Just a quick note to those who have been following these posts that I’m currently editing the material from the last several posts into a book to be called, unsurprisingly, “The Devouring Mother”. The editing process is mostly complete and has consisted of re-arranging the material from The Devouring Mother posts into a more coherent and logical order. It’s going to be a short book of about a hundred pages and, although it could be padded out, I’ve decided to keep it lean and mean to try and attain maximum clarity of analysis. I hope to have it available in about three to four weeks pending a final edit, proofread and the usual other tasks to get a book through the publishing sausage grinder and out into the world.
Overseas readers might be interested to know that the Australian Prime Minister finally released his plan of how the country is going to get out of corona about a week ago. He got forced into it because Sydney went back into lockdown a few weeks ago and, on current trajectory, looks likely to stay that way all winter mirroring the nightmare that those of us who live in Melbourne went through last year. It’s more than a little embarrassing that while the rest of the world is taking steps back to normality we are still locking ourselves in our houses down under.
The Prime Minister’s plan was essentially just The Plague Story. Once everybody who wants the vaccine has had a chance to get it, restrictions will be relaxed gradually until we treat “covid” like any other disease. That’s the idea. It is not at all clear that we will be able to pull it off. Israel has been the poster child for vaccinations and, after dropping all restrictions recently, the news I saw this week was that they re-introduced some restrictions after a spike in cases. Apparently some public health officials there are calling for even more restrictions but the government has so far refrained. It occurred to me that the current battle is actually between The Plague Story and The Devouring Mother. The Plague Story, even though it was a ridiculous path to take, at least has an ending. Republican governors in the US such as DeSantis have run a textbook version of The Plague Story and brought corona to a close (for now). Other governments have not succeeded. If governments re-introduce restrictions after the vaccinations they will be tacitly admitting that the vaccinations failed and therefore The Plague Story has not been fulfilled. Things may get even more crazy at that point (yes, I really think it is possible that it could get more crazy). The coming northern hemisphere winter seems to me to be the critical period. Either The Plague Story holds and life goes back to normal or we slip into an indefinite round of restrictions and The Devouring Mother wins the day. The Devouring Mother, of course, does not want an end and you really get the feeling that the public health bureaucrats would just love to continue locking people in their homes indefinitely.
It is not at all clear to me who is going to win but I’ve got all my fingers and toes crossed that The Plague Story holds up. Any story is better than no story.
In recent posts we sketched out The Devouring Mother archetype in detail with specific attention given to the manifestation that is most relevant to corona – Munchausen by Proxy. We then took a look at the meaning of masks in the collective unconscious and how they are exclusively reserved for the ‘bad guys’. To put it in Jungian language, they are exclusively reserved for people or characters who are in their shadow. This is fitting because The Devouring Mother is a shadow archetype. As we’ll soon see, it also fits the archetype of the acquiescent child. Finally, in the last post, we described how the rebellious children of The Devouring Mother found their voice politically with the Trump and Brexit votes and culturally through the rise of Jordan Peterson. The corona event brought all three rebellions to an end in 2020 and archetypally represents the fightback of The Devouring Mother against her rebellious children.
The relationship of The Devouring Mother to her rebellious children is always going to be unstable. The mother seeks co-dependence and she does that by stunting the growth of the child. Because the rebellious child demands its autonomy, the two are incompatible. The same is not true of the mother’s relationship with her acquiescent children. That relationship is an equilibrium position for both mother and child and can continue indefinitely if external circumstances do not intervene. That is the whole problem because the relationship is not a healthy one. The Devouring Mother and her acquiescent child are both in their shadow. To use a phrase from popular culture that explains this nicely, they have gone to the dark side. Imagine if Luke Skywalker quit The Rebel Alliance (synchronicity much?) and joined his father working for the empire. That wouldn’t be good for him or Darth Vader who would have lost his chance at redemption. Neither is it good for The Devouring Mother and the acquiescent child to be in their relationship. Jung believed all people have a desire for individuation and a natural part of the individuation process is transcending your shadow. However, The Devouring Mother deliberately prevents her children from individuating. It is this that the rebellious children are fighting against. They are striving to become adults which means they are striving to individuate themselves, to come to fruition, to grow and expand and ideally to flourish. The acquiescent child is different. It submits to the mother and accepts being stifled. In so doing it does not come to fruition, does not flourish and gets stuck in a rut. So does the mother. In this post we will describe this relationship in more detail at the individual level and then extrapolate it to the societal level where we’ll see that, much like Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump became leaders of the rebellious children, so too did a leader appear for the other side. Superficially, this leader symbolised the acquiescent child but, as we are about to see, it is much more complex than that as the leader symbolises the relationship between The Devouring Mother and her acquiescent child and therefore embodies the combination of mother and child together. That leader is Greta Thunberg and it was her rise to fame in 2018 which symbolised the initial fightback of The Devouring Mother against her rebellious children and portended the corona event as a whole. I suggest you buckle up cos things are about to get weird. Or should we say, Jungian.
In this post we are going to see that the acquiescent child itself belongs to a specific archetype but before we get to that it’s worth zooming out a little and positioning The Devouring Mother more broadly within the larger Jungian framework. Each archetype has a positive side which is what the archetype strives for and a shadow side which are the negative traits that the archetype can fall into. An old fashioned way to think about this would be the battle between good and evil where you have your angel sitting on one shoulder arguing with your devil sitting on the other shoulder. Each archetype has its own specific angel and its own specific devil. The Devouring Mother is the shadow version of the archetype known as The Caregiver. The Caregiver itself could be thought of as a variation on The Mother archetype but the more general title captures the fact that the characteristics of the archetype are not related to personal circumstances. One only becomes a biological mother when a child is born or alternatively one can be become a mother via adoption. But The Caregiver archetype denotes general psychological properties that can apply to anybody. The positive properties of The Caregiver are generosity, compassion and selflessness. The Caregiver desires to help others. Obviously, these are characteristics that are desirable in a mother as a young child is completely defenceless and requires constant attention and care. But it’s also possible to apply these to other areas of life such as volunteering to help the needy, working in health care or social services or what have you. We would expect Caregiver archetypes to do well in these fields of endeavour. Like every archetype, The Caregiver has a shadow side. The shadow traits of The Caregiver, the temptations this archetype can fall into, are martyrdom, seeking the control of others through emotional manipulation, seeking a co-dependence relationship; essentially all the things we have described about The Devouring Mother in recent posts including the Munchausen by Proxy behaviours. These are the archetypal temptations that must be overcome by a Caregiver in order to achieve individuation. Stories and movies are a useful model here because the classic hero’s journey is about this battle that takes place in the individual to overcome the temptations of the shadow. To use Luke Skywalker again, he must overcome anger and desire for revenge. That is the shadow side that tempts him. He must resist that temptation. The Caregiver’s archetypal temptations are to manipulate others emotionally and to martyr themselves supposedly on behalf of others. What The Devouring Mother denotes is an archetype that has given in to these temptations. Just as Darth Vader gave in and went to the dark side, so The Devouring Mother has given in to the temptations inherent to The Caregiver archetype. She martyrs herself, manipulates others, lies, guilt trips and seeks a co-dependence relationship with her child.
A Devouring Mother can come into being only when there is a child to partake in the co-dependence relationship. The problem is that children grow up and most people have an innate desire to assert their independence and autonomy no matter what archetype they belong to. For that reason, the rebellious children of The Devouring Mother will come from all archetypes. All they demand is the freedom to become themselves and to escape the stifling atmosphere of The Devouring Mother’s household. There is, however, one other archetype which is susceptible to the co-dependence relationship that The Devouring Mother seeks. Up until now I have been referring to this by the phrase acquiescent children but now we can be more specific about it. The archetype in question is The Orphan. As the name suggests, The Orphan bears the characteristics one might expect from somebody separated from their parents as a child. The primary goal of The Orphan is to regain the safety they lost in childhood. There is an implied wound in the nature of The Orphan that comes from the lack of development suffered because of the (symbolic) separation from its parents. The Orphan’s archetypal mission is to heal that wound and make up for lost development they suffered. That is their pathway to individuation. The positive traits of The Orphan are realism, empathy and the ability to connect with others. The shadow traits are playing the victim, excessive complaining, feelings of hopelessness and apocalyptic fantasies, expecting favourable treatment as compensation for their suffering and giving up in the face of (mostly psychological) difficulties. We can see that these shadow traits fit in perfectly with The Devouring Mother. The Orphan can become addicted to being powerless because when one is powerless one gets rescued. The Orphan’s task is precisely not to get rescued but to learn to do it themselves but that is difficult. Far easier to let somebody else take charge and that is where The Devouring Mother comes onto the scene. A powerless child is exactly what The Devouring Mother needs for her desired co-dependence relationship. The trouble for The Orphan is that lapsing into powerlessness is its shadow side. Its other shadow traits such as playing the victim, expecting favourable treatment and engaging in predatory behaviour towards others also fit in nicely with The Devouring Mother who will happily encourage all of these behaviours knowing (unconsciously) that these are shadow traits that will prevent the child reaching autonomy and leaving the house. Thus, The Devouring Mother and The Orphan in their shadow side are a perfect match. This is why intervention, usually in the name of protecting the child, needs to come from outside in order to break this relationship up. We saw this already in our discussion of Munchausen by Proxy but it is true of the relationship in general. This was why the writer D.H. Lawrence spoke of having to “rescue” his nieces and nephews from their (devouring) mother, his sisters.
