The Princess and The Pea

The Princess and the Pea is a Hans Christian Andersen tale. There is a parallel myth found in Grimm’s called “The Pea Test.” In both tales, there is a test designed to ferret out if the princess that appears in the kingdom is a “true” or “genuine” princess. It is her “sensitivity” and “delicacy” that will prove her true:

The old queen upon the arrival of princess, “went into the bed-chamber, took all the bedding off, and put a pea on the flooring of the bedstead; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them upon the pea, and then twenty eider-down beds upon the mattress. On this the princess had to lie all night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.

‘Oh miserably!’ said the princess. ‘I scarcely closed my eyes all night long. Goodness knows what was in my bed. I lay upon something hard, so that I am black and blue all over! It is quite dreadful.’

Now they saw that she was a real princess; for through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider down beds she had felt the pea. No one but a real princess could be so delicate.”

If we take the kingdom as a metaphor for our psychological landscape, what is needed in this kingdom? What is the delicate princess that is being sought? And why an image of delicacy that is so exaggerated, i.e. that the princess would turn “black and blue” because of a pea underneath so many mattresses and down beds?

The particular psyche represented by this kingdom is one missing delicacy or sensitivity. The word delicate is defined as “keenly sensitive as to feeling,” or “pleasing to the senses in a subtle way.” Sensitive as “a capacity of the organism or sense organ to respond to stimulation, irritability; the degree to which a radio receiving set responds to incoming waves, the capacity to be easily hurt…”

What is missing is responsiveness to stimuli including feelings, both one’s own and other’s feelings. The sensitive princess is perhaps the antidote to Rapunzel in the tower who is locked up in a sort of schizoid encapsulation. With this sensitive princess, you have entering the psychological landscape a princess who can respond to stimulation.

This particular princess however, is not only sensitive, she is hyper-sensitive. Her hyper-sensitivity is compensatory. To have this kind of sensitivity in reality might not me very desirable but what the image is doing is exaggerating to bring into focus the missing element in the kingdom, i.e. its compensating for an inability to be responsive to either inner or outer stimuli and feelings.

This particular psyche is someone who has difficulty registering their own reactions, they are not reactive enough to know when something either stimulates them or irritates them. Perhaps they sleep-enticed by that wonderful eider bedding, and don’t notice those little irritants that are full of meaning.

Slaying the dragon

I snapped this picture in Basel and this image lies directly across the entrance of Jung's Gymnasium, into which and from which he would have entered and exited daily during his school days.

Jung often wrote of the struggle with "regression" and the desire to fall back into the "bosom of the family" especially the "mother's bosom." Its the falling back into the comfort of the known, which at some point comes in conflict with the desire to break from the past and move into new and unknown territories. This impulse emerges from some internal place and creates a psychological imperative to break free of the old comfortable order.

Jung quotes Nietzsche at length: "We must suppose that a mind in which the ideal of the 'free spirit' can grow to maturity and perfection has had its decisive crisis in some great act of emancipation, and that before this it was a spirit bound and apparently chained for ever to its corner and pillar. What binds it most tightly?...it is the ties of duty: the reverence that befits youth, respect and tenderness for all the time-honoured and valued things, feelings of gratitude for the soil whence they grew, for the hand that guided them, for the shrine where they learned to pray--their highest moments are the very ones that bind them most firmly, that put them under the most enduring obligations. The great emancipation comes suddenly for those who are so bound...A sudden horror and mistrust of what is loved, a flash of contempt for its so-called 'duty,' a rebellious, wilful, volcanically impelling desire for travel, strangeness, estrangement, coldness...a hatred of love, perhaps a sacrilegious grasp and glance backwards to everything it had worshiped and loved till then..."

Emancipation into new ways of being, new perspectives, new insights, and new psychological vistas, if we follow Nietzsche here, are accompanied by irreverance, contempt, rebelliousness, wanderlust, mistrust, coldness, and a hatred of old love ties. What about this?

The Grace of Desire and Suffering

I continue with Rapunzel’s story…the barren couple wish for a child, and then at some point there is another desire. “One day when the wife was standing at the window and looking down at the garden (the one surrounded by a high wall and belonging to a sorceress), she noticed a bed of the finest rapunzel lettuce. The lettuce looked so fresh and green that her mouth watered, and she had a great craving to eat some. Day by day the craving increased, and since she knew she could not get any, she began to waste away and look pale and miserable.”

