In the next set of posts in this series I’ll be expanding on some of the major themes from my previous post which explained the corona event as being either caused by, or encapsulated by (depending on your metaphysical convictions) The Devouring Mother archetype. Among the upcoming topics, I expect to cover the Jordan Peterson phenomenon in more detail to see what it reveals about the rebellious children and to contrast that with what the modern education system reveals about the acquiescent children of The Devouring Mother. Although I’m still working through it, I expect to have a post about the symbolism of Greta Thunberg who embodies the kind of inversion and combining of opposites that the psychologist R.D. Laing was fascinated by. Symbolically, Thunberg speaks as Devouring Mother through the body of a child purporting to be rebellious while in actual fact being acquiescent. That post may hurt my head to write. I will also have a post re-analysing my earlier posts on automation ideology and bullshit jobs into the desire of The Devouring Mother to prevent her children from achieving economic autonomy. And I expect to have a post examining in more detail why Australia has been ground zero for The Devouring Mother. Apart from revealing something about the Australian character, it also demonstrates how the American version of ‘freedom’, although it filters through American culture to places like Australia, is not really believed in by Australians or other westerners outside the US.
In this post, we’re going talk about the psychiatric condition called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy which is, for our purposes, a subset of The Devouring Mother archetype and which provides an important perspective on what has happened during corona. Munchausen by Proxy comes out of modern clinical psychiatry and refers to the scenario where a mother either seeks unnecessary medical treatment for her children or actively harms the children in order to get treatment. The mother is responsible for such acts of harm in 95% of cases of Munchausen by Proxy and therefore the syndrome fits within The Devouring Mother archetype. Because Munchausen by Proxy is often used in a court of law to either prosecute or defend a mother for the harm of the child, questions of intention arise because lawyers need to establish motive in order to win cases. However, in our archetypal analysis, motive is not necessary. An archetype in the Jungian sense simply exists in the unconscious. It is a possibility that can manifest at any time just like water can manifest as ice or steam given the right conditions. Jung emphasised the notion of transformation and transcendence in his psychology and thus he believed it was our mission as humans to overcome our archetypes and ensure we are not overwhelmed by them but, of course, we don’t always succeed. For this reason, we can expect varying levels of self-awareness on the part of people manifesting an archetype. In relation to The Devouring Mother, many people have been completely possessed and therefore lack almost all self-awareness. This is borne out by the fact that many people appear to be acting against their self-interest. Some people might say they are puppets of Big Pharma and its evil machinations. But within the Jungian analysis, they have been overcome by an archetype. (Note: an argument could certainly be made that the propaganda machine, our invisible religious body, has either encouraged the archetype or failed to mediate it on our behalf). Interestingly, Munchausen by Proxy is problematic in a legal context precisely because it does not establish motive and so even the legal system implies the loss of autonomy that can happen in relation to archetypes.
Munchausen by Proxy is quite well known in our culture. The rapper, Eminem, was one of the most famous victims. His mother would take him to hospital when he was young even though he was not sick. He once wrote a song on the subject which contains the lyric “My whole life I was made to believe I was sick when I wasn’t. ‘til I grew up and blew up…”. If ever there was a catchphrase for the rebellious child breaking free of The Devouring Mother it could be that. All you’ve gotta do is grow up. The Devouring Mother aims to keep her child co-dependant and Munchausen by Proxy is one way to achieve that goal by gaslighting the child into thinking it is sick. In more extreme cases, the mother goes a step further and actively harms the child. Damage to the child comes in the physical form but perhaps more importantly in the psychological form of deep confusion and anxiety. Consider even a simple case of a cold or flu. As children, we came down with a fever but our parents were there to re-assure us that it was “just a cold” and the fever would break in a few days. Eventually, the fever would break and life would go on as normal. What our parents had taught us was how to recognise a cold or flu and how to deal with it. Once we have learned that, we no longer worry when a cold or flu comes along. As adults, we recognise the symptoms and simply go to bed when fever strikes. But now imagine that your parents didn’t do that but insisted on rushing you to hospital every time fever strikes. Not only that, they would rush you hospital when you didn’t even have a fever. That is both confusing at the time but also sets you up for a life of anxiety around disease. Of course, this is exactly what has happened during corona. People with flu symptoms were told they didn’t have the flu, they had covid and were then treated like a biohazard. People with no symptoms who happened to test positive were also treated like lepers. That is exactly the kind of gaslighting that takes place in Munchause Syndrome by Proxy; imaginary illness or the gross exaggeration of mild symptoms.
