeeding parts: right understanding, right intention, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

One cannot have the right intentions without the right belief system, or understanding of the world, as a foundation for those intentions. Of all the good deeds one can do, speaking the right way (i.e., with kindness and honesty) should be the easiest. Good deeds should lead naturally to doing honest work (i.e., non-exploitative work, and not cheating people).

Right effort (i.e., resisting temptations before they arise, abandoning sin when it has arisen; also, arousing and maintaining wholesome states of mind) should grow from this living of a good life, and in turn that effort should lead to right mindfulness (i.e., always keeping one’s mind on the goal of liberation). Right concentration, that is, meditation, is an extension of mindfulness to every second of one’s thoughts.

XI: No Gods, No Self

Since the gods are part of the phenomenological world of pain and suffering, they cannot help us attain nirvana, which is a state of no-thing-ness, of a fluid, ever-changing reality that is unlike any perceived ‘fixed’ state of being. Our attachment to previous forms of being, wishing them never to go away, is what causes our suffering.

Without the aid of the gods, we must rely on ourselves. As daunting a task as this is, to attain enlightenment on our own, we nonetheless have Three Jewels to take refuge in: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

When one speaks of ‘self’-reliance, though, one must use the word self with caution; for the Buddha taught that there is no self (anattā, or anātman), in direct contrast with the Hindu concept of one’s eternal soul, Atman, being one and the same as Brahman, or the eternal oneness behind the whole universe. If all is impermanent (anicca), there can be no soul; karma is what binds people to the cycle of reincarnation.

How can one reconcile the contradiction between the Hindu conception of Atman with the Buddhist concept of anātman? I use the dialectical relationship between opposites to do that. Impermanence is, paradoxically, the one permanent reality. Self and other are unified, as I see them; Atman and Brahman are one. Brahman is an infinite ocean of perpetual change, ever flowing from one temporary state to another, from one dialectical opposite to the other, and we are a part of that endless flowing, though we think we each have a self. Lacan recognized what a lie the notion of a fixed, permanent self is, in our experience of the mirror stage.

In any case, the Buddha was not interested in speculation about theological or philosophical matters; he just wanted to end suffering, and thus to focus on what would help end suffering. These issues were recorded in the Lesser Mālunkyāputta Sutra.

XII: The Fire Serpent

He went to the Kingdom of Magadha, where he stayed overnight in the hall of the sacred fire of Agni, worshipped by the three Kasyapa brothers. There, a fire snake emerged to attack him, but he used his radiant power to charm, calm, and defeat it. The three brothers were so impressed (and repentant that they’d tried to have the Buddha killed) that they and their many disciples joined the Sangha. (The story is represented on a fragment of a stone slab from Gandhara.) He would teach them the Fire Sermon.

The vanquishing of the fire serpent symbolizes the defeating of the fires of desire. In this story, I also see, in the calming of the snake, an illustrative example of what in psychoanalytic circles is Bion‘s theory of containment. Normally something a mother does to pacify her agitated baby, or what a psychotherapist does for his or her psychotic analysand, containment involves receiving the agitation of a distressed person (this agitation and distress being known as the contained) and being a container for it. One detoxifies the contained distress and returns it to the upset person, but it’s now in a tolerable, acceptable form. (See here for more on Bion and other psychoanalytic ideas.)

The Buddha made himself the container of the fire snake’s ferocity (the contained). He used what Bion called alpha function to soothe and calm the snake. The ‘heart of the Buddha,’ that is, his calm, loving, compassionate way replaced the ferocity with calmness and returned this now-soothing energy to the serpent. This kind of soothing and pacifying, reflected in the Christian tradition by the notion of ‘turning the other cheek,’ is the ideal way to deal with the hostility of other people. If only it weren’t so difficult to do…

Photo by Sadaham Yathra on Pexels.com

XIII: Spreading His Message

The Buddha’s message spread so far that it was received by followers of all social classes, from the poorest and hungriest to the richest of kings, including King Bimbisara of Magadha, who donated a garden of squirrels to the Sangha, the Bamboo Grove Monastery.

The Buddha returned to the Shakyas to see his father, King Suddhodana, his wife, Yaśodharā, and his son, Rāhula. The king had hoped he’d be dressed better, but the Buddha knew he didn’t need fine clothing. Purity of heart is more important. Soon, all the Shakyas became Buddhists.

These incidents, including the donation of the Prince Jeta Monastery through the (unnecessary) covering of the ground with thousands of gold coins, show how the Buddha’s message of love, compassion, and conquering of desire can win over even the wealthy and powerful.

XIV: The Three Poisons

Still, conquering our passions is never easy, even for committed monks. The three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion must be constantly guarded against; and even monks can miss the mark, as the Buddha noted in the quarrel among the monks of Kosambi, which even he couldn’t resolve (over a fairly minor problem, unclean water that mosquitoes might breed in), and threatened a rending asunder of the congregation.

Suffering isn’t caused only by wanting to keep things we cannot keep (greed) because of the reality of impermanence; it’s also caused by not accepting the unpleasant things that must be (hatred), even if just temporarily. The delusion behind all of this is the belief in a permanent pleasure and permanent non-existence of pain. All things, both good and bad, flow to us and away from us, like ocean waves.

