"But for Adam there was not found
an help meet for him.
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep
to fall upon Adam, and he slept:
and he took one of his ribs,
and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
And the rib, which the Lord God
And the rib, which the Lord God
had taken from the man, made he a woman,
and brought her unto the man.
And Adam said, 'This is now bone of my bones,
And Adam said, 'This is now bone of my bones,
and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.
Therefore shall a man leave
Therefore shall a man leave
His Father and His Mother,
and shall cleave unto his wife:
and they shall be one flesh.' "
That’s a walloping statement to put in there at the end of those three sentences. The "therefore" comes as somewhat as a surprise, but there’s an injunction there. It’s a good injunction. Man, I tell you, people who don’t do that have a hell of a time in their marriage. This is a good thing to know if you are married, or if you’re planning to get married: We have very strong orientation towards our parents, and for good reason. The injunction, here, is that’s secondary as soon as you’re married, and failure to do that makes your marriage collapse—and you deserve it to collapse, too, as far as I'm concerned, because it’s a reflection of your pathological immaturity and your unwillingness to extract yourself from the talon-like grip of parents, who are a little bit too much on the interfering side. But the injunction…There’s a deep injunction, here. It’s very complicated.
One of the ideas is that the original Adam wasn’t a man: he was more like a hermaphroditic being. In that hermaphroditic being, there was a kind of undifferentiated perfection that was split into male and female. Part of the goal of human beings is to reunite as the singular unity that reestablishes the initial perfection. That’s actually the goal of marriage from the spiritual perspective. Jung wrote quite a bit about that. It’s such a good idea.
I had these friends that went to Sweden to get married.
That’s a walloping statement to put in there at the end of those three sentences. The "therefore" comes as somewhat as a surprise, but there’s an injunction there. It’s a good injunction. Man, I tell you, people who don’t do that have a hell of a time in their marriage. This is a good thing to know if you are married, or if you’re planning to get married: We have very strong orientation towards our parents, and for good reason. The injunction, here, is that’s secondary as soon as you’re married, and failure to do that makes your marriage collapse—and you deserve it to collapse, too, as far as I'm concerned, because it’s a reflection of your pathological immaturity and your unwillingness to extract yourself from the talon-like grip of parents, who are a little bit too much on the interfering side. But the injunction…There’s a deep injunction, here. It’s very complicated.
One of the ideas is that the original Adam wasn’t a man: he was more like a hermaphroditic being. In that hermaphroditic being, there was a kind of undifferentiated perfection that was split into male and female. Part of the goal of human beings is to reunite as the singular unity that reestablishes the initial perfection. That’s actually the goal of marriage from the spiritual perspective. Jung wrote quite a bit about that. It’s such a good idea.
I had these friends that went to Sweden to get married.
They were from Northern Alberta, but both their heritages were Swedish. They did this cool thing as they were being married: they had to hold a candle up between them while they were being married. You think, well, what’s the candle? It’s a source of light; it’s a source of illumination; it’s a source of enlightenment; it’s the candle that you put on Christmas trees in Europe. So it’s the light that emerged in the darkness, in the depth of winter. It’s a symbol of life in darkness; it’s the reemergence of the sun at the darkest, coldest time of the year—which is also associated, symbolically, with the birth of Christ for all sorts of complicated reasons. So the candle’s all that. The next question is, why do you hold it above you? Because what’s above you is what you’re below to. It signifies something transcendent. Why do you both hold onto it? Because you’re both supposed to hold onto the light, right? And you're supposed to be subordinate to the light. You ask, well, who’s in charge in a marriage? Well, the light! That’s the idea. So you come together as one thing. You’re no longer two things. It isn’t what's good for you, and it’s not what’s good for your wife: it’s what's good for the marriage. The marriage is about the combined being, which is the reassembly of the original hermaphroditic being at the beginning of time. That’s the idea, and that’s all packed into these four sentences.
All of these sentences have a tremendous history of interpretation associated with them. It’s just endless, and that's one of the lines. It’s also an antidote to the idea that women taken out of men—which is also the reverse of the biological process, by the way—makes women, in some sense, subordinate to men. That is not built into this text. I don't see that, at all, as built into the text.
There’s something else that’s associated with it, too. The reason Sleeping Beauty goes to sleep is because—you have to remember what happens. She has parents who are quite old, and so they're pretty desperate to have a child—like so many people are now. They only have one child—like so many people do now—and they don’t want anything to happen to this child. It’s a miracle, and there's only one of them, and she’s the princess, and so we’re not letting anything around her.
They have a big christening party, and they invite everybody, but they don’t invite Maleficent.
Maleficent is The Terrible Mother; She’s Nature; She’s The Thing That Goes Bump in The Night; She’s The Devil Herself, so to speak, and she’s everything that you don’t want your child to encounter.
So The King and ueen saying, well, we just wont invite her to the christening…It’s like, good luck with that. That’s an Oedipal story, right? the Oedipal mother is the mother who devours her child by overprotecting him or her, so that instead of being strengthened by an encounter with the terrible world, they're weakened by too much protection. And then, when they’re let out into the world, they cannot live. That’s the story of Sleeping Beauty, and that's what the king and queen do. They apologise to Maleficent when she first shows up.