The Orphan is the necessary other half of The Devouring Mother archetype which has been on the ascendant in our culture in recent decades. We know what the mother side of this equation looks like and we covered the rebellious children in the last post. What about The Orphans? Where do they fit into the picture? Recall that The Orphan’s main drive in life is to regain “safety” and that is exactly what The Devouring Mother will promise although not in the interests of securing genuine safety but in the interests of keeping The Orphan dependent. The Orphan’s shadow traits – desire for illusory safety, insecurity, anxiety, apocalyptic fantasies, victimhood and blaming others for its own problems have all been at the core of corona. The latter maps effortlessly onto both the mandatory mask and the vaccine issues which are primarily justified as being things other people must do to ensure the safety of The Orphan. Of course, this has no basis in science. We know masks don’t work and we are now being told that, unlike practically every other vaccine, the corona vaccines do not prevent infection. Ergo, they don’t work either. None of that matters in this case because it is not actual security that The Orphan desires but the illusion of safety. That’s why it’s not uncommon to hear a politician say we won’t be safe til everybody has taken the vaccine. It’s a complete fantasy but it’s a fantasy that is specifically tailored to The Orphans. However, it goes further than this. The Orphan in its shadow form doesn’t merely require safety, it likes to use its feigned powerlessness to control others. If it was just about personal safety, The Orphan could wear a mask and take the vaccine and feel safe. That is not good enough, though. Everybody must wear a mask, everybody must take the vaccine and everybody must stay at home. The Devouring Mother wants those things for control purposes but it has been The Orphans among the public who have most fervently supported such measures. Just like The Devouring Mother’s pretence of protecting her child hides deeper shadow desires, so The Orphan’s pretence of powerlessness hides the desire to make others act on its behalf. The need for special treatment is the primary addiction of The Orphan. If that special treatment involves overturning an entire society and coercing others into doing things that make no sense, that is of no concern. In fact, the more outlandish the special treatment, the better. This explains why there have been a sizeable section of the public for whom it is not an exaggeration to say that they have been exhilarated by the corona event. They are The Orphans living out the ultimate Orphan fantasy of having the entire world rearranged on their behalf all supposedly in the name of safety. The Orphans are the Branch Covidian True Believers in the cult of corona, the ones who have actually been happy to have been locked up at home and even happier that everybody else got locked up too. We too were supposed to be defenceless against the virus and to need to be saved, a ridiculous claim when you look at the statistics but the truth does not matter when archetypes are involved. Being returned to the (symbolic) safety of the home is exactly what The Orphan archetype desires and so the lockdowns were a perfect fit for both The Devouring Mother and The Orphan.
The whole corona event has supposedly been about safety. Boris Johnson got up in the British parliament last year and announced “We can hear the toot of the scientific cavalry coming over the hill”. The scientific soldiers were coming to the rescue. They were going to save us. The doctors and nurses were going to save us too. Earlier in 2020, it had become the thing to do in Britain to go outside at a certain time of the day and cheer for the NHS. Doctors and nurses were the heroes all of a sudden. So too the scientists. Just this week at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, the crowd applauded the woman who had helped design the Astra Zeneca vaccine. She’s a saviour too. We needed saving and the doctors, nurses and scientists were the ones who were there to do it. It is both ironic and synchronistic that in Britain the official line at the start of corona was that the public needed to band together to “save the NHS”. We needed to save the experts who were going to save us. There’s been an awful lot of saving going on and all of it largely illusory. Of course, it has all been for the benefit of The Orphans. In its shadow form, The Orphan wants to be saved. The truth is, it must save itself. But The Orphan’s temptation is to let others do it. It can easily slip into a self-destructive mode where it will hurt both itself and others in order to avoid the challenge of indviduation. In fact, The Orphan will lash out against those attempting to help it by telling it the truth. We have also seen that behaviour on display during corona. All dissenting expert voices have been silenced; a very strange thing given it was supposed to be the experts who would save us. You would have thought we would listen to them but this has not been the case. The True Believers have had no problem dismissing the advice of people such as Luc Montagnier and Professor Bhakdi. More recently we have had the absurd situation where the very inventor of the mRNA vaccine, Robert Malone, has spoken out against the vaccination program only to be de-platformed from at least one social media site. The same thing happened to videos of the man who discovered Ivermectin. You would have thought we’d want to hear what such people have to say, but that hasn’t been the case. The truth threatens the co-dependence relationship between The Devouring Mother and The Orphan. Anybody pointing out the truth can expect the wrath of both parties and that is exactly what we have seen in recent times starting with corona and then ramping up substantially with the Trump de-platforming. Seeing prominent figure de-platformed is now a daily occurrence. This has led to the absurd situation where people were de-platformed only months ago for suggesting the virus escaped the lab in Wuhan only for that story to now become the accepted narrative. It’s got nothing to do with the search for truth. It is, in fact, the denial of truth, something that both The Devouring Mother and The Orphan need in order to protect their relationship of co-dependence.
The Orphan archetype in its shadow form has been ascendant in our culture in recent decades in lockstep with the rise of The Devouring Mother. Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of The Orphan can be seen in the concept of safe spaces. As we have already seen, The Orphan primarily seeks safety and what better place to find it than a safe space. The safe space movement goes hand-in-hand with the victimhood ideology that has come to dominate in the universities and corporate culture. We saw in the last post that Jordan Peterson left college campuses and took up the role of leader of the rebellious children preaching a gospel of personal responsibility, accountability and truthfulness. It’s not hard to see why that had to happen. Universities have been progressively weeding out people like Peterson for some time, especially in the humanities faculties. Peterson’s message is completely incompatible with the woke politics of the modern campus with its dizzying array of victim groups. Thus the woke ideology along with the safe space is the precise manifestation of The Orphan archetype in its shadow form. Remember that The Orphan archetype’s mission is to return to a place of safety but it is something they must achieve for themselves. By letting others do it for them, they lapse into their shadow side of powerlessness and victimhood. Almost by definition, providing a safe space for The Orphan archetype is encouraging them to lapse into their shadow. But that is exactly what The Devouring Mother wants because The Orphan in their shadow side is exactly what The Devouring Mother needs for the co-dependence relationship she seeks. That is why both woke ideology and safe spaces have been encouraged and facilitated by the establishment. No surprise then that safe spaces have been primarily located on college campuses, the very place where people go to graduate into adult life as fully educated members of society. In the 60s, university campuses were places of genuine education and genuine rebellion against the status quo. Not anymore. The woke ideology of university campuses is shared by the marketing department of every major corporation as well as Hollywood and the mainstream media. It is encouraged and facilitated by the establishment. The Orphan loves to play the victim and woke ideology allows it to do just that while being encouraged to do so by the powers that be. Thus, the woke ideology and the safe spaces are there to feed The Orphan’s shadow side and prevent it from attaining autonomy. The Orphans will graduate into a world of salary class bullshit jobs where autonomy and independent thinking are the exact opposite of what is required and so the education system is matched to the world which its students will enter. The world of The Devouring Mother.
Having sketched out the main points about The Orphan archetype and its relation to The Devouring Mother, we are finally ready to unpack the symbolic complexities of the rise of Greta Thunberg. We saw in the last post that the rebellious children found their voice in 2015-2016 through the Trump and Brexit votes and the emergence of Jordan Peterson. This is exactly one generation after globalisation went into hyperdrive and threw much of the western middle class under the bus. Of course, it wasn’t just that Trump won. He beat Hillary Clinton, the ultimate political manifestation of The Devouring Mother. The Trump victory, like the Brexit one, represented a huge shock to the system. The first time the public had explicitly rejected the ascendance of The Devouring Mother. It is therefore not a coincidence that another leader would arise immediately afterwards. With the rebellious children finding leaders and seemingly taking charge, The Devouring Mother and her Orphan children needed their own leader and that is where Greta Thunberg enters the picture in the northern hemisphere summer of 2018. Before we get into an archetypal analysis of Thunberg, it is important to understand a bit of historical context about the environmental movement which she has “led”. Just like universities used to be sites of real rebellion back in the 60s and 70s, so the environmental movement at that time was a real grassroots movement that aimed for real change in society. Like every grassroots movement, the environmentalists were initially concerned with tangible issues on the ground. They achieved some genuine wins by highlighting a number of obvious and easily fixed problems such as lead poisoning from petrol and paint. These were the low hanging fruit. Once the easy wins had been realised, the movement continued to push for measures that were more costly to the status quo. It became in the interests of the establishment to buy them out and that is precisely what happened. The environmentalist leaders took up well paying positions on advisory boards or consulting to the marketing departments of corporations and government and the whole thing, the real grassroots movement, promptly disappeared in a puff of environmentally friendly smoke. What has been called “green” ever since is simply whatever is in the interests of the establishment including and especially the enormous infrastructure spending on so-called renewable energy. By the time 2018 rolled around, environmentalism was run through various NGOs which are simply fronts that hide the real financial interests at play. It was into this world that Greta Thunberg decided to skip school and protest alone in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm.