XV: Devadatta

Speaking of sinful Buddhist followers, we mustn’t forget the Buddha’s envious cousin, Devadatta, who as a fellow Buddhist monk formed a splinter group to rival the Sangha. According to the Theravada Vinaya, Devadatta persuaded Prince Ajātasattu to have his father, King Bimbisara, killed (or jailed?); then he hired mercenaries to kill the Buddha.

But the mercenaries couldn’t bring themselves to do so horrible a deed, and they joined the Sangha instead. Devadatta made other attempts on the Buddha’s life, such as throwing a huge rock from up high on a mountain to crush him (it missed), and releasing an intoxicated elephant to trample him (as with the fire serpent, the Buddha used his powers of love and compassion to tame the elephant).

Devadatta eventually repented of his sin, but karma would have its way, and when he approached the Buddha, the earth opened up and sucked him into the Niraya Hell.

Photo by Daniela Ruiz on Pexels.com

XVI: Angulimāla

There are sinners who pretend to be good, like Devadatta; then there are those who are unabashedly bad, like Angulimāla, a robber who murdered hundreds, having cut off a finger from each victim to wear on a necklace (hence, his name).

When he encountered the Buddha, Angulimāla had already murdered 999 victims and was craving his thousandth, to fulfill a demand made by his old teacher for a thousand fingers. So wicked had Angulimāla become that he was actually considering murdering his own mother! Karma would never support such a crime, hence the Buddha’s intervention.

When he appeared on the road through a forest in Kosala, Angulimāla began chasing after him. Strangely, the killer was running as fast as he could, with his sword drawn, but the Buddha was just calmly walking. Even more strangely, instead of catching up with the Buddha, Angulimāla found the distance between himself and his prey lengthening!

The killer yelled at the Buddha to stop, to which he replied that he’d already stopped, and it was his pursuer who needed to stop. The killer repented and became a monk, who then had to endure the wrath of the families and friends of all of his murder victims; the Buddha told him to endure their hatred with patience, for such was his karmic burden.

This story demonstrates the superiority of calm over the passions; it also teaches how even the worst of people can be redeemed and made good.

XVII: The Buddha Enters Parinirvana

The Buddha spread his message for almost fifty years before finally falling ill and dying at about the age of eighty. He was going from Rajagaha to Savatthi. He reached a forest bordering Kusinara and rested between two large sala trees.

His disciple, Ananda, made a bed for him under the shade of the two trees. Subhadda, the Brahmin, came to see him, and he became the Buddha’s last disciple. He lay on the bed, reclining.

As he lay dying, the Buddha consoled his mourning disciples by saying that all things arise and pass away. “All compound things are transitory,” he said. “Seek out your liberation with diligence.” Then he died.

He went into the state of parinirvana, the end of his last physical life and into nirvana. Twentieth century scholars gave his dates as 563 BCE to 483 BCE, but recent scholarship considers the following dates as more accurate: from about 480 to about 400 BCE.

XVIII: Prodigal Sons

There is a story in the Lotus Sutra, about a young man who runs away from home, then, destitute, accidentally finds himself returned to the city of his (unrecognized) father, now a wealthy old man who recognizes his son and wants to ensure the boy inherits his wealth when he dies. Christians sometimes misinterpret this story, thinking that when the father gives his son work, he is making the boy do penance for his former unfilial ways. Part of the motive for such a misinterpretation is to present the forgiveness of the father in the Christian parable as proof of the ‘superiority’ of Christianity over Buddhism. Apparently, only Christianity offers grace; other religions require atonement.

The father in the Buddhist story, however, already forgives his son, and would eagerly have him back; but the boy, in his shame and impoverishment, would never accept being taken in as the son of such a rich man. The father accepts this mistaken feeling of his son, and employs him only to ensure that the boy is always nearby. He will tell his son the truth when the boy is ready to hear it. He also goes over to his son in filthy clothes and works with him.

When the son eventually learns who the rich old man really is, and that he is to inherit his father’s wealth, he is overjoyed to receive so unexpected a fortune, one unearned and given as a free gift. His job of cleaning away dung was not penance, but just something he did because of his inability to comprehend that he already had his father’s favour.

The father represents the Buddha as understood in the Mahayana tradition; the son represents those Theravada arhats who would never believe themselves capable of attaining Buddhahood. The purpose of the story is to tell Theravada Buddhists that, while they may continue practicing Buddhism in their usual way, they may become Buddhas just as Siddhartha did.

In an extended sense, this story can be interpreted to mean that we all have potential Buddha-nature. The Mahayana tradition sees no distinction between nirvana and samsara, two opposites that I would consider dialectical in nature. These things put together can be seen as a kind of grace, encouraging us, as the dying Buddha advised us, to seek our liberation with diligence.

Photo by Rodolfo Clix on Pexels.com

Blood

F
a
r

t
o
o

m
u
c
h

b
l
o
o
d

has been spilt
on the ground,

t
h
e

b
l
o
o
d

o
f

t
h
e

innocent,
blameless
civilians.

R
i
c
h

m
e
n

h
a
v
e

b
o
m
b
s

d
r
o
p
p
e
d

on cities
and houses.

O
n
e

d
a
y
,

t
h
e
y
‘
l
l

f
a
l
l

to the ground
where we are,

f
r
o
m

t
h
e
i
r

h
i
g
h

s
e
a
t
s

o
f

p
o
w
e
r

to the dirt
where we’re buried.