The best portrayal of the confusion and disorientation caused by The Devouring Mother that I have seen in popular culture is from the excellent Danish-Swedish television series Bron-Broen known in English as The Bridge. In the story, Saga Norén is the lead detective for Malmo police in Sweden and throughout the various series of the show she is required to pair up with another detective from across the strait in Copenhagen. Norén is the cool, calm and rational Swede playing off against her more emotional and intuitive Danish counterpart. The difference is meant symbolically to reflect the differences between Danish and Swedish culture but, even by Swedish standards, Norén is unusual as she has Asperger’s Syndrome and is detached, unemotional and rational to a fault. This makes her very good at her job as detective but no so good at forming close personal relationships. In series three of the show, we meet Norén’s mother and find out she is a Devouring Mother who practiced Munchausen by Proxy on Norén’s sister when she was a child. Norén is plagued by guilt at her inability to save her sister who later committed suicide. Thus, in The Bridge we get to see the interaction of a gaslighting Devouring Mother against possibly the one psychological type that you would expect to be most immune to that gaslighting; a vehemently independent and accomplished adult with Asperger’s Syndrome. However, even Norén struggles to maintain her sanity and keep her rationality intact in the face of her mother who is an expert at manipulation. In this way, the story is true to real life where, in cases of Munchausen by Proxy, the child must be removed from the mother and must stay removed from the mother as it is very common for the syndrome to reappear when the two are reunited. Viewed within this frame, the constant flip-flopping of the government and public health bureaucrats on public health measures could also just be the exact kind of confusion The Devouring Mother desires. To put it in language the Ancient Greeks might have used, the Gods are screwing with them just as much as they are screwing with us. The Devouring Mother sows confusion among her children.
To reiterate, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy occurs when the mother either makes up a story about an illness that never happened or actively harms the child in order for it to appear as if the child is sick. Let’s take each of these in turn and see how it applies to corona.
On the subject of made up illness, corona is perhaps a world historical prime example. Whether you believe “covid” is actually a new disease (I don’t), it’s a statistical fact in almost half of all “cases of covid”, the person shows no symptoms of illness. This is because we have been (mis)-using the PCR test to identify a “case”. Is it possible to have “covid”, supposedly a deadly disease, if you have no symptoms? According to our public health bureaucrats, it is. Return a positive test and you will be labelled diseased by the state and you will not only have to endure the stress of wondering whether you will become very sick, you will have several weeks of having your life turned upside down while the government tests all your family and friends and while you deal with all the attendant issues on your interpersonal relationships, work and finances. Meanwhile, you are most likely to have no symptoms or only mild flu symptoms. Throughout corona, we have literally been telling people they have a deadly disease even though most barely have any symptoms. The media then amplified the signal by talking endlessly about ‘cases’ and never about illness. If that isn’t Munchausen by Proxy at the societal level, I don’t know what is. At best, it is deeply confusing and at worst a form of gaslighting designed to create unnecessary anxiety. The misuse of the PCR matches exactly the pattern I noted in an earlier post in this series about mammograms where the prevalence of false positives causes damaging treatments to be given to people who would otherwise have been fine. It is at this point that Munchausen by Proxy goes beyond just imaginary sickness and into active harm and, sadly, we have also seen exactly that also during corona.
This harrowing video released by a whistle-blower nurse from a New York City hospital is perhaps the best example of the early days where anybody suspected of having corona, even those who tested negative, were put under heavy sedation and intubated. The survival rate from such an invasive procedure was extremely low. I recall hearing it was about one in ten. There were many similar stories going around in the early days where, for whatever reason, the sedation-intubation protocol was circulated among medical professionals and recommended as the go-to option for treatment of covid. It wasn’t until a couple of months later where videos emerged of doctors claiming that the disease they were seeing was not the one they had heard about and that the intubation treatment was not the correct protocol. By then, the damage had been done. As the video with the nurse in New York shows, many people had already died as a result. Around the same time, we started hearing about hydroxychloroquine which got caught up in the madness of US politics after Trump stated that he was using it as a preventative measure. Some doctors believe that hydroxychloroquine also caused unnecessary illness and even death as the doctors who were experimenting with it were using very high doses that compromised the immune system of already vulnerable people and made them less able to fight off the virus.