In the previous post I noted that Jordan Peterson’s rise to fame was partly due to his authenticity. The same can certainly be said for Greta Thunberg. She’s definitely one of a kind. There’s no way some marketing department or paid political hacks could come up with somebody like a Thunberg. If you want to know what they would come up with, go back and look at the Clinton campaign of 2016. Just like with Peterson, Thunberg’s rise has been facilitated by social media but it is here that there is a crucial difference between the two that reveals what has really been going on with the Thunberg phenomenon. Recall that Peterson had been putting his material online for some time and had built a small following in the years before 2016. His videos about the pronoun issue were picked up by mainstream media with the intention of holding him up as an example of everything that was wrong in the world and this brought him the attention of the people who were looking for somebody to speak against the system. That gave his existing online channels a big boost and over the next years Peterson learned to use the online tools to build his audience. Just like Trump, Peterson benefitted from the negative media coverage and used it to his advantage to become a leader of the rebellious children. The situation with Thunberg is very different and gives us the first hint about what has really been going on. In many ways, Thunberg is an inversion of Peterson. Peterson is a 59-year-old male who is a teacher and scholar at a university. In 2018, Thunberg was a 15 year old girl who was a student in high school. Old vs young. Male vs female. Teacher vs student. If Peterson was leading the rebels, it would follow that Thunberg must be leading the establishment. However, Thunberg’s whole thing was that she was supposed to be rebelling. After all, she was skipping school and speaking out against the powers that be. This is true at the individual level. She did skip school against her parents wishes and so this was rebellion within the Thunberg household. So, it’s probable that Thunberg believes she is rebelling. The problem is to what use this rebellion has been put because Thunberg’s rise was not organic like a Peterson or a Trump. It was manufactured. Thunberg’s school strike and her social media posting about it were immediately picked up and shared by high profile social media accounts. Within two months, Thunberg was getting speaking gigs at demonstrations around Europe and then came her famous speech at the UN. Thunberg went from unknown schoolgirl in Stockholm to giving speeches at the UN within four months. In 2019 she became Time’s Person of the Year and was a given a string of other awards as long as your arm. All awards granted by the establishment. As the saying goes, it takes years to create an overnight success. Peterson’s story shows that formula very clearly. Thunberg’s does not.
To put it in the archetypal terms we have been using, Thunberg was embraced by The Devouring Mother. We would therefore expect her to be The Orphan in the relationship and given her age and social status this would be fitting. But his where things get symbolically weird because Thunberg herself is clearly of the archetype of The Caregiver in its shadow form. She is The Devouring Mother. Recall the properties of The Devouring Mother: it seeks martyrdom, it emotionally manipulates others, it aims to win control by guilty tripping others. Thunberg ticks all the boxes. People in the mainstream media talk unironically about how Thunberg wants to “save the world”. That may actually be true of what she believes but that is a prime case of martyrdom and delusion. It is also fake. Although theoretically giving up her education for the greater good and therefore acting selflessly, Thunberg has in the process become a global phenomenon who has met world leaders, attended famous events and gone on adventures that no normal sixteen-year-old could dream of. Whatever that is, it’s not martyrdom. Real martyrdom involves real sacrifice. By any rational account, Thunberg is not a martyr but we not dealing with reason here but the unconscious. The archetypal perception that has been created for Thunberg is that she is a martyr for the climate cause. Of course, Thunberg herself probably believes that to be true. To understand Thunberg, we must be very careful to differentiate between what she thinks, what the public relations machine around her wants us to think and what she actually is. What she appears to be is The Devouring Mother, or, to be more clear about it, she is a young girl who is The Caregiver archetype in its shadow form. The story of how Thunberg got started with her activism also shows the shadow traits of The Caregiver. We are told that she attempted to convince her parents of the climate problems using graphs and numbers but when that didn’t work she told them they were “stealing her future”. That is guilt tripping and emotional blackmail both prime traits of The Devouring Mother. Thunberg as a child was using them on her own parents and it worked. The official story goes that she convinced her parents to take measures like giving up flying to reduce their carbon footprint. The desire for martyrdom, guilt tripping and emotional blackmail are all traits of The Devouring Mother. To the extent that Thunberg demonstrated those traits prior to her rise to fame we can conclude that her individual psychology is The Caregiver in its shadow form i.e. The Devouring Mother.
If Thunberg is a Caregiver in shadow form, how have the people who have hoisted her to fame wanted us to perceive her? We can find the answer in another snippet from Thunberg’s biography. In May 2018, Thunberg submitted an entry to a climate change essay competition held by a Swedish Newspaper. In it she wrote “I want to feel safe”. That should set off your synchronicity alarm bells because “I want to feel safe” is the very catchphrase of The Orphan archetype we described above. This might tempt us to re-evaluate and say that Thunberg is really an Orphan archetype except that the line itself is a form of emotional manipulation. Just like Thunberg had blackmailed her parents saying they had destroyed her future, she was pulling the same stunt in the climate change essay. It was the same stunt she would pull later on at the UN. According to the official story, after winning the essay contest, Thunberg was contacted by somebody from a climate NGO. We don’t know what they talked about, but it was just three months later that she went on her school strike that on the very first day, with just her sitting by herself in front of the Swedish parliament, was massively amplified by climate NGOs and other establishment players. It went viral but the players who made it go viral were of the establishment. The “I want to be safe” line, the image of a solitary young girl in front of the seat of power, combined with climate apocalypse fantasies are all traits of The Orphan. That is how the establishment wanted to portray Thunberg. Thunberg played along and gave lip service to that perception but her behaviour and words are straight from The Devouring Mother playbook. Let’s just take some of the phrases from Thunberg’s famous speech at the UN.
“Our house is on fire.”
“You are still not mature enough to tell it like it is”.
“Your betrayal”.
“We will never forgive you.”
“We will not let you get away with this.”
And, of course, the most famous one – “How dare you!”
These words could all be straight from the mouth of The Devouring Mother. Thunberg had said exactly the same thing to her parents back in Stockholm. Then she got elevated to saying them to the whole world. In amongst this language is the language of The Orphan. Just as she had previously told her parents, Thunberg told the UN that “you” (she almost always uses the second person pronoun in her speech) have stolen my future. That again is classic Orphan speech: the victimhood, the guilt tripping. In Thunberg, we have a combination of The Devouring Mother and The Orphan. More specifically, The Devouring Mother pretending to be The Orphan. Thunberg comes from the upper class of Swedish society but is portrayed as just a lowly schoolgirl. She plays the victim while travelling around the world to meet international leaders. She speaks as a mother in the body of a child. She declares that she just wants to be “safe” while fighting political battles against world leaders, taking round-the-world boat rides and generally doing things that almost no teenage girl (or teenage boy for that matter) would ever have the courage to do. Thunberg is the Devouring Mother at the microcosmic level brought to fame by The Devouring Mother at the macrocosmic level. Where the whole thing gets very uncomfortable, of course, is that The Devouring Mother is a shadow archetype and so we have the image of a young girl being encouraged not to individuate herself and overcome her shadow but to indulge in it for the benefit of others. That is what The Devouring Mother does to The Orphan at the individual level and also at the societal. She prevents their growth and hinders the individuation process. Sadly this wilful and shameful disregard for the welfare of a young girl is all too common now in our culture and has been on full display throughout corona. Like The Devouring Mother, our society only pretends to care about the interests of the young. Our actions speak very differently. Thunberg is being denied her normal childhood development and so will quite likely inherit the problems of The Orphan archetype. She has become reliant on The Devouring Mother (the establishment) for her fame. If and when that gets taken away, the results for her are likely to be very painful.
The lifting to prominence of Thunberg by the establishment has happened because the entire climate movement these days is funded by the establishment. Climate change has become a weapon in the hands of The Devouring Mother as well as the financial interests that are happy to come along for the ride. In order to hide those interests, the climate “debate” has become a form of gaslighting and emotional manipulation at the societal level in just the same way that the vested interests have been hidden behind the hysteria of corona. The whole thing is one giant guilt trip to make rich westerners kowtow to The Devouring Mother. That is not to say there aren’t real issues at play, there are. But the real issues went out the window decades ago and were replaced by propaganda. Did you notice how all the climate stuff came abruptly to an end as soon as corona kicked off. We haven’t heard a peep about it in a year and a half. Cory Morningstar has an excellent article describing the massive environmental problem we have created by producing billions, if not trillions, of disposable plastic face masks, gloves and other PPE gear in the last year and a bit. That should have been the kind of thing the environmentalists were talking about if they were really worried about the environment. But they’re not really worried. It’s all for show. The truth is of no relevance to either The Devouring Mother or The Orphan in its shadow form. In fact, the truth is anathema because it threatens to break up the relationship between the two and they are both very comfortable in that relationship. However, it is that relationship which is exactly what must be broken up because both parties are in their shadow. To be confronted with the shadow is not necessarily a bad thing. It as an opportunity to individuate. We all must learn to incorporate our shadow and make it a part of a well-rounded self. For The Orphan archetype, that is learning to be yourself, by yourself, without letting others do it for you. For The Devouring Mother, than means learning compassion that is not grounded in selfishness; allowing others and oneself to grow and change without the desperate clinging need to smother everything in order to retain an illusory control. If The Devouring Mother and The Orphan have been increasingly dominating our culture in recent decades, we would expect these issues to be the ones we need to confront as a culture.