T
h
e
i
r

b
l
o
o
d

w
i
l
l

r
e
p
a
y

all the blood
that they’ve spilt.

T
h
e
i
r

l
a
s
t

b
l
o
o
d
,

r
e
d
e
e
m
i
n
g

that first blood
of ours,

will mean no more wounds,
the beginnings of peace.

Analysis of ‘Jojo Rabbit’

Jojo Rabbit is a 2019 comedy-satire-drama written and directed by Taika Waititi (based on Christine Leunens‘s 2008 book Caging Skies), and starring Roman Griffin Davis in the title role, Waititi, Scarlett Johansson, Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, and Thomasin McKenzie. Jojo is a ten-year-old German boy indoctrinated by Nazi ideology, hoping to join the Deutsches Jungvolk (DJ) in the Hitler Youth, and having an imaginary friend, a fanciful, buffoonish Hitler (played by Waititi).

The film got almost universal acclaim, especially for the performances, direction, screenplay, visual style, musical score, and production values. It was chosen by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute as one of the ten best films of the year.

Here are some quotes:

Jojo Betzler: Adolph…I don’t think I can do this.
Adolf Hitler: What? Of course you can. Sure, you’re a little bit scrawny and a bit unpopular and you can’t tie your shoelaces even though you’re 10 years old, but you’re still the bestest, most loyal little Nazi I’ve ever met. Not to mention the fact you’re really good looking. So you’re gonna get out there and you’re gonna have a great time, okay?
Jojo Betzler: Okay.
Adolf Hitler: That’s the spirit, okay. [Adolf turns Jojo around] Heil me, man.
Jojo Betzler: Heil Hitler.

Captain Klenzendorf: Today you boys will be involved in such activities as marching, bayonet drills, grenade throwing, trench digging, map reading, gas defence, camouflage, ambush techniques, war games, firing guns and blowing stuff up. [boys cheer] The girls will practice important womanly duties such as dressing wounds, making beds and learning how to get pregnant.
Fraulein Rahm: I had eighteen kids for Germany. Such a great year to be a girl!

‘Let them say whatever they want. People used to say a lot of nasty things about me. “Oh, this guy’s a lunatic!” “Oh, look at that psycho! He’s gonna get us all killed!”‘ –Hitler

[Rosie and Jojo come upon six people hanging from a gallows in the town square] Jojo Betzler: What did they do?
Rosie: What they could.

Elsa Korr: You know what I am.
Jojo Betzler: No.
Elsa Korr: Yes. Say it. Say it!
Jojo Betzler: A Jew?
Elsa Korr: Gesundheit.

“There are no weak Jews. I am descended from those who wrestle angels and kill giants. We were chosen by God. You were chosen by a pathetic little man who can’t even grow a full moustache.” –Elsa

Jojo Betzler: I said to draw where Jews live. This is just a stupid picture of my head.
Elsa Korr: Yeah, that’s where we live.

Rosie: You’re growing up too fast. Ten-year-olds shouldn’t be celebrating war and talking politics. You should be climbing trees and then falling out of those trees.
Jojo Betzler: But the Führer says when we win, it is us, young boys who will rule the world.
Rosie: Pfft! The Reich is dying. We’re going to lose the war and then what are you going to do, hmm? Life is a gift. We must celebrate it. We have to dance to show God we are grateful to be alive.
Jojo Betzler: Well, I won’t dance. Dancing is for people who don’t have a job.
Rosie: Dancing is for people who are free. It’s an escape from all this.

“You and your friends may have heard a rumor that Hitler only has one ball. This is nonsense. He has four.” –Deertz, to Jojo

“You two seem to be getting on well!” –Hitler, to Jojo, annoyed that the boy is starting to like Elsa

“She doesn’t seem like a bad person.” –Jojo, defending his friendship with Elsa to ‘Hitler’

“You’re not a Nazi, Jojo. You’re a ten-year-old kid who likes swastikas and likes dressing up in a funny uniform and wants to be part of a club.” –Elsa

“Fuck off, Hitler!” –Jojo [then kicks him out the window]

Johannes “Jojo” (which incidentally, with German pronunciation, would sound like ‘yo-yo‘) is a lonely little boy without his father and sister; he just wants to fit in. The problem is that he lives in one of the most exclusionary societies in history–Nazi Germany.

Having so few people in his real life to connect with, Jojo has to split his ego, along with the objects of the real world that his ego would connect with, into a pair of opposites: one of this pair libidinously linking with an idealized, exciting object of his fantasies (his imaginary friend in Hitler); and the other, an anti-libidinal ego linking with a hated, rejecting object–the conception of Jews that he’s been indoctrinated into believing is what real Jews are.

Counteracting this splitting in his mind is the ironic casting for ‘Hitler’ (Waititi is part Maori, part Jew) and the Jewish girl, Elsa Korr (McKenzie, a non-Jew, is a New Zealander of English and Scottish descent). The implication in this casting, it seems, is to make a plea for tolerance and inclusion.

To help relate a story set in the mid-1940s to our time, in which fascism is again rising (and, of course, to enhance the comedic effect), the characters speak with German accents, but also use contemporary English colloquialisms. Adding to the irony is how Jojo’s hero, Hitler, is a cartoonish clown who smokes (the real Hitler would have already permanently given up smoking decades before the time of this movie). Jojo thus has an odd way of portraying his idealizations in his mind.

