The Emperor's New Clothes

“Many years ago there lived an Emperor, who cared so enormously for new clothes that he spent all his money upon them, that he might be very fine. He did not care about his soldiers, and did not care about the theatre, and only liked to drive out and show his new clothes. He had a coat for every hour of the day; and just as they say of a king, ‘He is in council,’ one always said of him, ‘The Emperor is in the wardrobe.’”

And so, the story begins. What can we discern by the exposition of this story? What kind of person spends “all his money” on what they wear? We all know someone like this, its all about how it looks. They might drive the most expensive cars, wear designer labels, attend the toniest events—all with the underlying reason of seeing and being seen. To say, “The Emperor is in the wardrobe” is to describe this kind of psychological state of being.

Interestingly the tale says of the Emperor that he spends all his money on new clothes that “he might be very fine.” This leads me to make a “fine” distinction between being fine and appearing fine. “The Emperor is in the wardrobe” describes narcissistic dynamics where “image replaces substance, and what Jung called the persona (the self one shows to the world) becomes more vivid and dependable than one’s actual person” (McWilliams, 1994, p. 170).

The Match-Girl's "Fantasying"

What do we make of how the Match-Girl uses her fantasies? Carl Jung made a great deal about the value of imagination. He even developed a technique he came to call active imagination—this was his method for exploring and assimilating unconscious contents. Jung also makes a great deal about the importance of regression and its finalistic purposefulness in progression. Both of these are different to what the Match-Girl is doing and how she is using her fantasies. We can speak of a regressive movement in her “fantasying,” yet the regression is not in service to the individuation impulse. Rather, her “fantasying” keeps her stagnant since the meaning is not discerned. Hence the images are not symbols which are capable of moving libido. The libido expended simply dies out.

D.W. Winnicott also has something to say about the “difference between fantasying and dreaming." For Winnicott dream is related to object-relating in the real world…"by contrast…fantasying remains an isolated phenomenon, absorbing energy but not contributing-in either to dreaming or to living…fantasying interferes with action and with life in the real or external world, but much more so it interferes with dream and with the personal or inner psychic reality, the living core of the individual personality.”

Little Match-Girl, an overview

Watch an animated short of The Little Match-Girl:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ig26YFmgdc

I want to give a broad outline of this fairy tale’s psychological meaning. It depicts a particular psychological state of being, or in the language of Carl Jung, a complex. When one is in this experience, one feels very young—our heroine here is a young girl. The experience is one of feeling young, alone, cold and hungry. When this particular psychological state of being is constellated, we feel the interior coldness of disconnection from ourselves and others. We also experience the hunger of wanting to be fed, a metaphor perhaps of how we feel nourished when we have significant human contact and empty without it.

The story involves how the little girl goes about handling her psychological experience of cold and hunger, in other words her feelings of being loveless and devoid of human warmth. When one is “in a complex” one handles the feeling aspect of the complex in particular ways. How one handles the feeling, or the behavior itself, characterizes the complex. For some people, feeling devoid of human contact and warmth might manifest in a state of denial—“I don’t need anyone”—for example. The Match-Girl handles her feeling state by engaging in fantasy.

The Little Match-Girl strikes the matches and each time she does so, a fantasy image emerges. The matches themselves are metaphors for our libido, or in other words, how we expend our energy. We all have a limited amount of energy/libido and we make choices as to how we use it. Our libido is directed in particular directions. The little Match-Girl uses hers fantasizing about those things that she hopes to experience in her life, ultimately fantasizing about embracing the “only person who had loved her,” her now deceased grandmother.

She uses all of her matches (all of her energy) at this point to maintain the fantasy of her grandmother’s embrace and in the end, makes a wish that her grandmother take her with her when the matches burn out. The grandmother “took the little girl in her arms, and both flew in brightness and joy above the earth, very, very high, and up there was neither cold, nor hunger, nor care—they were with God!”

The story ends as we are told that the Little Match-Girl is found “frozen to death on the last evening of the Old Year. The New Year’s sun rose upon the little corpse!” We are told that the people who found her believed “She wanted to warm herself…” and that “no one imagined what a beautiful thing she had seen.”

As the readers of this story we are privy to the two perspectives, we know what the Little Match-Girl imagined, but was also know that she was not ultimately warmed (objectively) by the fantasy of her grandmother’s embrace, and that she died “frozen to death.”

The Little Match-Girl

A fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ig26YFmgdc

This fairy tale is set in winter. We are told, "It was terribly cold, it snowed and was already almost dark, and evening came on, the last evening of the year. In the cold and gloom a poor little girl, bareheaded and barefoot, was walking throught the streets."

The setting of the tale depicts not just the outer atmosphere, but the inner atmosphere, that is the psychological state of being. The weather is cold, this corresponds to a place of solitude, perhaps a loveless state of being--devoid of the warmth of real human contact.

This particular cold atmosphere is one which is not sought after by our little heroine but one imposed on her. She does not go to it willingly but instead she seeks warmth. We know this because of her fantasies--fantasies that emerge when she strikes the matches she has with her.

Twenty Mattresses and Twenty Eider-down Beds

This drawing was rendered by a young and promising artist entering the High School for the Performing Arts this coming fall semester, and is an image of the princess of the Princess and Pea story as she lays unknowingly atop a pea placed among the many mattresses and eider down bedding by the old queen:

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.”

Continuing with the interpretation of Andersen’s Princess and the Pea, what happens when we find ourselves laying on “twenty mattresses and twenty eider-down beds?” Usually, we fall asleep. There are two things at work in this aspect of the fairy tale, the height of the mattresses on which the princess is placed, and also the comfort of the eider-down: the height shows the distancing from the little irritant, and the eider down, the soporific state of regressed comfort.

The many layered bedding, and the soft sleep-inducing comfort of the eider down, is an image of a powerful psychological defense. Sleep, don’t notice those things that bother you, place them as far away from consciousness as possible, stay high above it, or sleep through it, ignore…this is the image of the bedding defense…and is the reason why such a delicate princess is needed: only a true princess will notice and be effected by the seemingly insignificant irritants that might prove themselves not so insignificant.

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.

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.

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…