In late January of 2020, Boris Johnson finally got the UK across the finish line as the country withdrew from the EU bringing to a close the formalities of the process that had begun with the Brexit referendum in mid-2016. Donald Trump, who won the US election less than six months after the Brexit vote in November 2016, was entering the final year of his term and looking strong despite having been impeached a few weeks earlier by the US House of Representatives over something to do with the Ukraine (does it really matter what?). The impeachment came on the back of three years of seemingly the entire US establishment attempting to pin the cause for Trump’s victory on fictitious collusion with Russia. Meanwhile, in early January 2020, Jordan Peterson travelled to Russia. The Canadian professor of psychology who had shot to superstardom in 2016 (are we sensing a pattern?) had become addicted to prescription medication and, apparently not being able to find appropriate treatment in North America, had decided to go to Moscow for help. On arrival, he was diagnosed with having pneumonia. It was only a week or two prior that an apparently unusual cluster of pneumonia cases had broken out to the east in Wuhan, China. While Peterson was lying in a coma, the beginnings of the event that was to overturn the world were taking shape; the corona event. All three men in question – Johnson, Trump and Peterson – would test positive to corona during 2020. Boris Johnson wound up in hospital. Peterson was already in hospital, this time in Serbia. According to his daughter’s report, his corona symptoms were mild but that had not stopped doctors “putting him on everything”, not a little ironic for a man who had just spent six months trying to get off medication. Trump would famously test positive in the last few weeks of the presidential election campaign, although he was clearly one of the many asymptomatic ‘cases’ of corona. He too went to hospital but that was purely for show. In typical Trump fashion, he took the opportunity in the middle of his visit to take a car ride to smile and wave to adoring fans who had gathered outside.
What unites Trump, Peterson and Johnson is not just a positive corona test. All three men were leaders of a revolt that had taken place in western culture beginning four years earlier. I noted back in post 26 of this series that The Devouring Mother archetype implies children and that there are two options available for said children in their relation to the mother: to rebel or to acquiesce. It was in 2015-2016 that the rebellious children found their voice. Trump, Peterson and Johnson all in their own way were leaders of that rebellion. But the rebellion, or at least their leadership of it, seems to have come to an end in 2020. Trump, of course, lost the election. He was also de-platformed from the social media sites he had so expertly used to launch himself to the presidency. Although not a spent force by any stretch, it’s hard to see him becoming a contender again now that the establishment (The Devouring Mother) has found a way to silence him. Johnson has held onto his job but the self-proclaimed ‘libertarian’ has led Britain through arguably the least libertarian period it has experienced in centuries and is now apparently a card carrying member of the Branch Covidian Great Resetter brigade. Peterson has joined the ranks of the public intellectuals who have chosen to sit out corona. The man who won fame and admiration for taking a stand against the petty tyranny of the wokeists in Canadian universities and who has railed against the totalitarianism caused by communism has apparently decided not to have an opinion as western societies themselves have lurched into totalitarianism. Having spent the first half of 2020 battling to get off medications and despite already having had the virus, Peterson announced in May 2021 that he was getting the vaccine because his “antibody levels appeared insufficient to prevent re-infection”. The reaction of many of his fans was not one of approval, a fact which his enemies in the MSM took delight in pointing out.
I have already described how the corona event fits into the archetype of The Devouring Mother. In this post we are going to add some historical context. It represents the fightback of The Devouring Mother against three of her most rebellious children and their followers. If 2016 was the year when the rebels made their voices heard, 2020 was the year when the empire struck back. What will happen next is anybody’s guess but in this post I want to spend some time exploring the nature of this battle with particular reference to Peterson and Trump who best characterise the rebellious children and their fight for independence and autonomy. Both men won support by tapping into the latent dissatisfaction felt by a sizeable proportion of the population. That dissatisfaction is precisely the dissatisfaction felt by the child of The Devouring Mother. There were many such ‘children’ looking for a way to rebel and in 2015-2016 and Trump and Peterson appeared on the scene to meet the demand. Let’s take a look at each man in turn to see what they reveal about the nature of the rebellious children of The Devouring Mother.
Jordan Peterson
It is fitting that Jordan Peterson erupted from a modern university like Jonah being spat out of the belly of the beast. Universities these days have become nothing more than ideology factories which, in a perverted way, do provide appropriate training for those who are going to graduate into a world of salary class bullshit jobs where knowing how to play along with ideological power games is the main predictor of success. It is also fitting that Peterson is a professor of psychology. In the world of The Devouring Mother with its gaslighting and emotional manipulation, the children are in need of psychiatric counselling and here was a man who did that for a living. If the rebellious baby boomers found their escape valve in sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, a couple of generations later, Peterson offers almost the exact opposite. In a world awash with porn, twenty four hour ‘news’ broadcasts, endless entertainment options, social media and information saturation, Peterson has offered meaning (his first book was called Maps of Meaning). He has described to a generation of young people who have been taught that the culture they live in is at best something to be corrected and at worst downright evil, what exactly that culture was good for. Because that message is so vanishingly rare these days, Peterson became a kind of magnet for, among other things, the desire for gratitude. The standing ovations Peterson received at the start (not just the end) of his speeches were a sign of that. Here was a man who surveyed western culture and said “it is good and here’s why.” That was a message that many people had simply never heard because, in the house of The Devouring Mother, every bit of praise hides a secret intent; an ulterior motive. Peterson had no ulterior motive, quite the opposite. He may have been ejected out of the belly of the beast of a modern university but, if I may be permitted a mixed metaphor, he was thrown straight into the frying pan of the modern culture wars. Alongside the usual torrent of online hatred that players in the culture war can expect, Peterson also put himself on the line in public. He had protestors at his speaking events. He had hysterical people screaming into his face on the street. That can’t be a very fun way to spend your time but Peterson stood firm and in doing so his star continued to rise. Here was a man who stood for what he believed in. In our modern society, where nihilism still reigns supreme, that symbol is what an awful lot of people were looking for and it also became a central part of Peterson’s message to his followers. In a world filled with the endless gaslighting of The Devouring Mother, here was a rare gem of authenticity.
Peterson’s message was not just authentic but authoritative. But not in the way that The Devouring Mother’s message is authoritative. The Devouring Mother demands submission. The gaslighting and propaganda asks not to be understood, internalised, reasoned about and discussed, it demands unthinking repetition and fealty. It also changes every other week because the point of it is not to be ‘true’. It is not a means to the end of knowledge but a means to the end of power. Thus, for years the establishment media in the US banged on endlessly about Trump and Russia then changed on a dime when Ukraine served their purposes better and when that was done it was all about corona. Now it will go back to being about race or climate change or whatever else does the job. The ‘authority’ it wields issues from the ability to control the narrative. If the narrative is a complete and total lie, it simply does not matter. That’s what makes it gaslighting; the ability to say what is patently untrue and have it accepted as truth. That is the ‘authority’ of The Devouring Mother. Peterson’s authority is very different. He draws on equal parts biblical scholarship and science. In doing so, he combines the two primary sources of historical authority in western civilisation. It is an authority that stretches back over millennia. It is also the authority of common sense. One of the common criticisms of Peterson is that he is long-winded; that he takes a hundred words to speak a basic truth that could have been said in a sentence. But that criticism misses the whole point. Yes, Peterson is stating the obvious but there are a large number of people who want to hear that. In a world where authority figures state blatant lies in public every day, the man who gets up and states the obvious truth is a revolutionary figure who challenges the power structure. That is what Peterson did. As the saying goes – knowledge is power. Teach a man to fish and you give him knowledge and thereby power and autonomy. In the house of The Devouring Mother, you are not taught to fish. You are given a fish and then told you don’t really deserve it (more on that in the next post in this series).
To a large extent, the rebellious children of The Devouring Mother chose Peterson. I don’t mean that they consciously chose him. I mean it was subconscious. It was archetypal. As the saying goes “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”. Or perhaps we can rephrase that “when the Devouring Mother appears, the children get ready to rebel”. But the teacher in this case was always there. Peterson had been delivering his lectures to students at the University of Toronto since 1998 and had been uploading those lectures to Youtube in the years prior to 2016. Like most university professors, he was active to some extent in the public discourse prior to his rise to fame. He was a guest on various intellectual programs over the years during his tenure at the University of Toronto. But, it was a series of videos he posted to Youtube in 2016 that finally propelled him into the spotlight. In the videos he criticised a bill that was going through the parliament in Canada about gender pronouns. That is another synchronicity because the whole gender pronoun thing is one of the purest examples of a power game imposed on purely ideological grounds. The kind of thing that has become more and more common recently. In challenging it, Peterson challenged The Devouring Mother directly but that was not the important part. No doubt there were thousands of videos floating around on the internet of people raging against such measures. What was important was that the minions in the mainstream media decided to give Peterson some coverage and in so doing they brought him to the attention of the people who were desperately looking for a voice that could fight back against the ideology that was being imposed on them. In Peterson’s case, these were mostly young people and specifically young men. Because Peterson already had a substantial amount of material online, those young people had something firm to grasp onto and so began the ever quickening co-evolution of a leader with his audience. One of the advantages of social media and online communication channels, and this is something Trump also used to expert effect, is that they give real time feedback on how a message is received by an audience. They also allow global reach. Peterson was no longer addressing just a half full lecture theatre in Toronto, he was addressing the young people of the western world in general and he was able to gauge in real time what they wanted to hear. His best-selling book 12 Rules for Life began as an internet site where he was able to judge from the audience response what they were looking for. What they apparently wanted were rules. The rule giver or lawgiver has a strong symbolism in the collective unconscious. In western civilisation, it goes back at least to Moses. The lawgiver speaks with authority vested in him in some way. For Moses, and other prophets, it was vested by God. As I have already said, Peterson claimed his authority not from God directly but from the Bible and from modern science. By contrast, the faceless ideologues who grease the wheels of the modern propaganda machine do not claim authority from anywhere other than their ability to have their words splayed across computer screens. Thus, news reports are full of empty phrases like “experts say” or “scientists are increasingly finding…”. A lot of modern media claims its authority from nothing more than what anonymous sources on twitter blurted out yesterday afternoon. Peterson claims his authority from his mastery of the ideas that have shaped western civilisation. In that way he became a genuine authority figure. A lawgiver. Hence the fact that his bestselling book is about rules for life. Two of the most famous of these rules were clean your bedroom and stand up straight (so that you can find a mate). Both of those are tailored perfectly to the male children of The Devouring Mother and represent the desire to become a full-fledged adult male in a society which desperately wants you to remain the eternally dependent child. That is why Peterson’s message resonated most strongly with young men. He became a father figure on a global scale. It was a role that he had to step into. His transition into it began in earnest in 2016 and has continued up to the present day. One can see it very clearly in the way he has changed his appearance during that time.