Since Hitler was idealized as the hero of an indoctrinated nation, he was rather like the rock star of his time, idolized by a German public as blind to his faults as a rock star’s teenage fans are to his or hers. Accordingly, as Jojo is going through the streets of his town proudly doing his “Heil Hitler” Nazi salute, we hear the Beatles singing their German version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which is “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand” (“Come, Give Me Your Hand”). Footage is seen of young German women screaming in ecstasy at the sight of Hitler, just as teenage girls in the 1960s would have at the sight of the Fab Four (I discussed the comparison of the idolatry of fascism with that of rock stars in my analysis of Pink Floyd: the Wall).

Because of his indoctrination, Jojo has built up a False Self of being a ruthless killer of all enemies of the Third Reich. With the DJ knife he’s been given, a symbolic phallus, he fantasizes about stabbing his enemies with it.

When this killer instinct of his is put to the test, though, his hidden True Self, a gentle boy who’d never want to harm a defenceless animal, emerges in his inability to kill a rabbit. From this, he earns the nickname of “Jojo Rabbit,” and he runs away from the Nazi youths who mock him. It doesn’t matter that he’s an “Aryan”: even he cannot fit in with the Nazi club.

It’s fitting that, earlier, we hear Tom Waits‘s song “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” during the training activities of the Deutsches Jungvolk: these are people whose thinking is completely distorted by politically immature thinking. Few white supremacists ever want to outgrow their collectively narcissistic ideology.

Desperate to prove his ‘worthiness’ as a brave Nazi, Jojo lets his imaginary friend inspire him to grab a Stielhandgranate and throw it without proper training. He is badly injured and scarred as a result of the inevitable accident, and is now bad-mouthed as ‘ugly’ by his fellow Nazis.

Only the love of his mother, Rosie (Johansson), can soothe him, though his Nazi indoctrination makes him none too appreciative of her anti-Naziism. These feelings of hers are especially evident when he learns she’s been hiding a Jewish teen in their house!

Before he discovers her, he has been wandering about lonely in his house, visiting the bedroom of his dead sister, Inge. The juxtaposition of being in her room with finding her old classmate, Elsa, immediately after establishes the beginnings of a transference of his feelings for the former girl onto the latter, though he’ll have to overcome his antisemitic prejudices first.

Another association of Inge with Elsa comes later, when the latter pretends to be the former in order not to be caught by the Gestapo inspecting the house. This tense scene strengthens Jojo’s transference of his sister onto Elsa, and we can see the empathic fear he has for the Jewish girl’s life.

His realization that she’s “a Jew,” followed by her saying “Gesundheit,” is–apart from being one of the best jokes in the film–full of resonant meaning. “Achoo!”–the expulsion of germs from the nose in a sneeze–is symbolically a projection of what’s sick inside a Nazi onto a Jew, the disease of antisemitism as a projected self-hate.

Similarly, Jojo’s unmitigated terror at having found her hiding in his home is a projection of the fear he causes a Jew to feel from having been found by a Nazi. Her hiding place is symbolic of the unconscious, for all of his absurd beliefs about Jews are just that–all in his head (as Elsa points out to him in her “Dummkopf” drawing of him), with no basis in external reality, everything bad in himself repressed, split-off, and projected outside.

When Elsa takes Jojo’s DJ knife, then later another knife he’s got from the kitchen in an apparent need to defend himself from her, these are symbolic castrations. Furthermore, when he blusters about his supposed Aryan superiority, she quickly overpowers him and puts him in his place. When he mentions his bizarre beliefs about Jews, she has no choice but to call him an idiot.

Nonetheless, the only way she can cure him of his belief in antisemitic canards is, temporarily, to humour him by going along with his nonsense. In this sense, she is playing the role of psychotherapist for him, taking in the agitation of his prejudices, containing them, then returning them to him in a detoxified form…or, at least, in progressively less toxic forms.

Wishing to write a book about Jews, he asks her to tell him all about her “race.” She repeats back to him a number of the absurd canards he already believes, while also adding false ideas to make fun of his beliefs (feeding her well will kill her, apparently), or to turn the tables on him and get him to realize who the real monsters are around him (Jews are like Nazis, only human).

His unconscious transference of dead Inge onto Elsa will help him in his ‘psychotherapy.’ Since, if he reports Elsa to the Gestapo, not only will she be taken away, but also he and Rosie will be, for having protected her, he must realize that this Jew is connected to his family intimately. He’ll thus have to give up his belief that Jews and “Aryans” are irreconcilably different.

His mother has been trying to find the real Jojo buried deep down under his Nazi False Self, but she has been failing where Elsa will ultimately succeed. This is partly because Rosie focuses on being cheerful and optimistic, whereas Elsa faces the dark, painful root of Jojo’s problem: his loss of family, his loss of connection with real people.

The boy has lost his father, missing in action and secretly working with the anti-Nazi resistance in Italy, as his mother is doing in their German town. Inge is dead, and his mother will be hanged as an enemy of the Nazi state. Because of his Hitler/imaginary friend, Jojo doesn’t sufficiently appreciate his actual friend, Yorki (played by Archie Yates).

