The Punishing Psychology of Wanting

The Jungian psychologist begins the class on Ambition, Limitation, and the Desire for a Significant Life by doing his best, understated imitation of the Spice Girls and their much parodied and maligned chorus of “I want, I want, I want.” The teacher offers this soft, melodious anthem with such a yearning and wistful fervor that I half expect the Spice Girls to show up in the flesh, draped in that untidy, horizontal textile look, as if the group had spent the evening hanging out with Falstaff in sleazy, East London pubs.

I hold my breath and check the exits and the entrances, hoping for a revelation. I recall that the Jung Center once considered inviting Donald Trump to speak because he happened to have mentioned Carl Jung in one the books. Wiser heads prevailed though I do wonder what the businessman might have said about his ambitions and limitations.

The teacher runs out of Spice Girl lyrics and speaks about a dream that Jung recounts in his biography, “Memories, Dreams and Reflections.” Jung recalled a dream in which he is wandering through fog, wind and storms in the direction of a tiny light. The pull of the dream is toward the darkness and the surface of things — or the world of the ego. Our task is to keep a focus on this tiny light that Jung called the Light of Self.

The teacher recounts some of the things that keep us from focusing on that light or our essential self: family abuse, rage, shame and fear. The room is suddenly filled with testimonials from people, largely those who had been abused in some way, who have struggled mightily to keep that flame alive. I hear polite, anguished and understated accounts of the effects of envy, jealousy and abuse within the family has done to the suffering soul. I think of the “Jesus, Mary, Joseph” thunder from my father. I wonder what my son and daughter would say if they were present.

The instructor is open and reveals that he is still in therapy, grappling with these forces. This doesn’t sound like a prepared lecture. He seems to be speaking from the heart when he acknowledges how incredibly fragile we are and how difficult it is to counter the daily resistance to efforts to develop our souls.

The grounding for this session is archetypal psychology, a force that is carried, contained and given meaning by our images, dreams and reflections. For Carl Jung, “image is psyche.” So we are in a world of correspondences — poetry in a way. The flame must be taken care of. When we imagine the beach, that symbol of the unconscious, we keep looking for that special place for the beach blanket. The sailor cannot see the North, but knows the compass can.

We are in familiar territory. Joseph Campbell and others have suggested that we follow our bliss or our joy. We have always struggled with the divine or the numinous. We ask in so many ways, so many languages: Is man related to something infinite or not?

Carl Jung, who died about sixty years ago, was prescient about the modern condition and our loss of meaning. He wrote often about our rush into novelty. His remarks were not really about products per se or other accoutrements of modern life. Sure, he would not have been pleased with the junk that clutters my life, but he was really talking about epistemology or how we view the world. Jung had suggested in his “Symbols of Transformation” that a modern curse, in part due to science and our rationalistic tradition, is that we have become literalists and ego-centric. One effect of this perspective or way of seeing the world is that we have lost a sense of the numinous.

The instructor ends the session by reading to us in his soft voice the Grimm fairy tale about the “Fisherman and his Wife.” The two live in a pigsty. In the Low German dialect, this place might well be a piss pot or a chamber pot.

The man fishes in the nearby ocean and hooks a golden flounder that is actually a prince. The flounder begs the fisherman to let him go and the man obliges, saying that it was enough to actually catch a prince. On returning home, the fisherman’s wife chastises him for not asking some favor from the prince in return. Over time, she sends her husband back to the ocean to request from the flounder prince a cottage, castle, and a kingdom; then the title of emperor, pope and God. The flounder prince grants all of these requests except the last. The man and his wife end up in the pigsty.

The instructor does not belabor this nineteenth-century allegorical version of the Spice Girls’ extravagant want list, but does nudge the metaphor forward. The ocean, that symbol of creative possibilities, becomes increasingly dark and threatening during the demands of the wife. She becomes more unconscious during the process. Her husband is complicit. We see inflation, addiction and compulsion on land and at sea.

Of course, the fisherman’s ego is not strong enough to say no. The teacher reminds us that the real point is that change has to be earned to be real. And by his mythological reading, Eros is in the mud. In its primitive form, the pigsty has an association with the goddess. This is where love is, not up in some unearned parapet in a castle on the way to becoming God. The psychological advice is to look inside, not outside, to objects that we collect.

As an unreconstructed English professor, I am sometimes surprised at the intersection of mythology and Jungian psychology, perhaps looking for parodic intent. Then I remember that both Alexander Pushkin and Günter Grass both used this Grimm’s tale as basis for their novels.

And to prove Carl Jung was right about our endless search for novelty, I recalled that this tale found its way into the Rocky and Bullwinkle television show. This time the flounder became a beautiful mermaid, and the wife went straight to goddess, no psychological baggage and no questions asked.