Or what is found at the bottom of depression
Here’s something else from Jung’s analytical psychology, which for me lately has been the most valuable resource for understanding how to take care of the soul (the path of individuation). In this article, I examine the relationship between depressive states and the archetype of the Self (realizing potential of the “image of God“).
This relationship is desires.
More precisely, the impossible desires – the grand desires for romantic love and beauty, for power and strength. The deep longing for a perfect world, with perfect people, perfect relationships and perfect selves. These are intense desires that we cannot fulfil in our lives. That’s why we don’t even allow ourselves to see them, and if they do come into our sight, we immediately return them to where they came from – the subconscious. Their grandiosity seems so great to us that we are ashamed to admit it, even to ourselves. Denial, however, does not remove them. Like an angry lion buried in the dungeons of our soul, they continue to live on. We know it’s there, by the heavy-as-lead depression.
“... if you dig up depressive states in people, usually at the bottom there are either creative contents or a violent, unsacrificed desire.
Frequently depressed people dream of voracious lions or other devouring animals such as dragons, but particularly lions, which means they are depressed because they are frustrated in the fulfillment of their wild desires. They want everything: to be top dog, have the most beautiful partner, money, and everything else. They have the childish, wild desires which would like to eat everything up, but at the same time they are intelligent enough to know that life is not like that, that they cannot have what they want, so the desire curls up into sulky depressiveness. Such a depression has the quality of sulkily frustrated desire and explains why, after an unhappy love affair, people drop into an awful depression.
Their lion has been frustrated and has returned sulking to its lair.”
Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology
Since we are wise enough to know that such wishes are impossible, we try to live ‘normally’. But depression and anger do not go away. And they do so because the time has come to realise the potential of the deeper part of us – the archetype of the Self that is the first to show its dark side.
“Some people have a frustrated infant within them. Usually they are very correct and polite, and make very few demands on the analyst, but being too polite and correct and considerate is always suspect… The frustrated child could be said to be an aspect covering up an image of the Self, and the devouring lion also an aspect of the Self.
If you take the image of the devouring lion this is quite clear. If I think I ought to be top dog everywhere, have the most beautiful partner, have money, be happy, and so on, that is a paradise fantasy, and what is that? It is a projection of the Self! So actually, the childish thing is the desire to experience everything in the here and now. The fantasy in itself is entirely legitimate, it has the idea of the coniunctio, a perfect state, a state of harmony. It is a religious idea, but naturally if projected onto outside life and wanted there, in the here and now, that is impossible.
The way in which the person wants to realize the fantasy is childish, but in itself it is valuable and has nothing wrong or unhealthy in it. So just in that undominated mad spot of the person, or in the wild or problematic spot, there is the symbol of the Self. That gives it the drive, which is why people never know what to do for they cannot repress it; or if they are reasonable and just give the thing up and realize how childish it is and that one should be resigned and adapt to life, then they feel that they are cured but that they have been robbed of their best possibilities and so are frustrated.” (ibid.)
This is my experience as well. I know what it looks like to send the longing for something perfect that is not of this world into the dungeons of your soul and try to live life as it is. You have indeed adapted, but the depression doesn’t go away from that, it even grows. Inside you keep hearing the growling discontent with the imperfections and limitations in life. How, then, does one resolve this insoluble contradiction – to achieve the unattainable? How do we make it so that we do not throw away the “child” of the Self, but only pour out the “dirty water” of our primal passions? The Jungian analysts’ answer is – The Jungian analyst’s answer is to unearth our strongest desire and spiritualise it. For, on the one hand, desire is the “red sulphur,” the “devil” who wants something concrete from the world of matter. On the other hand, it is the divine energy of development, the soul that has incarnated in the world of matter to create itself.
“The great difficulty, therefore, to return to alchemical language, is to extract Osiris from the lead, to save the fantasy which is life-giving and cut away the childishness of the wish to realize it. That is so damn subtle. The whole task is to save the nucleus, the fantasy of the Self, and cut away all the childishness, the primitive desire, and so on which surround it, which would mean getting Osiris out of the lead coffin.
That is what the alchemist did in a projected form when he said that the divine man had to be extracted from the lead coffin or from the corruptible matter..” (ibid.)
And this is difficult. By the time we manage to get Osiris out of the leaden ark, years will have passed. What helps is the knowledge that if we want to experience the divine in ourselves, we will have to pay the price of coexisting with our demonic side for as long as it takes. That price is high, but so is the reward – the birth of our new self. It also helps to understand that adapting to the demands of the outer world no longer works when the soul awakens and desire to be our true self comes.
“I once had an analysand who came to Europe for a Jungian analysis while his best friend went into Freudian analysis. After a year they decided to meet again. The Freudian analysand said that he was cured and was going back to his own country; having realized all his neurotic illusions and nonsense, he was going to begin to earn his living and find a wife and marry. The other said he was not cured at all but still very mad and in a condition of great chaos, and though he saw his way a little bit more clearly there was still a great deal which had not yet been solved.
The Freudian patient then said that it was strange, but that though all his devils had been driven out, unfortunately so had his angels! A lid had been put on the mad spot, but the religious fantasy in it of perfection, the romantic fantasy, the fantasy of the Self, had also had the lid put on it, so that man will be a resigned, socially adapted animal who functions, but all his romantic dreams of truth and life and real love—admittedly childish fantasies in both those young men—are buried too.” (ibid.)
The duality being resolved here is between the longing for perfection (which is not of this world) and the desire to experience it on Earth. The challenge in this case is to be able to contain the two parts of this inner conflict, because it creates tremendous tension. As well as not being in a hurry to get rid of it, because it cannot be resolved on the principle of simple compromise. Instead, let us patiently suffer the transformation of desire until something third and creative begins to take shape.
“In the knowledge of late antiquity lead was the metal of the planet Saturn and had the same qualities: on the negative side, depression, and positively, creative depression. Saturn is the god of mutilated people, criminals, and cripples, but also of artistic and creative people. In our modern language that would mean the strange quality in certain depressions in which one feels literally like lead. Without thinking of these alchemical similes, people often say: ‘Today I feel like lead.’ In a heavy depression one feels unable to get up from one’s chair, or even open one’s mouth to explain that one is depressed; one just sits like a block of heavy matter. Confessions of people in such a state have innumerable lead similes.
As the word implies, in a depression the person is pressed down, compressed, usually because a part of the psychological libido is below and has to be fetched up; the real energy of life has fallen into a deeper layer of the personality and can only be reached through a depression.
So unless there is a latent psychosis, a depression should be encouraged and people told to go into it and be depressed—not try to escape by the radio or *The Reader’s Digest*—and if the depression says that life means nothing and that nothing is worthwhile, then accept that and say, ‘What about it?’ Listen, go deeper and deeper, until you again reach the level of psychological energy where some creative idea can come out, and suddenly, at the bottom, an impulse of life and creativeness which has been overlooked may appear.
People who are professionally creative, like artists or great actors and so on, know that before every performance or new piece of work they are likely to have such a depression. One can have it on a smaller scale, for instance, I always have it before a lecture, for the libido first goes down. Those are smaller rhythms of something which happens on a large scale in a depression. It means that one has overlooked certain creative factors which have constellated below and attracted the libido, causing listlessness and lack of energy.” (ibid.)
Taming the devouring lion is not an easy process, nor a one-time act. However, the effort is worth it. It is the alchemical effort of our inner transformation in which we turn the lead of depression into the gold of individuality. When we do this, our expression in the outer world is not threatened by ego-inflation, and the frustrated lion becomes the source of our most creative self, whose tamed power we can embody in the world.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
* all quotes are from the book Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology (Studies in Jungian Psychology, 5) by Marie-Louise von Franz