Rosie would dance in gleeful anticipation of the imminent Nazi loss of the war, but setting this example for Jojo won’t cure him of his indoctrination. We can dance when we’re free…but Jojo hasn’t freed his mind yet.

He’ll be mentally freed when he can integrate the split parts of his mind (to use the terminology of WRD Fairbairn, these parts of his mind are: his Libidinal Ego, linked with the Exciting Object–‘Hitler’; and his Anti-libidinal Ego, linked with the Rejecting Object–‘the Jew’), to allow him to relate his True Self (or in Fairbairn’s terminology, Jojo’s Central Ego) with real people in the external world (the Ideal Object–for Jojo, this is exemplified in Elsa and Yorki).

His frustration with his mother, over her refusal to conform with his Nazi ideals, makes her, in his mind, what Melanie Klein called the ‘bad mother,’ intensifying his splitting into what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position. Rosie’s execution will cause Jojo to mourn that ‘bad mother,’ and to wish to reintegrate her good and bad sides in his mind, to experience the depressive position.

His interactions with Elsa will help him lay the foundations for such an integration. In his attempt to brag about the ‘superiority’ of German ‘Aryan’ culture, he can only bring up the names of classical composers such as Bach, Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven (as for Germans other than musicians, I suppose Goethe slipped Jojo’s mind), whereas Elsa can mention talented, famous Jews in a wide variety of areas, including science (Einstein), poetry (Rilke had a Jewish mother), magicians (Houdini), artists (Modigliani), and even religious founders (Moses and Jesus).

One of the major things that makes Jojo change his mind about Elsa is when she mentions her fiancé, Nathan (who Jojo eventually learns has died of tuberculosis); but when Jojo forges a letter claiming that Nathan wants to dump her, Jojo hears her softly weeping in her hiding place. The sound of her sobs makes him feel something one would never expect a Nazi to feel: compassion for a Jew. Therefore, he quickly fakes another letter, claiming Nathan doesn’t want to leave her.

This moment in the film proves my point about what Jojo needs to be cured of his Nazi indoctrination: relationships. He’s lost most of his family relationships (while Rosie’s still alive), so he’s replaced them with his imaginary Hitler-friend, and he desperately wants to join the Deutsches Jungvolk. But when they reject him, and when Elsa opens his mind, he finds himself more and more ready to reject ‘Hitler.’ Think of all those neo-Nazi skinheads, and how much of their anger and hate comes from an aggravation of social alienation.

At first, ‘Hitler’ is merely a bumbling fool (and, come to think of it now, so was the real Hitler). Some have criticized Jojo Rabbit for its ‘inaptly’ comic portrayal of Hitler, but recall the words of a German Protestant whose antisemitic writings made him, ironically, among the Nazis’ favourite reading, Martin Luther: “I often laugh at Satan, and there is nothing that makes him so angry as when I attack him to his face, and tell him that through God I am more than a match for him.” Later, when Jojo grows more independent in his thinking, we see, more vividly, his imaginary friend’s dark side.

When the Gestapo does an inspection of his house, Jojo is worried that Elsa–him having fully achieved a transference of Inge onto her (who is impersonating his sister at the time) in his mind–will be arrested. Yet they presumably have instead found something incriminating on Rosie (i.e., her “Free Germany” messages), for she is executed soon after.

Just before he finds her hanging, Jojo has been following a bright blue butterfly fluttering before him. In other words, he has been just beginning to appreciate life and its beauty before experiencing the trauma of seeing her distinctive shoes hanging, just below eye level, before him.

As a last, symbolic gesture of love for her, he does for her what she has done so many times before for him: he ties her shoelaces. Shots of eye-like windows of the houses, surrounding him and the hanged at the gallows in the town square, suggest that he should be careful of who’s watching him show love to an executed enemy of the Third Reich.

Captain Klenzendorf (or ‘Captain K’–played by Rockwell), during the Gestapo’s inspection of Jojo’s house, has lied to protect Elsa in going along with her impersonation of Inge. Deertz gets Jojo’s DJ knife back from her and puts it down to look at Jojo’s book on Jews; then Captain K picks it up and returns it to him. (Since it’s understood that the captain is a closet gay Nazi in a relationship with his second-in-command, Finkel [Alfie Allen], we can see how he’d naturally sympathize with other “Untermenschen” like Elsa).

In his grief and rage over his mother’s execution, Jojo, with the few remaining crumbs of Nazi in him, wants to stab Elsa with his knife, blaming her in his mind for Rosie’s death. Elsa stops the blade from going deep inside her, but it does cut in a little bit. She’s allowed the tip to poke a tiny hole in her upper right chest, by her shoulder.

Her receiving of the blade symbolizes her once again curing him of his Nazi mentality by containing his rage (the contained symbolized by his knife, her body symbolizing the container; see above for links explaining Bion‘s theory of containment; see also this link for his and other psychoanalytic concepts). She must allow him his moment of rage before she can detoxify it. Note the feminine symbol for the container, a yonic symbolism in her wound, and the masculine symbol for the contained, his phallic knife.

Jojo loves Elsa and calls her his “girlfriend,” hence the sexual symbolism of their container/contained relationship. His conflict over this love versus his residual antisemitism accounts for the violence of this containing of his knife (a negative containment). The conflict is also expressed in the growing jealousy that his Hitler/imaginary friend feels…while lying in Jojo’s bed!