Before
After
Dude, Kurt Cobain called. He wants his cardigan back.
Dressed like a boss.
It’s in the rise of Peterson (and Trump) as the opposition to The Devouring Mother that we first really see the mother for what she is. As I have noted, she has been on the ascendant for decades but it wasn’t until 2015-2016 that her dominance became obvious. It wasn’t until the opposition formed itself that we could see what it was trying to oppose. Peterson as lawgiver speaks in the stern, dour tone of an old protestant pastor. His message is one of duty over happiness, of striving against difficulty and triumph in self overcoming and, perhaps most importantly in the world of endless gaslighting, of speaking the truth. He tells his followers that they are not perfect little angels who have been corrupted by the big bad world. Rather, they are just as capable as anyone of perpetuating evil. The battle between good and evil is within them just as much as without. “I am a man and nothing human is foreign to me,” said Montaigne and Peterson would agree. This is in stark contrast to the prevailing ideology of The Devouring Mother who tells her acquiescent children they are perfect little angels. They don’t need to do anything to be happy. Rather, happiness is being withheld from them by forces outside themselves. As Peterson would probably know, Jung had already identified this psychology as the shadow side of The Innocent archetype. Both The Devouring Mother and her acquiescent children are projecting the shadow in Jungian terms. Is it a coincidence that Western society has lurched into totalitarianism at just this time? We have been projecting the shadow of Nazism, fascism and communism, all the things we fought so hard against in the 20th century. At the individual level, the acquiescent children of The Devouring Mother demonstrate the attitude and behaviour of the un-individuated person who, in being prevented from facing their shadow are also prevented from becoming a full-fledged adult. This is how The Devouring Mother keeps her children eternally dependent. To the extent that the forces keeping them dissatisfied are the other people in society, the ideology of The Devouring Mother translates into the perfect vehicle for turning the population (the children) against each other and that is how it all plays out politically. It is the world that must change, not you. So speaks The Devouring Mother to her acquiescent children. It is you that must change, says Peterson. Pull yourself together, Bucko. Start by cleaning your room. Then try and find a mate and a place in the world. Once you’ve got yourself sorted out, you can worry about society. This message of personal development and personal responsibility, which goes back at least to Jesus (let he who is without sin cast the first stone), was dynamite precisely because it threatened the existing order which had slowly built up over decades. The order of The Devouring Mother. One interesting random statement I saw in relation to Peterson was: “Jordan Peterson could never have happened in the 90s”. I think that’s right. The 90s, of course, was when globalisation kicked into hyperdrive and the middle class in the USA and large parts of Europe was thrown under the bus. It is when the future Jordan Peterson followers were born. They were born into the world of The Devouring Mother and it is from that world that they seek escape. That is what Peterson has offered.
Those are the broad outlines of how Peterson rose to fame channeling the support of the rebellious children and directly confronting the gaslighting and ideological/emotional manipulation that has been at the core of The Devouring Mother’s ascendancy in recent decades. As we know, Peterson was laid low in late 2019 and the half of 2020. What was it that brought Peterson undone? Prescription medication. The modern medical industry. I suppose you could argue that this is coincidence. But we know better by now. It’s a synchronicity. It’s The Devouring Mother in her Munchausen by Proxy form. Prescription medication has, of course, claimed an enormous number of lives in North America in recent decades. Just to give two examples that have personal relevance for me as I am a huge fan of both their music. Chris Cornell, one of the all-time great rock singers known best for his work with Soundgarden, died in a hotel room in 2017. The cause of death was officially suicide. But, at the time of his death, Cornell had no less than five different prescription medications in his system. His widow sued Cornell’s doctor for prescribing those medications to her husband. The doctor settled out of court. Prince, who must go down as one of the all-time great electric guitarists alongside his pop music career, died in his home of an overdose of fentanyl in 2016. Fentanyl is the drug that has been at the centre of the opioid crisis in the US. A couple of people close to the musician had tried to organise to get him into a similar program of rehab that Peterson would go through in 2020 but they did not get it organised in time to prevent his death. Numerous similar cases could no doubt be found for both famous and non-famous people. What is strange in Peterson’s case is that he is on the record pointing out exactly these issues with the medical system in North America. His journey to eastern Europe to seek treatment for his own problems speaks to a deep distrust of the system. Thus, symbolically, his trip to Moscow represents him fleeing from The Devouring Mother in order to get better and this is very much in keeping with the Munchausen by Proxy archetype. One would have expected him to bring that perspective to bear directly on the corona event. Instead, he has acquiesced. As noted above, this acquiescence has brought him into conflict with his followers who, I think rightly, expected him to speak out against what has happened. Corona should have been right up his alley. His failure to speak has meant that people looking for a dissenting voice failed to get one. To the extent that corona represents The Devouring Mother fighting back against her rebellious children, this is a substantial setback. The voices of the rebellious children have been silenced. What that means for Peterson in the years ahead will be a very interesting one to watch. Will his failure mean the rebellious children will start looking for another leader? Or will his failure of leadership bring an end to the movement as a whole?
Trump
So much has already been written about the Trump phenomenon and I do not intend to add much here except to do a lightning overview of how Trump fits into The Devouring Mother – rebellious child archetype. It probably barely needs saying that Trump was a rebel. He was a political outsider who seemingly single-handedly took on the entire US establishment and won. In doing so, he created a movement that was bigger than Peterson’s. It was Michael Moore of all people who was the one who mostly concisely summed up that movement when he described Trump as a human Molotov cocktail that his supporters wanted to throw into the system. The rebellious children who supported Trump were not just the young people, they were everybody who had been thrown under the bus as globalisation that had kicked into hyperdrive in the 90s. For them, “Make America Great Again” had a tangible resonance because they had seen with their own eyes the destruction wrought on the places where they lived (mostly in flyover country). Trump was offering to turn that around. His opponent in the election was the woman who was married to the man whose decisions as President started the very process that had thrown those exact people to the wolves. That would have been bad enough, but now she showed up again twenty years later and, rather than ask for atonement or offer an apology, she simply looked down her nose at them. Again, Michael Moore hit the mark in saying “The last thing you want to do is wag your finger, your adult finger, at these millennials. They’re upset about the whole thing. They’re upset about the world that’s been handed to them.” Your “adult” finger? I think we can safely translate that as your “Devouring Mother finger” because that’s what Hillary Clinton was waving at Trump supporters and not just the millennials. Of course, it went beyond that. She labelled them the “deplorables” and in so doing gave a name to the group and inadvertently helped to catalyse the movement which had been forming right under her nose and to which she seemed completely oblivious. That movement was the rebellious children and Clinton was their Devouring Mother. With the tag “deplorable” she did not merely dismiss them but disowned them. That is not behaviour befitting somebody running for president. Although you may criticise the other side, ultimately you hope to be elected and when you are president you are supposed to govern for everybody or at least pretend to. But Clinton couldn’t hide her contempt. Her behaviour was not befitting a presidential candidate but it was befitting a Devouring Mother where you either acquiesce or you get disowned. The truth is, the deplorables had already been disowned decades earlier and it was just now they were fighting back. Even Michael Moore could see that. In his victory speech at the Republican convention, Trump said “I am your voice”. He was talking directly to the rebellious children who had coalesced behind him into an open rebellion against the status quo in politics. Much like Peterson had modified himself into the lawgiver in a process of co-evolution with his audience, so Trump modified himself as he tailored his message in response to whatever got the most applause at his rallies. This gave rise to such phrases as “drain the swamp”. Two other were also notable – “lock her up” and “crooked Hillary”. Revenge on the system and revenge on The Devouring Mother. Clinton, the wife of the man who kicked globalisation into overdrive, a creature of the swamp and, most crucially of all, the very personification in tone of voice and attitude of The Devouring Mother.
Everybody remembers Trump’s campaign slogan which has become part of the culture now. Far fewer will remember Clinton’s but it is another crucial synchronicity that links her to The Devouring Mother archetype. “I’m with her”. This is a statement of allegiance pure and simple. It denotes no political content, no notion of what she will do for the nation or what she will deliver to you the voter. In it there is no hint whatsoever as to what the Clinton campaign stood for other than to get her elected. The slogan superficially resembles other campaigns in recent US political history, most notably “I like Ike”. But “I like Ike” is merely vapid and fits nicely with the buoyant mood of the post war boom years in the US. “I’m with her” is not vapid. It ties in with The Devouring Mother archetype and takes on whole new levels of resonance. The Devouring Mother asks only for submission and allegiance and this precisely what “I’m with her” denotes. By contrast, Make America Great Again is a goal and a mission. Something is wrong in the world and by voting for Trump you can make it right. Like Peterson, this phrase draws on history. In order to understand what it means, you must know what America was like when it was great, what has gone wrong since and what needs to be done to get it back. It is, in fact, the same slogan Reagan used. In this way, the Trump aligned himself with history. Just like with Peterson, the rebellious children were looking to identify what their tradition was and to ground themselves in it. In politics, that tradition is the democratic nation state and so it is fitting that Make America Great Again explicitly foregrounds the nation state. “I’m with her” is not about the nation state, it’s about her and you really got the impression from Clinton that she thought this was enough. That she deserved to be elected president just because of who she was. Of course, narcissism and vanity are defining features of The Devouring Mother. It is no small irony that the media attempted to present things in exactly the opposite way. Trump was supposed to be the vainglorious one only running for President to boost his ego while Clinton was the cool, experienced insider who knew how to work the system and would keep it running smoothly. But the rebellious children did not want the system to run smoothly anymore. It had been running them smoothly into the ground for decades and they had had enough. They wanted somebody to throw a spanner in the works and Trump knew how to portray himself as the man for the job.