How many of the deaths and serious disease attributed to corona were due to these kinds of treatments is a question we will never know the answer to. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that people were both injured and even died directly from treatments like invasive intubation and also indirectly through the reduced care given to those most in danger. In all western countries, most of the deaths from corona have come from nursing home patients and conditions in the nursing homes went to hell right around the time of the lockdown as employees either didn’t show up to work or, if they did, gave greatly reduced attention to the most needy. Again, we will never know how many of the deaths were due to actual illness and how many were due to treatments and lack of care. On one end of the spectrum are people such as Denis Rancourt who believes almost all the deaths were caused by our response. You can read his argument here. There are more moderate positions such as the Swiss Policy Research who have done a great job of providing objective data and analysis right from the start of corona. They estimate about 30% of the excess death was caused by the response. Either way, the response itself caused unnecessary pain and suffering and thereby fits the pattern of Munchausen by Proxy.
It is on the question of the vaccine, however, that the Devouring Mother in her Munchausen by Proxy form shows herself mostly clearly. One could forgive medical practitioners in the early days of corona for over-reacting given the stress of the situation. Doctors are only human and when everybody around you is losing their mind it is no doubt hard to keep yours especially when you are at the coalface. With the vaccine we have no such excuse. We are more than a year into this business and, despite continuing hysterics around every new ‘variant’ that some public health bureaucrat reads into the tea leaves of viral genome, we know what this virus is. The fundamentals have barely changed from day one. The case fatality rate is about 0.15% with the risk being almost exclusively confined to the elderly and immuno-compromised. For the majority of the population, this virus is equivalent to seasonal flu and, the younger you are, the less dangerous it is. The idea of mass vaccination with an experimental vaccine for such a virus is ludicrous and completely irrational but it is irrational in exactly the way predicted by Munchausen by Proxy where The Devouring Mother insists on unnecessary medical treatments even if she must harm the child to do so.
Recently, I was watching a video with Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, who has been one the most lucid experts right from the start of corona. Bhakdi was talking specifically about the dangers of the vaccines and noted “the immune system is being trained [with the vaccine] to do something that it would do very well on its own.” With just a couple of changed words, this sentence could describe The Devouring Mother archetype. Children grow up and seek autonomy all by themselves. The parents’ job is to keep the children on the rails, not to micromanage every part of their development. But that is what The Devouring Mother does because she wants the child to remain co-dependent. And that is what we are doing with the vaccine. Rather than allow people to be exposed to the virus naturally and to let the immune system do a job it’s been doing for millions of years, we have locked them away in their houses waiting to ‘train’ their immune system with the vaccine. That would be bad enough except we have no idea what the cost-benefit analysis of the vaccine is. As Professor Bhadki points out, vaccines such as tetanus have a clear cost-benefit profile. Tetanus is a genuinely deadly disease which will kill almost everybody who gets it if they do not receive immediate treatment. In fact, even with immediate treatment, a large number of people will die. The side effects of the tetanus vaccine are mild and very well-known as it has been in use for decades. It’s a no-brainer to take a tetanus shot. With the corona vaccines, the cost-benefit analysis is not clear at all. Early evidence suggests the vaccine causes about as much serious illness and even death for the population under the age of sixty as would have been caused by the virus. Unlike the tetanus shot, the amount of protection the corona vaccine offers is also unknown but we already know it doesn’t prevent infection and doesn’t guarantee protection from death (contrary to the tetanus shot). Although I very much doubt it, an argument could be made that the vaccines are in the interests of the elderly who are most at risk from corona and, in any case, they have nothing to fear from long term effects. In a sane society, we would let the elderly take the vaccine and let everyone else get on with their lives. But we are in the society of The Devouring Mother. In Europe, the vaccines are now being trialled on children as young as six months old. It’s a simple statistical fact that corona is far less dangerous to children than seasonal flu so why would anybody want to vaccinate children with an experimental vaccine? As Bhadki states bluntly – “You are endangering your own children.” But that is exactly what The Devouring Mother does in her Munchausen by Proxy form. She deliberately submits them to unnecessary medical intervention.