Since the Nazis know they are losing the war, Captain K has to prepare a defence against the invading Americans from the West and the Russians from the East. It’s interesting how the Russians are described and portrayed in the harshest way (in this bourgeois liberal Hollywood film), and are never called Soviets. “They’re worse than anyone,” Yorki tells Jojo. (!)

The American soldiers drive around the captured German town showing off their flag, thus being portrayed as liberators in the film; while the Soviets are seen as just a bunch of ruthless executioners, not only of all the bad Nazis, but also of our finally openly gay Captain K in his colourful, flamboyant uniform. Now, anyone who has properly read history knows it was mainly the Soviets who saved Europe from fascism, having sacrificed so many more Russian lives than the sacrificed lives of their Western counterparts. Also, it was the Americans and West Germans who gave jobs to many ex-Nazis to help them fight the USSR during the Cold War.

The tension between East Berlin and the ex-Nazis working with NATO in West Berlin, among other causes, led to the building of the Berlin Wall, or Anti-fascist Protection Wall, as the East Germans called it. Such is the needed correction to all the capitalist propaganda of the Wall as an instrument of “oppression”: it was more about keeping the fascists out (and preventing the danger of World War III) than about keeping people in.

As Jojo walks about his town and sees the death and destruction all around him, he realizes that war isn’t the glorious thing he’s been indoctrinated to believe it is. He also learns from Yorki, one of his few true friends whose indoctrination is also waning, that Hitler has not only shot himself in the head in despair over losing the war, but that he’s also responsible for the atrocities the SS has committed and kept hidden from the public eye.

And so, when Jojo sees his Hitler/imaginary friend one last time, ‘Hitler’ has a bloody wound in his left temple, and he is in a particularly grouchy mood. Jojo, no longer sympathetic to him, tells him to “fuck off,” and kicks him out the window.

Because of his choice to give up his Nazi ideology and save Elsa, and because she has so bravely endured through this whole ordeal, both of them are heroes…”für einen Tag,” and I’d say for many more days after that. They are now free to dance and celebrate life, as Rosie would have wanted them to, hence we hear the German version of David Bowie‘s “Heroes.”

Now, Germany may have been split in two at the end of the war, but Jojo’s splitting has been cured. He is reintegrated and able to see people as each a mix of good and bad. He can see Elsa as a human being, and not just as “a Jew.” Having revived his ability to have relationships with real, and not imaginary, friends, he no longer needs a fascist demagogue to be his hero; nor does he need to fit in with others in a superficial, cultish way. He can be his own hero, and win…”für immer und immer.”

Archaic Trauma

[NOTE: please read the second and third paragraphs from this post before continuing. Important–don’t skip reading them!]

By “archaic,” I refer to the use of the term by post-Freudian psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein. She wrote of the terrifying archaic mother that exists in babies’ minds during their first few months, when they’re experiencing what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position. This position is a splitting of the internal object of the mother into extremes of good and bad, accompanied by intense persecutory anxiety after trying to split off and project the bad mother.

Heinz Kohut also referred to archaic feelings in the infantile mental state, old feelings that are brought back to the surface of consciousness in the adult patient through the narcissistic transferences. He studied and treated patients with narcissistic personality disorders, those who “are suffering from specific disturbances in the realm of the self and of those archaic objects cathected with narcissistic libido (self-objects) which are still in intimate connection with the archaic self (i.e., objects which are not experienced as separate and independent from the self).” (Kohut, page 3)

So I’m using “archaic” to mean old emotional experiences from early childhood and infancy, repressed as the years go by and forgotten about. Yet remember that whatever we repress comes back, though in a new and unrecognizable form.

Many of our traumas are of this archaic kind. As infants, we can’t prevent moments when our parents frustrated us, which results in us using the defence mechanism of splitting, or dividing our internal mental representations of our parents into absolute good and bad, and then projecting the bad half outward. If those parents have gone beyond being merely frustrating, and have ventured into being emotionally neglectful or even abusive, imagine how much more severe the splitting will be, and how much more severe the archaic trauma will be.

I’ve written several times before of my speculations on what my mother’s infancy and early childhood must have been like, she having been born in England in August, 1938, and doubtlessly having been surrounded by stressed-out parents and relatives during the Blitz, if not having endured the ordeal of bombings right there in their own city.

To have to take in, as a tender infant, such overwhelming agitation would have been unbearable. Such bad vibes would have had to be expelled and split off from the self. There’s no way an infant would have been able to process such archaic trauma.

The two poles of my mother’s nascent personality–those two being her infantile grandiose self, using her own mother as an empathic mirror of it, and her father as idealized parental imago–were in an unstable state because of the war. When her father died, she as a child lost the idealized pole, her beloved role model, forever; when, as I suspect, she found her now-single mother too busy and stressed to be sufficiently emotionally available for her, the other pole was insecure.

Her mother’s marrying of her now step-father must have caused some friction, that of the “No one can replace my daddy” sort. To defend herself from the psychological fragmentation that would accompany this weakening of her bipolar self–which, had it not been weakened, would have resulted in her grandiose self being let down in bearable amounts (known as “optimal frustration“), leading to mature, restrained, and healthy levels of narcissism–my mother would have had to build up a pathologically narcissistic False Self.