Four years later, it all came to an end in the Capitol protest, an event as surreal as the rest of the Trump presidency. I don’t know what to make of it on a factual level and from the other side of the world I wouldn’t like to judge. Symbolically, it seems to fit the archetype. The rebellious children had brought their grievances right to the seat of power and yet even the symbolism feels a bit off to me. One thing’s for sure, though, when you get guys like this showing up, you are definitely getting down into subconscious territory although I wouldn’t have a clue what archetype he is trying to embody.
In any case, it was this which finally gave the establishment an excuse to de-platform Trump permanently and that more than anything characterised his defeat. The rebellious child had been grounded, perhaps permanently.
Much more could be said about all this, but I think that overview suffices for our purposes. What’s left to explain is how corona brought the Trump train to a sudden stop. I suspect that Trump knew at least intuitively what he was up against symbolically when corona kicked off. In early February he tweeted that it was ‘just the flu’ but, ultimately, he had to give in. The entire establishment which had been running the Russia nonsense against him for three years had cottoned on to what could be done with the corona story at that stage. He did the next best thing which was to push the idea of heroic science in the form of the vaccine but it was never something he really believed in and it showed. It is not coincidental that this is the exact line that Peterson has pushed in relation to corona; a kind of acceptance of ‘science’. Invoking the authority of science works just as well in politics as in the culture wars. The problem these days is that institutionalised science has been corrupted and there is perhaps nobody who more personifies that corruption than Fauci. Kary Mullis, inventor of the PCR and a real scientist if ever there was one, had already pointed out twenty years earlier that Fauci was a fraud but Trump found himself having to put the fraud in charge of the corona response. In doing so, he handed over power to The Devouring Mother. I believe it was the first time in his presidency where he lost a battle on the symbolic level. It was notable that at Trump election rallies later in the year the crowd was chanting “fire Fauci”. This was well before the lab leak story went mainstream. The rebellious children knew the score just like Peterson’s supporters who have spoken out against his support of the vaccine also know the score. At least some of the rebellious children also want to throw a Molotov cocktail into the corrupt system of institutionalised science but both Trump and Peterson were unwilling or unable to lead them there. Perhaps that’s because they also know that this represents a genuine split in their supporter base. Appeals to ‘science’ still cut across the political divide. In Trump’s case, he chose the path he thought was least damaging politically. He was probably right but that did not stop him from losing as a result. The Devouring Mother got her revenge. She seemed to know exactly the point at which to split the rebels in two and diminish their power. That point was the faith in ‘science’.
It seems very likely that this battle over the corruption of science and medicine is about to be the defining feature of the years ahead. Since the end of lockdown in the UK, there have been weekly mass protests on the streets of London with hundreds of thousands marching against the measures imposed on them. In the US, republican politicians are already making decisive moves on the issue. Florida governor DeSantis has launched several lawsuits against the CDC, some of which he has already won. A number of republican states now have laws on the books prohibiting mandatory masking and vaccine passports and have also cut funding to the public health bureaucracy. We have seen the lab leak story become the dominant narrative for the origin of corona. The deliberate suppression of ivermectin and other treatments is the elephant sitting on the living room couch. There is ample ammunition for any smart politician to use. The question is whether it will become politically beneficial to do so and that will depend largely on the rebellious children. If so, the chants of “fire Fauci” may just come true. In any case, that is unlikely to work in favour of either Trump or Peterson. Both of them symbolically lost the battle with The Devouring Mother in 2020 on exactly this issue. If the rebellious children now re-group behind a platform to redress the corruption of science and medicine it seems quite likely that somebody like DeSantis could ride that horse straight to the White House. A lot depends on what happens next and there are way too many unknowns to make any firm predictions. One thing seems true, though, the battle between The Devouring Mother and her rebellious children isn’t going away soon.
Two of the common criticisms of Jungian archetypes are that they lack analytical rigor and that they are not causative, or at least can’t be shown to be causative in the way we normally associate with science. It is no small irony, of course, that the field of virology suffers from the same difficulties. As we saw in part 8 in this series, there are still no firm rules by which to show that a virus causes an illness and this is especially true of respiratory viruses. And the criteria about what constitutes a distinct virus that is different from other viruses have been changed a number of times recently and there is still much disagreement within virology about what they should be. Nevertheless, our society has had no problem believing that sars-cov-2 is a ‘new’ virus and that it causes a ‘new’ disease. In fact, it’s the same people who believe in that ‘science’ who would criticise Jungian psychology for being unscientific. What is really at stake is not science as such but metaphysics. Jung did not conform to the standard materialist dogma that is dominant in western society and the criticisms of him are mostly nothing more than punishment for this indiscretion. Recently, it occurred to me that there are strong parallels between Jungian psychology and the branch of knowledge I did my university degree in – linguistics. One of the things that is interesting about that is that modern linguistics aims for exactly the kind of rigor some people would say is lacking in Jungian psychology. So, I thought it might be worthwhile to spend a post detailing these correspondences as a way to try and illuminate Jungian psychology and also put the criticisms of it into perspective. Some people deny that the archetypes exist, but nobody would deny that the English language exists. Nevertheless, the two are directly comparable and we should be able to use the latter to elucidate the former. In doing so, we’ll also have a look at why linguistics and psychology have so much in common and how that commonality makes them not amenable to the strict analytical rules and causal determination that can be achieved in the ‘hard’ sciences. Before we get to that, though, let’s do a lightning review of the main moves in 20th century linguistics wrought by the man whose work overturned the discipline, Noam Chomsky.
One of the main tasks Chomsky set for linguistics was how to account for the ages-old problem of how children learn language. We know that every healthy child with faculties intact will learn language to native speaker level automatically and without conscious effort. We also know that a child will learn the language of wherever they happen to be in the world even though the languages of the world show radical diversity in form. And we know that the language a child is exposed to is imperfect and incomplete. As I write this post, I am correcting myself as I go and I have the ability to go over what I have written and correct errors afterwards. But we can’t do that with spoken language. A transcript of me reading this exact same post out loud, even if I was reading directly from the written material, would show errors, false starts and other inconsistencies. Every-day, spontaneous spoken language contains even more errors, false starts and incomplete sentences and that is before you factor in metaphorical language or creative and novel use of forms and all the other bits and pieces that add spice to the spoken word. The task for the language learning child of bringing order to his mess seems insurmountable if the child was using general deduction to try and ascertain the rules of the language. Therefore, Chomsky posited that there must exist a faculty of some kind which is innate and whose structure the child brings to the problem so that it knows most of the rules in advance at some level of abstraction and its job in language learning is to figure out how the language it is hearing fits onto those pre-existing rules. Because these rules are limited, the child has a relatively small set of options to choose from and the task of language learning becomes manageable. Chomsky called this innate faculty Universal Grammar and we can map what this looks like as follows:-
This diagram is a logical diagram that is meant to refer to three logical types of individual speaker, a specific language spoken by a community of speakers and the Universal Grammar whose rules govern the possible forms of individual languages. In reality, universal grammar is in each of us and, according to the materialist position, must be present genetically so that it can be handed down through the generations. Meanwhile, what we call a language is itself an abstraction from the everyday spoken word. The linguist deduces a grammar from the linguistic behaviour of a community of speakers and calls that the language. This language is always in flux and its vocabulary and grammar can and do change over time. Nevertheless, within the Chomskyan paradigm, it is hypothesised that the grammar will always map back to the abstract rules of Universal Grammar which every one of us has in our mental makeup. By analysing the rules of each language spoken in the world, we should be able to hypothesise and then prove the rules of Universal Grammar. In doing so, we would account for how children acquire language and we would shine a scientific light into the previously dark recesses of human cognition. That was, in a nutshell, the goal which Chomsky set and which made linguistics, at least for a few decades, one of the most exciting fields of study in the 20th century.
There are all kinds of problems with the Chomskyan program which we don’t need to go into here. However, this way of formulating the structure of the way we learn language is almost beyond doubt. Linguists will argue about the nature of the faculties used in language acquisition but almost nobody doubts that there must be some innate faculties the child brings to the job. What Chomsky was trying to do was to bring the issue down to concrete, testable hypotheses and thereby to arrive over time at a more precise understanding of the language faculty. What is of relevance to us is that this way of framing things is, as far as I can tell, identical to what Jung had in mind with his archetypes. In fact, the exact same diagram can be drawn to characterise Jung’s theory of the archetypes:
What Maximus (the character in the movie Gladiator), Jesus and Wotan are meant to represent here are culturally specific examples of archetypes which bear the same relation to the collective unconscious as a specific language such as English bears to Universal Grammar. Jung would posit that there exists a more abstract form of each archetype in the Collective Unconscious which governs the expression in a particular culture. Thus, Maximus is one possible example of The Warrior archetype in the same way that English is one possible example of a human language. Just like Chomsky and other linguists study the patterns of language to try and determine the more abstract forms of Universal Grammar, so Jung and other psychologists study the cultural manifestations of the archetypes to try and arrive back at the more abstract forms. At this resolution, the two methods seem the same. However, Chomsky created a detailed and highly technical analysis of syntactic forms in his generative grammar whereas Jung did not aim for anything like that level of precision. In my opinion, what happened with Chomskyan linguistics is that the generative grammar became a complex game in its own right and arguably became a distraction from the underlying goal. What’s more, it doesn’t appear to have worked. The early results, which seemed promising, were limited by a focus on syntax and specifically the syntax of English. As the model was applied to other languages the limitations of this approach became clear. There are languages in the world where syntax simply isn’t that relevant and where morphology does most of the heavy lifting. In such languages, generative grammar becomes a clumsy and laborious way to account for the language and this throws doubt of the relation back to Universal Grammar. It looks to me like Chomsky’s project fell into the kind of category error that we’ll have a look at shortly and the purported rigor and detailed technical analysis actually left out a great deal that was essential to language itself.