There are two aspects to the story here I want to focus in on, the first is that the wife “notices” and then that she “desires.” The state of barren-ness in whatever form that takes (spiritual poverty, emotional poverty, schizoid encapsulation), is not always noticed: compulsions that keep one encapsulated go unabated, or one lives within a state of perpetual boredom and ennui.

To “notice” that one is in a state of barren-ness and stagnation requires an act of grace because the state of being encapsulated is not an easy one to break through. A clue in how the “noticing” may occur, comes from examining where the craved for lettuce sits. It is in a garden behind a high wall. This high wall is a division and perhaps psychologically, this division is the partition between consciousness and unconsciousness. The garden thus is part of the unconscious life of the individual. For the lettuce to sit in the unconscious, is to say that new life emerges from this part of the psyche. It is the soil from which new possibilities grow. The act of grace that I often observe in psychological growth, is the emergence from unconsciousness of new possibilities, including those things previously repressed and forgotten.

When these acts of grace occur, when those green things from the inner garden are “noticed,” desire emerges: now I want, now I crave, and perhaps now I suffer. What was previously encapsulated and locked away, now I see and now I crave. This is sometimes first experienced as a real suffering for what was previously not seen, and this is often the first step in moving closer to what was previously encapsulated. It is then with this kind of craving, that action begins. Amyemilia wrote “if wishing is all we do then nothing changes, action is required.” Action begins after what is missing is noticed, and when the craving becomes a matter of staving off “wasting away,” in other words, it becomes a matter of psychological survival.

The High Wall

Let’s continue with Rapunzel's story by going back to the beginning of the tale. The story begins with a barren couple, they have “been wishing in vain for a child.” The couple’s fertility is in question. There is a sense of stagnation where new life is wished for, but is wished for “in vain.”

This is a common human experience: “I’m bored.” “Nothing is happening.” “Nothing ever changes.” At some point in everyone’s life, we meet this psychological space of stagnation.

At this point in the story, we hear of the beautiful garden that is “filled with the most beautiful flowers and herbs. The garden, however, was surrounded by a high wall, and nobody dared enter it because it belonged to a sorceress who was very powerful and feared by all.”

What is this “high wall” that keeps our dear couple from the fertile energies of nature, the garden experience? What does that look like in us as a psychological experience?

The Sorceress' Spell

Rapunzel is locked in a tower by a “sorceress.” What is going on here? What is the psychological experience of being bewitched or under a spell? I meet this experience daily—in myself and others. Most schools of psychology have a way of talking about being under a spell. The cognitive psychologists speak of “automatic thoughts” and “core beliefs,” some speak of “the programmed tapes we listen to,” and Carl Jung’s complexes. Jung says of complexes: “In the middle Ages it went by another name: it was called possession.”

The state of being under a spell is not a rare occurrence, and there are many kinds of spells. The spell that traps one in a tower, that isolates the whole individual with such anxiety that interaction with others is rare or at least filled with distress, or a spell that creates a situation in which feelings go unexpressed, might include thoughts like:
“it is dangerous to interact with others, I’ll get hurt, I’ll be made fun of, I am not worthy to interact with others, I am less than. If what is trapped is the feeling life, perhaps the spell works its magic with such thoughts as, no one wants to know what you are feeling, your feelings don’t matter, or they’ll make fun of you if you show your feelings, or real men aren’t emotional, etc.” You get the picture. Can you hear the sorceress and her incantation?

Lars and the Real Girl

Rapunzel’s encapsulation, her imprisonment in the tower by the sorceress, is depicted in the movie “Lars and the Real Girl.” Lars is a young man who lives alone in a garage next to his brother and his brother’s wife’s home. He does not like to socialize with others and avoids contact with others as much as possible. Contact is painful. During the movie we find out that Lars’ mother died while giving birth to him and that he grew up with a grieving father who never touched him. He has an older brother but his brother moved out of the house as quickly as possible, leaving Lars behind in a sterile environment with little warmth or touch.