This False Self of hers gave her stability, allowing her to function in the world, in spite of her pathologies. That archaic trauma, however, was never resolved. Whatever gets pushed back into the unconscious will return, as I said above, though in a form that isn’t easily recognized.

I have every reason to suspect that, now grown-up, married to my dad, and a mother, she regularly behaved like a tyrant to my elder siblings, my brothers R. and F., and my sister, J, when they were little. I suspect that the bulk of the abuse they suffered from her was either before I was born, or when I was too young to know what was going on, let alone remember.

I’ve already related the story of our mother bragging (decades after the incident) about pulling down the pants of R. (then a kid) and publicly spanking him in a supermarket for “being a brat” (his fault, for all I know, could have been anywhere on a continuum from “being a brat” to just causing her narcissistic injury). “He never did it again,” she boasted, proud of her power over a little boy.

I’ll bet there were many instances of her doing this kind of thing to all three of my siblings, of her (and, to be fair to her, of our dad doing it, too) beating them (physically or mentally) into submission. The archaic trauma that they’d have felt, at so young an age, would have made it virtually impossible for them to process what had been done to them, let alone understand its true meaning.

Children at such a tender age are far too helpless to go around questioning the motives of their parents. In their state of utter dependency, children cannot afford (literally) to contemplate the possibility that their parents are, often if not almost always, bad people. When punished, bullied, threatened, or abused by Mom or Dad, a child will find it easier to blame him- or herself for the problem; this is a defence mechanism called turning against oneself.

The frustrating bad parent is nonetheless still there, and the child has to deal with the resulting pain in one form or another. As I said above, the child can engage in splitting, recognizing only the good parent and attempting to project the bad one far outside himself. This ejecting, I believe, is what R., F., and J. did with those aspects of our mother that were so hurtful. They also turned against themselves whenever she flew into narcissistic rages, instead of contemplating the far more painful possibility that one of the two crucial people feeding them, clothing them, and putting a roof over their heads often got mad at them for immature, totally unjustified reasons.

J., the golden child of our family (and therefore the top candidate to be the narcissistic second-in-command in our family, since our father tended to be bad-mouthed by our mother, that is, if she felt he’d crossed her in some way), would have been disappointed in Dad’s insufficient empathic mirroring of her grandiose self; so J. would have compensated for this insufficiency by having Mom as her idealized parental imago.

Because of this idealizing, J. would react to any of our mother’s rages with fawning. What makes my elder siblings’ world have psychological stability is their bedrock belief in the narrative that our mother was a ‘wonderful, loving family woman’…yes, one who gossiped about and bad-mouthed her nephews, stirred up resentment and division in our family, and emotionally abused me with gaslighting and lies about an autism spectrum disorder I’ve never had. Some love.

This insistence that Mom was ‘so wonderful and loving,’ just like Mom’s having told me on her deathbed that she’d given me “the most love” (i.e., more than she’d given R., F., and J., which is utter nonsense–she most obviously favoured J., her golden child), was a blatant example of reaction formation. To keep alive the myth that ‘we’re all one big happy, loving family,’ R., F., and J. speak of Mom’s wonderful love instead of facing up to the painful reality that was the opposite of this fabled love: at best, she loved us conditionally–if we gave her narcissistic supply, she was good to us; if we failed to give her that supply, there’d be hell to pay. R., F., and J. learned how to play Mom’s game.

I didn’t learn the game, because I didn’t want to (I hate phoniness). I would also pay dearly for that refusal. I paid for my individual ways by being made into the family scapegoat, or identified patient. My ‘illness’ as that ‘patient’ was the autism lie, a label used to make me feel different from everyone else, and thus to isolate me, judge me, and make me feel inferior to the rest of the family.

You see, they all had their forms of archaic trauma, and they needed to release all that pent-up pain. In me, someone five years younger than J., six years younger than F., and eight years younger than R. (making them adolescents when I was a little boy, and young adults when I was an adolescent), they had the perfect emotional punching bag. They projected everything they hated about themselves onto me, and displaced all their frustration at the split-off bad mother and bad father onto me. Getting all that negative energy out of themselves allowed them otherwise to function.

I, on the other hand, didn’t have the luxury of a younger brother or sister that I could take out all my pain on. That my elder siblings, mother, and to an extent my father, could use me for that purpose shows not only how spectacularly they failed at being that ‘loving family’ they fancied themselves to be, but also shows what cowards they were. Anyone can take his frustrations out on a powerless child; not everyone can look in the mirror and see what’s wrong with himself.

Now, to be fair, on a number of occasions, I as a teacher have found myself blowing up at students (little kids, generally) whenever they irritated me, frustrated me, or made my job stressful in any other way. I have also, unlike R., F., J., or our late mother, usually apologized sincerely to those kids and made genuine efforts to control my anger. And I have never used gaslighting on a student to make him believe he had a mental disorder he doesn’t have, to maintain power over him.

The bullying that my family subjected me to involved intimidating me to the point where I rarely dared to fight back. This, of course, started when I was very little, and they were all much bigger than I. At the time, my caving in to them and letting them walk all over me was a simple survival tactic. By the time I’d grown taller, I was already programmed never to fight back. Our mother’s typical defending of them at my expense only reinforced that programmed passivity of mine. The bullying I endured in school didn’t help, of course.