It’s instructive that one of the criticisms labelled against Chomsky was that, for all his purported scientific rigor, ultimately he had to rely on the intuitions of individual speakers of a language to decide what was and was not grammatical. His rules were based on such intuitions but, within the edicts of materialist science, that is bad form. We need empirically verifiable data and not ‘subjective’ data. Of course, this same accusation has been levelled against Jung. In order to see why it is invalid and in order to elucidate the category error that I believe Chomsky fell into, let’s have a look at a way of dividing up the domains of knowledge that I first read about in Gregory Bateson’s book Mind and Nature. We’ll see that both linguistics and psychology are related disciplines that fall into a separate category from the hard sciences. Because of that, they can and do share an approach to knowledge that is valid within that domain but would be considered invalid in the domain of hard science.
The two domains that Bateson outlined are pleroma and creatura. To pleroma belongs the two disciplines that we generally consider hard science: physics and chemistry. To creatura belongs disciplines such as linguistics and psychology as well as biology, medicine, hermeneutics and religious and spiritual pursuits. The following diagram gives an outline of this distinction.
If we accept this distinction, we can see that a category error occurs whenever we apply the methods which are valid in pleroma to creatura and vice versa. The latter of these is what is usually called superstition while the former is sometimes called scientism. What Chomsky was trying to do in linguistics is also what many others have been trying to do in the 20th and into the 21st centuries which is to apply the methods of science from the pleroma domain to the creatura domain. Chomsky’s appeal to intuition, however, was more in keeping with the domain of creatura and was for this reason criticised. This criticism is only valid if you think that real knowledge only comes from the methods applied to pleroma. But this exactly what Bateson, Jung and others would have denied. There were various movements and schools of thought in the 20th century that set out to put the domain of creatura on a firm footing and trying to address the imbalance that had arisen where the methods valid to pleroma had come to be seen as the be all and end all of knowledge. The creatura domain is always in the process of becoming. It simply can’t yield the static, reproducible results that we find in the dead world of pleroma. Moreover, in Bateson’s analysis, all the creatura domain is governed by mind and because mind implies a hierarchy of logical types and feedback loops up and down the hierarchy, it’s not possible to do reductionist science because the attempt at reductionism at best sets a new context which didn’t exist before and at worst outright changes the very object under study. Bateson would also have said that empathy is needed in the domain of creatura. It takes a mind to know a mind. That’s why linguistics must appeal to the intuitive judgements of speakers about what is and is not grammatical. Only a speaker of a language can know those things. If you try and remove the speaker from the equation, you lose something fundamental. This is exactly what happens in cognitive science research where the researcher will often hide the true intent of the study from the subject. It’s very common in such research to give the subject a task to do while the thing that the researcher is trying to test for is unrelated to that task. In that way, the subject’s rational mind will not ‘get in the way’ of the results. In doing so, the researcher has removed conscious awareness from the equation. Such results may have a certain validity but I think we can all agree that conscious awareness is a pretty important thing to be leaving out when it comes to human beings. That’s what happens when you apply the pleroma paradigm to the creatura domain. Even within the Chomskyan paradigm, with its pretension to hard science, that I am a native speaker of English gives me the right to make judgements about the whole of the English language. Bateson said the same in relation to biology. As biological creatures, we can compare ourselves to other biological creatures and determine the patterns which connect us. The same goes for Jungian psychology. Each of us is a psyche and, if we can recognise the elements of the psyche within us, we can also recognise it without. That’s why you have to know thyself.
The messiness of human language mirrors the messiness of human psychology. But the desire to clean up this messiness is not valid in the domain of creatura. Even in the hard sciences, the preference for simplicity known as Occam’s Razor is mostly a practical matter. For any simple explanation there are numerous, perhaps infinite, explanations that work to account for a phenomenon but we prefer the simplest one. However, to paraphrase Einstein, explanations should be as simple as possible but no simpler. By leaving out so much of what makes language what it is, Chomsky might have won some insights into syntax but he left out a whole lot of other things that are arguably just as important. As Mary Midgely noted, this zeal for reductionism seems tied very much to hubris and when applied to the domain of creatura it leads to results that miss the point by excluding from consideration that which cannot be excluded.
Jung did not deny the validity of the hard sciences. Rather, he argued that the part of our mind that can think ‘causally’ and ‘rationally’ is actually quite young and is built upon a much larger and much more well-established part of the mind that interprets the world acausally or, we might say, religiously or symbolically. Many of the greatest scientists believed much the same thing and did not deny the validity of the older way of understanding. It is only in the modern world with our extremist materialist philosophy that the denial of that way of thinking has become common. We demand causal explanations based on quantity and number but when these are applied to the domain of creatura we leave out that which is crucial to our understanding. Consider this, virology actually sits right on the border between pleroma and creatura. We call it a part of biology but it deals with viruses and viruses are not alive. If we were to say that virology was actually a part of organic chemistry we would then also be saying that it is part of pleroma. This would be useful because it make very clear a distinction which has not been clear during corona which is that virology and viral disease are two very different things. The former has as its object a virus while the latter has as its object the relation between a virus and a person (medicine) and the relation between a virus and a population (epidemiology). These latter two are very clearly in the domain of creatura and this would make clear the fact that we would not want to apply the methods that are valid in pleroma to those disciplines. But, in fact, the whole corona discourse has been based on exactly that. The obsessive counting of ‘cases’ is just one aspect of that category error. The same people who are happy to gloss over the analytical difficulties of viral disease are the ones who would deny archetypal analysis because it does not establish causality. That correlation does not imply causality is one of the basic principles of hard science and yet it is correlation that has driven the whole corona business. Ironically, the corona event has been driven largely by those older faculties of the mind that Jung described and not the younger, scientific faculties. And yet it’s the people who deride those older faculties as superstition who have been most susceptible to them. In a way, that’s not surprising. If you aren’t used to using those faculties, you are going to be defenceless in the same way that somebody who has no fighting skills is defenceless against a trained martial artist. Our modern materialist society pretends those faculties don’t exist and so we have a population of people who are completely blind to what is still the main driver of human affairs. We pretend that the rationalist tip of the iceberg is all that exists while being wilfully ignorant of the power and mass of the submerged subconscious.
Thus, the error in corona has been the same error that Bateson and the other systems thinkers and cyberneticists had already identified in the 20th century. A category error of believing that only the precepts of reductionist science can give rise to knowledge and the invalid application of those precepts to the creatura domain. What is required in the creatura domain is the acceptance of holistic thinking. It’s a generalist approach that uses what the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called adductive reasoning. This involves drawing patterns across domains or looking for what Bateson called the pattern which connects. What abductive reasoning implies, and it is this which most offends against our materialist prejudices, is that certainty is not attainable. By failing to acknowledge this, we do what we have done during corona which amounts to nothing more than a desperate grasping after a certainty which can never be attained. We attempt to simplify things which cannot and should not be simplified and in so doing we fall into the trap outlined by the old saying – we cut off our nose to spite our face.
I first began to get acquainted with Jungian archetypes as part of my fiction writing. There are a number of different versions of the archetypes that are useful for writers but the one I have mostly used is a list of twelve that includes such archetypes such as The Fool, The Lover and The Warrior. Almost all well-written characters in literature and film can be placed into one of these archetypes and the archetypes prove to be handy tools to guide the development of a character. Much like the classical 3-act plot structure helps keep the story on the rails, the Jungian archetypes help to ensure a character’s personal attributes ring true. They are not hard and fast rules, just guidelines that have stood the test of time.
This raises the question of why they have stood the test of time and the Jungian’s answer would be: because they tap into the collective unconscious. Back when Jung and his collaborators were first working through the emerging psychology of the unconscious, one of the data points they were using were fairy tales and myths. By definition, fairy tales and myths had been around for a long while and the ones that had survived were almost certainly touching on something fundamental. Such stories feature simplified characters and one of the effects of this simplification is to strip away the rationalisations of the conscious mind and get down into what is essential including what is essential at the subconscious levels.
The primary storytelling medium in modern times is film and the type of film which most corresponds to fairy tale and myth is the superhero film. In fact, it’s not uncommon for superheroes in film to be named after or based on characters from classical myth. Many superhero films are adapted from comic books and therefore incorporate strong visual elements with less attention given to complex characterisation and more to action. As the Marvel franchise can attest, such stories are as popular as were the myths and fairy tales of old and from this we can deduce that they resonate strongly with the unconscious. In the Jungian sense, they should be the perfect place to go looking for archetypes and, when we do so, it turns out that superhero films have something very interesting to tell us about a subject that has been at the centre of corona: masks.