Lar’s is living an encapsulated life, he is encased within himself. At some point in the movie, Lars gets the idea of ordering a life-size doll from a mail order internet site. This creative impulse is where something new emerges (could this be the prince in the fairy tale? Or perhaps Rapunzel’s song?) which begins to pierce through the encapsulation. Lars is ready to let something in, a woman, albeit a “plastic,” immovable woman. Although she is “plastic,” and precisely because she is “plastic,” she bridges two worlds, the world of Lars’ imagination, and the concrete world outside. This is important in Lars’ healing, to let the imagination have its say and this is an especially poignant aspect of the movie: his immediate family and the whole town although at first reluctant to give his “delusion” any room, make room for the new woman in Lar’s life, Bianca, and through a shared imaginal experience with his family and townspeople, Lar’s slowly emerges from his encapsulated experience and becomes a more integrated part of the community.

The depiction of the healing aspect of the imagination is an especially notable part of this film. At first, when the doll makes an appearance at Lar’s brother’s home, Lar’s brother is worried and takes him to see a doctor/psychologist in town. Initially his brother only wants to “fix” Lars, have the doctor take away the delusion, but the doctor recommends to the young couple that they go along with Lars. She calls his belief in Bianca a delusion but also states that the delusion may be a communication. When Lar’s brother protests and says that she is not real and that he doesn’t want to go along with the delusion, the doctor replies, “she is real and she’s sitting in the waiting room.” The doctor’s attitude is “the analytic attitude,” it respects the “reality” of the imagination, and the natural healing abilities of the individual as it emerges through the imagination. Bianca is real in Lars' imaginative world and the doctor is sensing a purpose to Bianca’s arrival. Her prescription is to allow the psyche to heal itself through what is emerging.

Rapunzel's Encapsulation

Rapunzel’s tower experience begins when she is 12 years old. That is the age at which the sorceress decides to place the girl in the tower with “neither doors nor stairs.” Because of her age at the time of her imprisonment, this fairy tale is often interpreted as a delay in the individuation-separation process, a putting off of adulthood and the growing biological impulse of sexuality.

Rapunzel’s tower experience can also be a sort of encapsulation. I began writing about this yesterday. What does this mean? It can mean one of two things. I have known individuals in whom social contact is painful, in whom venturing out of the solitude of themselves to make contact with others elicits great anxiety. Its not that they don’t desire contact, only the anxiety keeps them away from relationship. Interestingly, I find that these people are often quite sensitive and warm in a psychotherapeutic relationship.

The other meaning of encapsulation, Rapunzel’s tower experience, is about the difficulty we have as individuals of being whole, and the locking away of parts of ourselves. In our present culture, the most notable part of ourselves that is imprisoned in a tower is the feeling life. Our feeling life, like Rapunzel, can be placed in the tower by a wicked queen, or in this case, by a sorceress. This is essentially the same as saying that some of us are taught that feelings aren’t very important, and one must be governed by logic, rationality, etc. Freeing Rapunzel would thus come to mean the freeing of some part of ourselves that has been locked up because at some point in our lives she was deemed unacceptable.

Jung's Tower

This is Jung's Tower, Bollingen, on lake Zurich. I took this picture a few years ago from a small boat that I rented.

Rapunzel's Tower

I have towers on my mind and am naturally drawn to the story of Rapunzel. In this Grimm’s fairy tale, Rapunzel “when she was twelve years old, the sorceress locked her in a tower that was in a forest. It had neither door nor stairs, only a little window high above…”

This “Tower” is a psychological space. To say of someone, she is in the tower is to say she is currently inhabiting a certain psychological space, living a certain kind of human experience. What is this experience like?

The experience is one of solitude, and of being alone with oneself. This reminds me of Carl Jung’s tower, Bollingen, which I visited a few years ago. Jung built his tower himself on the shores of the upper lake of Zurich. This was a place that Jung often retreated to and where he spent much time in solitude, working and resting. Jung says: “Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.”

Jung’s tower, however, is different to Rapunzel’s “Tower” experience. Jung also occasionally accepted visitors at his Tower, and then he had his other home in Kusnacht where he lived with his family, saw patients, and other friends and visitors. He could come and go into his tower, while Rapunzel’s tower has “neither doors nor stairs.” It is an experience of imprisonment, there is no coming and going freely, one is trapped. This is the experience of encapsulation where one cannot interact and is only free to look out the “little window” at the world going by…