addiction, feminine, & archetypal psychology

Marion Woodman Compilation ~ Audiobook

Part 1: Addiction to Perfection

Addicts have the desire to create that kind of perfection, and when that cannot be accomplished the negative energy comes in from the other side. it is based on illusion. The person cannot distinguish between illusion and reality. Because he cannot accept reality and himself as he is, he chooses to go for the illusion.

At the core of that addiction to perfection, I see the Medusa complex… More and more and more and more, I want, I want, I want… The body literally becomes rigid. I’ve had many people say, “I just lie in bed dead… I just am petrified.”

To face the witch straight on is to be turned to stone.

When the head comes off, she has been pregnant with Pegasus, the white winged horse of creativity, and a black horse comes out at the same time bearing a golden sword. We have the creative process as well as the sword of discretion released in the killing of Medusa.

Medusa is that craving for more and more and more of something. It’s what Jung calls the Negative Mother Complex. The negative mother is controlled by a power principle which is a pseudo kind of masculinity.

If you think of our society with our machines, our technology, and our measuring of our progress by economic growth, and wanting more and more and more matter.

We try to make ourselves safe with mother. We get as much matter as we can possibly get around us, most of it junk.

There is a terrible emptiness inside, and we try to fill our emptiness with matter.

The sensitivity in the body is protected by that fat, as it can be protected by alcohol for the time being. But the child is carrying an archetype from the parents and trying to live up to a totally unreal world.

Puers are the most interesting guys around because they are so creative, and they’re right in touch with the virgin ground of the unconscious. So that if they could once find the balance, get hold of that golden sword, there’s possibility that the creativity could come into concrete form.

Her father was very often an alcoholic, and she projects god onto that father. Of course as she grows older she projects God onto men, and her whole point of living is to serve men and to live in terms of men. To find her identity through men. In fact, such a girl will understand exactly how to connect into the unconscious of a man. She automatically does because she’s lived with the unconscious of her father. And very often that father himself is a puer.

She may be four different women with four different men. And it’s not dishonest for her, because she’s being what the man wants, what Jung calls the anima woman.

All kinds of things gnat her away in her head, “he isn’t strong enough, good enough, I’m a better man than he is.” If she can get hold of that buzzing and her own ego, then she can see what she’s doing. Again, this huge gap between reality and the god she is projecting. If she doesn’t get a hold of that, the god archetype will flip and become demonic.

Women who are caught in this either get control of that or go down in self destruction. But in the meantime they will eat or drink or sleep or whatever to escape that reality of the great hole of the abyss.

Our energy is into doing, doing, doing with the Medusa archetype. All the time… That same energy is sometimes repressed, sometimes moving in the unconscious. So that if a person is controlling, disciplining themselves all day in an effort to do the best possible perfect job, the shadow side, the dark side of the energy is accumulating behind with that same kind of energy, “I want, I want, I want.” So at night when the discipline simply cannot be maintained, the energy in the unconscious breaks loose into the addiction.

When it’s swinging like that it’s almost unbearable to deal with that psychically. If it gets strong enough, it just goes right over the top. That’s what jung calls enantiodromia… The witch energy breaks loose in the unconscious so the person cannot control the addiction, and of course no longer is protected by the addiction. #pendulum

The person who is identified with the archetype is lost.

I continually work on ego in analytic situations, because if there is not a strong enough ego the person is victimized by what they may call their own fate.

The Medusa-possessed woman is not grounded… So that when trouble, conflict, anxiety begins, they have no home to come back to.

The addict doesn’t want to know his greed, lust, irresponsibility… He can’t face it in the world, he’s certainly not going to be able to face it here.

The rage and the fear and the anguish that is in the musculature of the body is released through body work, and that can be tremendously valuable in helping the person to come to grips with a world that he essentially hates. And of course he hates himself.

She hasn’t got the inner security to be open and flexible, and her rigidity blocks her femininity.

The body work reinforces the ego development, and the woman can become much more assured of her ego grounded in the body, as can the man with his masculine ego grounded in his body. Behind all of this, I see the problem as the lack of being-ness in our culture. The lack of a feminine principle. The lack of the feminine side of God. The Sophia, the wisdom of the body. The wisdom that comes from knowing, not head stuff, not knowledge, but wisdom that comes from suffering, from having experienced. It’s a tremendous thing.

When a person can finally say, “I am, and I don’t have to do anything. I don’t approve myself. I don’t have to try to please anybody. I don’t have to be worrying about what anybody thinks. I know that I am.” It’s the verb “to be.” Essence. To be. So that when all the junk is taken off of the surface and you don’t have to pile on stuff to pretend, and the illusions are just torn away and you come to this wonderful recognition that you are. You are full. You don’t need alcohol or food to fill up. You don’t have to escape into TV. Because you aren’t empty anymore, and you simply are. And with that, that’s what I call the feminine. It’s that sense of just being a little part of God here on earth. It is a very slow rhythm. It won’t rush. It won’t go to a machine. It doesn’t care about clocks and calendars. It’s slow, it goes with nature, and it just is. But it cuts out all addictions. It’s that marvelous sense of a standpoint that is absolute.

 

Part 2: