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.

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?