Bhakdi’s exasperation is totally understandable. Right from the start of corona we were told that if we didn’t like the measures we wanted old people to die. That’s a non sequitur and a form of emotional manipulation but it should have been possible to point out that the virus did not affect children and that the lockdowns and masks were a form not just of physical harm but psychological harm. It should have been obvious that everything should be done to shield children from whatever measures were necessary to protect the elderly. In a video from the UK that went viral last year, an elderly woman said that we shouldn’t be worried about her as she was going to die soon anyway. We should be worried about the young people. She was right and it should have been obvious she was right but it has not happened. One can only imagine the direct and long lasting effects of the last year and a quarter on the children that have lived through it.
In the last post I said that a feature of The Devouring Mother was that she sought a never-ending relationship of co-dependence. This is exactly what happens with Munchausen by Proxy except the co-dependence is maintained through illusory medical conditions or through direct physical harm. The stage is set for exactly these possibilities right now. We have the endless ‘variants’ of covid ready to roll. The elderly will no longer die of pneumonia. They will die of covid or rhivid or whatever other ‘new’ disease can be tested for. All it will take is a virologist to find a ‘new’ virus and off we go again. Trump was right in his instincts to defund the WHO but he is gone now. Instead, we have pretenders like Boris Johnson who recently stated that what we really need is a global surveillance network to help find more ‘new’ viruses. Of course, once a ‘new’ virus is found, a PCR test can be created and the whole play can start over again. More frightening though is Bhakdi’s warning that the “vaccines” may cause autoimmune disease. That is also in keeping with Munchausen by Proxy but now the illness is very real and not made up.
In Munchausen by Proxy, just as in other cases of The Devouring Mother, the child must be removed from the mother. In The Bridge, that is exactly what Saga Norén attempted to do but failed. However, it turns out that, in real life, Eminem succeeded. Not only did he free himself, he was later granted custody of his brother in order to protect him from their mother. Maybe in that story there is a hint as to the solution to our problem as well.
All posts in this series:-
The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)
The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet
The Coronapocalypse Part 2: An Epidemic of Testing
The Coronapocalypse Part 3: The Panic Principle
The Coronapocalypse Part 4: The Denial of Death
The Coronapocalypse Part 5: Cargo Cult Science
The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic
The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun
The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents
The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona
The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic
The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism
The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)
The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book
The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology
The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers
The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?
The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)
The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects
The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria
The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story
The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?
The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs
The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature
The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction
The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate
The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother
The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy
The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask
The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude
The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children
The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!
The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement
The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom
The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone
The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe
The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available
Hey mate,
Seems like there are some interesting posts in the future. Looking forward to that.
Corona gets more interesting the closer one looks. Not the virus of course. I think i learned more about psychology in the last 18 months than in all my life before 2020.
Here’s a question: munchausen by proxy is a mental disorder that affects individuals. I don’t disagree with your analysis, but it leaves the question how it can affect a whole society. A society is an abstraction and a very different thing from a person. For instance a society cannot catch the flu or break a leg. Yet, in this case society clearly shows all the symptoms. Quite remarkable.
G’day, Roland. Greer has talked a bit about the concept of an egregore which I think allows some explanation for this. A group of people, including a society, gives rise to a non-physical entity. If that non-physical entity is of the same type as each of our non-physical beings, then it could also manifest an archetype in the same way we can. It’s possible Jung had also given an explanation for this somewhere. I’ll keep an eye out.
Roland – came across this quote reading Jung yesterday: “the psychology of the individual corresponds to the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is also done by each individual, and so long as the individual does it, the nation also does it. Only the change in attitude of the individual is the beginning of the change in the psychology of the nation.”
A rather interesting concept the egregore. A group of individuals gives rise to an entity in its own right if i understand that correctly.
Presumably this entity would have its own consciousness and agenda.
A bit like the gods of the discworld.
How does one kill an egregore?
Sounds like a good question for Greer. “How do you kill an egregore? Asking for a friend.”
I’ve been saying since the vaccines were approved it is a terrible idea, but the analysis of them as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy helps explain it: children subjected to unnecessary and harmful medical treatment will often grow up to be adults who will refuse to seek treatment for anything. There are serious downsides to this, for obvious reasons, but I can’t argue with the experiences.
What happens if these vaccines turn out to be dangerous and have awful long term side effects? How many antivaxers will it create; how many people will decide to forgo all medical treatments going forwards, and what effects will that have on public health?