This timidity of mine, my ‘freeze‘ response, was based on my archaic trauma. If I ever dared to fight back, I knew the family would double down on me with their nastiness, because they never wanted to lose power over me. Their rationalizations over why they ‘had to’ get so nasty (I was ‘so frustrating’ and ‘annoying,’ while they apparently never were), combined with a few good deeds done here and there for me, reassured them of their collective delusion that they were always ‘loving’ to me.

Our family relationships were based on lies, for not only did Mom have her False Self, but she also assigned False Selves to us: I had to play the role of scapegoat; J. was the golden child; R. and F. were somewhere between golden children (to the extent that Mom had them be that way) and lost children (to the extent that she and Dad would have them that way); and Dad, to an extent, had the ‘tyrannical parent’ label projected onto him by Mom. None of us could be our authentic selves, for keeping the family myth alive was all important.

Curing these archaic traumas, however, is crucial to our healing process. We have to dig deep down into our early years to find the root cause of this pain. The fact that uncovering this pain is…well, painful…naturally discourages us from trying, and many of us cannot afford psychotherapy.

I find that mindfulness meditation is helpful in finding a state of calm with which to start the day, a way to contain all my agitations, but it isn’t enough. In Bion‘s containment theory, we learn (originally as babies through our mothers’ help) how to process agitating emotional experiences, detoxify them, and transform them into acceptable feelings. My ocean meditation, imagining my body to be part of an infinite ocean, with waves of energy flowing in, through, and out of me, can represent this taking in of agitating feelings, detoxifying them, and passing out the transformed, soothing vibes.

I’d be fooling myself, and I’d be being disingenuous to you, Dear Reader, if I were to say that such meditating is all we needed to do. Meditation helps a lot, I think, but we need to do more to detoxify our archaic traumas.

This is where putting trauma into words comes in. We need to face those old, painful experiences and find a way to express our feelings about them, without judgement, and all the while validating how we feel. When the trauma hit us, we felt angry, hurt, betrayed, frightened, crazy…and it’s OK to have felt that way. There’s no shame in feeling these feelings; such feelings are part of being human.

We have to feel these feelings, write about them, talk about them, create art based on them…whatever will help the healing process. We have to mourn the loving family we never got to have. This is how we get past the paranoid-schizoid position–that of splitting everyone and everything into black-and-white halves, then ejecting the bad half instead of facing it–and move into the depressive position–of integrating the split halves, seeing everyone and everything as a grey mixture of good and bad…because whatever splitting we do outside is also split inside ourselves.

In case you’re wondering, Dear Reader, if I’m at all working on integrating the split halves of my ‘good mother’ and ‘bad mother,’ as well as the split halves of my siblings, the best answer I can give you is this. Though, through the course of this and almost all of every other post I’ve written about my family, you’ve read me bash each and every one of them; I’ve also on occasion acknowledged that they all have their good sides, too, including my late mother. My negative judgement of them (and I’m sure they have the same overall assessment of me, too) is based on finding that what’s bad in them exceeds what was and is good in them.

As for the remaining ‘good mother’ in my mother, I have this quandary that I can never resolve: how am I to judge those times when she was good to me, that is, when the goodness was real kindness on her part, and when was the goodness just a reward for having given her narcissistic supply? What percentage should I attribute to the former, and what percentage to the latter? Given all the evil she’d done to me, I find I can only assume that the former portion is the smaller–much smaller–amount. Given the collective narcissism she spawned in her flying monkeys, my siblings, I can only assume that their genuinely heart-felt moments of goodness to me were also few and far between.

It’s an awful feeling going through your life knowing your family never truly loved you, that it was more of an act put on to preserve their public image than anything sincere. You go through life not knowing what real love is, not knowing who to trust, because the dysfunctional, abusive family you grew up in is how you define a ‘normal’ family, in the absence of strong alternatives. When loving people present themselves to you, you tend to reject them because your trauma won’t allow you to trust even people totally worthy of that trust.

Because of these difficulties, it is imperative that we go through these archaic traumas and find ways to heal. You don’t want to continue with the same destructive patterns that those traumas caused you to make into habits. There are lots of videos on YouTube (you might like Michelle Lee Nieves‘s videos, or perhaps Richard Grannon‘s) and online articles out there; I recommend you look for them, if you find that what I’ve written is ineffective.

Meanwhile, do mindfulness meditations, engage in self-care regularly, catch yourself whenever you engage in negative self-talk, practice self-compassion, write about your traumatic feelings (that’s what I’m doing here, for myself!), listen to positive affirmations while in a semi-hypnotic, meditative state (to make you more suggestible to the affirmations), and find communities of support.

Remember, above all, that you are none of those awful things your abusers called you. All that verbal abuse was just them projecting everything wrong with themselves onto you. None of that was you. And if you’re none of those bad things, why not begin to believe that you’re a whole lot of good things instead?

Knees

For
far
too
long
have cops pressed knees
on black men’s necks.

For
too
long
have
blacks had to kneel
before standing whites.

Yet,
at
one
time,
Colin took a knee
when they’d have him stand.

The
Man
up
top
would keep down low
those he despises.

To
end
the
pain,
we’ll have to rise,
get up, and fight.

Stand
when
we
must,
kneel when we wish,
rest when we win.

Let’s
kneel
and
pray
that, one day soon,
we all will stand

as
one,
and
no
more will whites kneel
on blacks’ sore necks.