If you have difficulty being taken seriously by others and feel that you do not carry sufficient authority in their eyes, this thought by Marie-Louise von Franz is for you:
“People who have integrated a large part of their own darkness possess an invisible authority, as if they had acquired weight and power, and others do not dare to attack them, because instinctively they sense that they would receive a slap in return.”
— Marie-Louise von Franz
To avoid confusion, I would like to clarify something. For two full millennia we have been immersed in the energy of the Age of Pisces, with which Christianity emerged. And Christian ethics teach: “If someone strikes you on one cheek, offer the other also; do not seek revenge” (Luke 6:29) . The above thought by Marie-Louise von Franz may unsettle those who are still strongly influenced by the Piscean ethos. We are, however, already entering a different age, for it is assumed that we have worked through the militant aggression of the age of Mars, of which the Age of Pisces was the successor.
The new Age of Aquarius arrives with a surge of psychology and self-knowledge, and one of the things we need to understand is that a fundamental criterion of psychological health is wholeness. This means that it is appropriate in life to defend ourselves if we are attacked. There is a significant difference between aggression driven by a desire for domination and healthy aggression, which is not the result of reactive behavior.
I would like to illustrate the above with a story from the life of Carl Jung, which has always impressed me whenever I recall it:
“Once a lady of the highest aristocracy came to me — she had the habit of slapping her servants, including her doctors. She suffered from an obsessional neurosis and had undergone treatment in a clinic. Naturally, she had bestowed the obligatory slap upon the chief physician. In her eyes he was merely a higher-ranking valet de chambre — after all, she paid him! He then referred her to another doctor, where the same thing happened. Since the lady was not truly ill, but in any case had to be treated ‘with gloves,’ the unfortunate doctor sent her to me.
She was an imposing and representative personality, six feet tall — she could really wallop you, I assure you! So she appeared, and we had a pleasant conversation. Then came the moment when I had to say something unpleasant to her. Enraged, she jumped up and threatened to strike me. I jumped up as well and said: ‘Very well, you are the lady — you strike first! But then I strike!’ And I truly would have done so. She collapsed back into her chair and simply shrank. ‘No one has ever said that to me before!’ she protested — but from that moment on, the therapy proceeded successfully.”
— Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
And so, if we sense that we would receive a slap were we to cross another person’s boundaries, we do not wish to cross those boundaries, because we know there would be consequences. The irony here is that it is precisely this anticipation that helps put an end to the exchange of slaps — and enables us to build healthy ego boundaries, one of the fundamental criteria of mental health.
Kamelia Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