I’m finding it impossible to discuss this: most people I know are dismissing the idea that long term consequences aren’t known as some sort of conspiracy theory, but this just makes me question the safety even more: how can I trust anything about it if the actual, obvious concerns are not being taken seriously?
Mollari – yeah, we are sleepwalking into what would be a combined health and political crisis. Imagine 2020 all over again except with a large proportion of the population (rightly) blaming the government. Then imagine what the government would do to try and evade blame. I don’t think there’s any point trying to change anybody’s mind now. We’re all strapped in for the ride and the only thing to do is buckle up.
I find the possibility of the vaccines causing a crisis quite disturbing, since the official records indicate the short term side effects of the vaccines are fairly nasty; especially on the second shot. The problem is that this has no bearing on the question of long term consequences, but the short term ones look bad enough I think it might convince a lot of people to reevaluate their relationship with modern medicine.
The biggest concern I have though is that the current wave of insanity was set off because people were worried that the health care system might get overwhelmed. Well, what happens when you get a lot of ill people, starting with the medical staff? I can’t see the system coping with that, especially not after the damage done to public health by the Covid hysteria.
The big problem though is we have no idea if that will happen, and that uncertainty is driving me, and probably lots of other people, nuts right now. I hate not knowing things, but right now, the only accurate answer to one of the most important questions which will shape all of our lives for the next few years is “No one can know what will happen yet.”
Mollari – I think a lot of people should reevaluate their relationship with modern medicine. If that outcome happens then some good may come of all this. Of course, as you point out, some people would go too far and dismiss it altogether which would cause other problems but that is pretty much the story of human history. We swing around an equilibrium trying to find the mid-point that works.
I agree that a lot of people ought to reassess their relationship to modern medicine; but when the state has placed its legitimacy on the topic, any kind of major reassessment will mean calling into question the legitimacy of the government; and when that happens things can get septic very, very quickly. It’s too late for anything to change it though: we just have to wait and see what happens, but the odds are far too high that this is going to blow up in catastrophic ways.
I agree. And as I stated before, when the state realises its legitimacy is genuinely under threat it will attempt to respond and that response is unlikely to be much fun. I think it’s very wise for people to hedge themselves against such an outcome at a personal level knowing, of course, that anything can happen at this point.
I’m hedging my bets right now on the possibility that the Canadian government will fall in the next few years. Not in the sense Trudeau loses a confidence vote, but I’m amazed he hasn’t, but in the sense of the fall of the Soviet Union. One major risk I’m factoring in is the possibility of a Yugoslavia style meltdown here. The tensions and mutual resentments between English and French Canadians go back centuries; and there’s a sizable French minority in Ontario and the Maratime Provinces, and a sizable English minority in Quebec. This kind of setup has blown up catastrophically before, so I think it’s a real possibility it will happen again.
I live in Ottawa, right on the border between Ontario and Quebec, which would be a major centre of violence; it also happens to be Canada’s capital. Hedging my bets has meant a lot of things, but one of the things I’m reminded of is the old proverb: Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Next best time is today.
I’ve started preparing as much as possible, but a large part of it is getting training for a career which will allow for easy emigration. I’m increasingly thinking this is going to be crucial in the next few years.
Mollari – Could you explain what is going on in Ontario? If I’m understanding correctly, they have gone into strict lockdown while other states in Canada have not. I don’t understand why and how is anybody putting up with that while all of the USA now, including even California, is dropping restrictions.
Where are thinking of emigrating to?
We’ve gone into another strict lockdown, one which is a fair amount stricter than other parts of the country, but other parts are following suit. And I frankly don’t know how so many people wound up believing that without these restrictions everyone will die, but that’s where we are. In my experience this is as true of the working classes here as it is the upper classes, which doesn’t seem to be the case elsewhere.
And my plan is emigrating to the US, most likely, but right now getting away from Ontario is my main priority, since I don’t want to be here when the Canadian government collapses. The main benefits to the US are that it’s fairly close, there’s no language barrier, it’s relatively easy for Canadians to get in, and I’ve been there before. It’s not in great shape, but right now I think it’s less likely to collapse into a blood bath.
Good luck with it. Right now states like Texas and Florida and the only places I know where anything makes sense and the leaders there seem to be in contact with reality.
@Mollari
What kind of career would allow for easy migration if you don’t mind?