I noted in my post on The Devouring Mother that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever to show that masks work to prevent the transmission of respiratory viruses. Numerous randomised control trials have found no effect of mask wearing. In the last year or so, we have conducted a mass experiment on the subject which has confirmed exactly what we already knew. Mandatory masking, wherever it has been implemented, had no noticeable affect case numbers at all. In fact, due to most governments deciding to make them mandatory during the northern hemisphere summer, masks appeared to cause case numbers to go up.
Most European and North American governments made masks mandatory around August which is the seasonal low point for respiratory viruses. No sooner were masks mandatory than case numbers started to rise and continued to rise in the march towards winter. Of course, this is just correlation and not causality but most of the “science” around corona has been correlation and not causality so why not let it cut both ways. The truth is, masks never had anything to do with the ‘science’. Within The Devouring Mother archetype, they are to do with dominance and submission. But, as we are about to find out, they are more than that. Superheroes love to wear masks. So do supervillains. But the masks they wear are very different and this difference reveals something about what masks symbolise in the unconscious.
As an exercise: picture in your mind a superhero; not any particular superhero, just a generic, run-of-the-mill, about to save the world kind of superhero. What is your superhero wearing? Chances are they are wearing a cape. The cape is the article of clothing most synonymous with superheroes, hence the facetious saying “not all heroes wear capes”. A pair of spandex tights probably comes in a close second. There is also a very good chance your superhero is wearing a mask but it won’t be the kind of mask people have been wearing in the last year. It will be a mask that wraps around the superhero’s eyes. Possibly one of the earliest examples of this kind of masked superhero was Zorro who appeared in 1919 but there have been countless others since then. We’ll see a few of them shortly.
One of the advantages of the eye-covering mask is that you can still show off your pearly whites.
This kind of mask is derived from the masquerade mask and the intent is to hide the character’s identity. The concept of the alter ego is another standard trope of superhero stories and the mask reinforces that trope. Just as the masquerade mask allows people to drop their normal personality and free themselves from social constrictions, so the superhero’s mask allows them to tap into their deeper strengths and, in doing so, perform amazing feats while not having to ruin their normal lives or risk being caught by the authorities.
The Green Lantern is one of innumerable comic book heroes to wear a mask over the eyes
Now let’s try the same exercise with a supervillain. Try to picture a stereotypical supervillain in your mind. Chances are this will not be such an easy exercise. Supervillains tend to come in different shapes and sizes and don’t fit an obvious pattern as much as superheroes. What most supervillains will have in common is an exaggeration of some part of their physical or non-physical characteristics. They might be way too big or way too small, they might have a huge head or a small head, huge eyes or small eyes. They might be super smart as in the evil genius or psychopathically lacking in empathy. Put simply, they are abnormal in some way.
In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, George Miller creates a doppelvillain combining the very small with the very large. Note the mask/helmet on the latter.The creators of teenage mutant ninja turtles would later use the same concept.
Supervillains can also wear masks but there is a crucial difference between the mask of the superhero and that of the supervillain. The supervillain’s mask is not meant to hide their identity, it is a crucial part of that identity. Supervillains are not acting as an alter ego, they are bad to the bone and the mask is a public demonstration of that fact. Sometimes, as in the case of Darth Vader and Immortan Joe, their mask is necessary for their very survival.
Let’s now have a look at some visual representations of the differences between the two kinds of mask. (To keep it symmetrical, I’ve included some heroes that don’t wear masks).
Superheroes
Supervillains
Max is masked when held prisoner…
…then symbolises his freedom by removing the mask
The Winter Soldier’s black mask would become the fashion accessory of the 2020 season. (Oh yeah, the character’s backstory is that he is brainwashed. Synchronicity much?)
Ok, not technically a superhero…
….but definitely a supervillain
It’s not the case that all supervillains wear masks over their mouths but it is the case that all characters in superhero stories who wear masks over their mouths are villains. I couldn’t find a single example where a hero character had their mouth covered. It can happen that a hero wears a full face mask, which technically does cover their mouth. Such characters fall into two main types.
What vexatious villainy visitates upon the avenger of the vanquished?
Firstly, there are the anti-heroes such as V in V for Vendetta. By definition, these are heroes who have something wrong with them. Though they act for good, they carry a fatal flaw within and the mask is a cover for that.
Secondly, there are shapeshifter characters such as Spiderman, The Hulk, Iron Man or The Mask. In these cases, the mask (whether alone or as part of a larger outfit) symbolises a complete transformation. The mask confers special powers on the character and they shapeshift out of their ordinary existence and into something else. Often it is part of the hero’s journey in such stories to learn to use their new powers wisely. These are just an extension of the alter ego trope and thus the full face mask is an extension of the eye mask and represents more strongly the fact that the hero has left their normal life and personality behind.
As one final bit of evidence, George Lucas designed Darth Vader’s helmet in Star Wars based on the masks and helmet traditionally worn by the samurai in Japan. Those masks were designed to protect the wearer while also instilling fear into an opponent in battle (just like we have had fear instilled into us in the last year by being surrounded by people wearing masks). Nevertheless, when Tom Cruise played a samurai (kind of) in the movie The Last Samurai, he went without the mask.
Note the traditional face mask of the samurai on the guy in the background.
These exceptions prove the rule. Masks covering the mouth are exclusively the domain of bad guys. On this subject, our culture (reflecting the unconscious mind) is quite unanimous: wearing a mask over your mouth signals there is something wrong with you; something to be feared.
Way back in part 9 of this series I noted how masks became tied in with a kind faux-heroism at the start of corona. People who were trying to convince others to wear masks would reference some sportsperson or sports team who were wearing masks and say something like “if they can do it while playing sports, you can do it while going to the supermarket.” I noted at the time that the tone of these calls was derogatory in nature. They didn’t call for real heroism but rather simply to fall in line and do what you were told. Re-analysed through the lens of The Devouring Mother archetype, such calls make perfect sense as emotional manipulation and a way for the acquiescent children to put the rebellious ones in their place. “If you’re one of us (the good guys, the heroes), you’ll wear a mask.” Of course, caving in to the mob is the opposite of what a real hero does. That was the first problem.
The second problem was that the wearing of a mask over the mouth has deep roots in our collective unconscious and simply asserting that it is now heroic or good to wear a mask doesn’t function at the lower levels of the psyche. Rory Sutherland, who I otherwise usually enjoy, made a valiant attempt to try and re-symbolise mask wearing as a kind of adventure we could all go on for a little while as if the mask was a fashion statement symbolising that you were a bad mofo out looking for trouble. The way to do this was to wear a cool hat and perhaps a bandana over your mouth instead of a proper mask. That way, at least you could look like you were about to rob a 7-11 and you would retain some outward appearance that you weren’t just conforming with the crowd. But that idea was never going to work. Archetypally speaking, the mask covering the mouth is reserved exclusively for the really bad guys not the cool, witty, fun-to-be-around, just-looking-for-a-bit-of-trouble bad guys. Any successful marketer, just like any successful writer of superheroes and supervillains, knows that their work must resonate in the unconscious and, as we have seen above, the unconscious is quite clear on the subject of masks that cover the mouth.
What the archetypes tell us is that covering the mouth symbolises badness, illness and wrongness. But that is exactly in keeping with the topic of the last post. In cases of Munchausen by Proxy, the mother feigns illness in her otherwise healthy child. The mask is the symbolic expression of that. With corona, we ‘quarantined’ healthy people in their homes and made healthy people wear masks. We treated healthy people as if they were sick and we dressed them appropriately. There is a logic to it but it is a logic that requires The Devouring Mother archetype to understand. “We are now sick until proven healthy,” has been one of the objections during corona and this is absolutely correct. The Devouring Mother wants you to think you are sick and that those around you are sick. That is the very definition of Munchausen by Proxy and that was always the point of the masks.
This also fills in another piece of the psychology we have seen on display during corona. I have already noted that the acquiescent children of The Devouring Mother are almost wholly concerned with dividing the world into the “good people” and the “bad people” (much like superhero films have good guys and bad guys. Another synchronicity?). During corona, being a ‘good person’ meant wearing a mask over your mouth. The problem with that is that wearing a mask over the mouth is the domain of bad guys (in the collective unconscious). Why would the people trying to be ‘good people’ want to dress like bad guys? This apparent paradox is resolved once we incorporate the Munchausen by Proxy concept. Within the Munchausen by Proxy frame, being a ‘good child’ is synonymous with either being sick or feigning sickness. That is what the mother wants and what the child learns to want. When applied to corona, the desire to wear a mask is the desire to please the mother by feigning sickness. At the same time, the mask mandate is a way to punish the rebellious children and force them to conform by also symbolically feigning illness. This desire to please the mother by willingly playing the game of faking illness corresponds to real life. In real world cases of Munchausen by Proxy, psychiatrists have noted that the child can learn to desire the attention they get from The Devouring Mother when pretending to be sick. Hence the enthusiasm for masks on the part of the acquiescent True Believers during corona.
As one final side note on this, I have already mentioned in this series a fascinating conversation I once had with an Indian doctor who had emigrated to Australia. I asked her what was the main difference she noted and she said “in India, my patients were actually sick.” She estimated about half of her patients in Australia didn’t have anything physically wrong with them but that their problems were “in their head”. This is Munchausen by Proxy at the social level. The medical industry has metastasised in the last several decades largely on the back of exactly this psychology. The psychology of The Devouring Mother.