They have a bunch of half-witted excuses why they didn’t invite her.
'We forgot'—I don't think so.
You don't forget something like that. And she kind of makes that point: you don’t just forget about the whole horror of life when you have a child.
You might wish that it might stay at bay, but you do not forget about it.
The question is, do you invite it to The Party?
And The Answer is, it bloody well depends how unconscious you want your child to be.
If you want your child to be unconscious, well, then you have the added advantage that, maybe, they won’t leave home.
You can take advantage of them for the rest of your sad life, instead of going off to find something to do for yourself.
And then, of course, you can take revenge on them if they do have any what would you call impetus towards courage, that you sacrificed in yourself 30 years ago, and that you want to stamp out as soon as you see it develop in your child.
That's another thing that would be quite pleasant.
That's what happens in Sleeping Beauty.
Well, none of this is pleasant, and nothing that happens in that story is pleasant.
Sleeping Beauty is naive as hell.
They put her out in the forest and have her raised by these three goody-two-shoes faeries, that are also completely devoid of any real potency and power. There’s nothing maleficent about them.
And then she falls in love so badly with the first idiot prince that wanders by that she has post-traumatic stress disorder when he rides off on his horse.
That’s what happens.
And then she goes into the castle, and she’s all freaked out because she met the love of her life for like five minutes, for God’s sake. That’s when the spinning wheel—that’s the wheel of fate—pops up, and she pricks her finger.
They tried to get rid of the wheels of fate, with their pointed end, but she finds it, pricks her finger, and falls down, unconscious. Well, she wants to be unconscious, and no bloody wonder.
She was protected her whole life, and she’s so damn naive that her first love affair just about kills her.
She wants to go to sleep and never wake up, and so that's exactly what happens.
And then she has to wait for the prince to come and rescue her.
Well, you think, how sexist can you get?
Seriously, because that’s the way that that would be read in the modern world—it’s like, she doesn't need a prince to rescue her.
That’s why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish.
You can say, well, the princess doesn’t need a prince to rescue her, but, you know, that's a boneheaded way of looking at the story.
The prince isn’t just a man who’s coming to rescue the woman—and, believe me, he’s got his own problems, right?
He’s got a whole goddamn dragon he has to contend with. The prince also represents the woman’s own consciousness. Consciousness is presented very frequently in stories as symbolically masculine, as it is with the logos idea. The idea is that, without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. You can read it as, well, the woman who’s sleeping needs a man to wake her up. Of course—just like a man needs a woman to wake him up. It’s the same damn thing: that’s the dragon fight in Sleeping Beauty. But it’s also the case that, if she’s only unconscious, all she can do is lay there and sleep like the sleep of the naive and damned. She has to wake herself up and bring her own masculine consciousness into the forefront so that she can survive in the world. Of course, women are trying to do that like mad, but that's partly what's represented in a story like that. That’s partly what’s implicit in this idea: unless the woman is taken out of man, so to speak, then she isn’t a human being: she’s just a creature. That’s partly what’s embedded in this story. So you don’t want to read it as a patriarchal…You don't want to read anything that way, really. I won’t bother with that. But, really, we can do better than that.
"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."
The other thing about Marriage —
All of these sentences have a tremendous history of interpretation associated with them. It’s just endless, and that's one of the lines. It’s also an antidote to the idea that women taken out of men—which is also the reverse of the biological process, by the way—makes women, in some sense, subordinate to men. That is not built into this text. I don't see that, at all, as built into the text.
There’s something else that’s associated with it, too. The reason Sleeping Beauty goes to sleep is because—you have to remember what happens. She has parents who are quite old, and so they're pretty desperate to have a child—like so many people are now. They only have one child—like so many people do now—and they don’t want anything to happen to this child. It’s a miracle, and there's only one of them, and she’s the princess, and so we’re not letting anything around her.
They have a big christening party, and they invite everybody, but they don’t invite Maleficent.
Maleficent is The Terrible Mother; She’s Nature; She’s The Thing That Goes Bump in The Night; She’s The Devil Herself, so to speak, and she’s everything that you don’t want your child to encounter.
So The King and ueen saying, well, we just wont invite her to the christening…It’s like, good luck with that. That’s an Oedipal story, right? the Oedipal mother is the mother who devours her child by overprotecting him or her, so that instead of being strengthened by an encounter with the terrible world, they're weakened by too much protection. And then, when they’re let out into the world, they cannot live. That’s the story of Sleeping Beauty, and that's what the king and queen do. They apologise to Maleficent when she first shows up.
They have a bunch of half-witted excuses why they didn’t invite her.
'We forgot'—I don't think so.
You don't forget something like that. And she kind of makes that point: you don’t just forget about the whole horror of life when you have a child.
You might wish that it might stay at bay, but you do not forget about it.
The question is, do you invite it to The Party?
And The Answer is, it bloody well depends how unconscious you want your child to be.
If you want your child to be unconscious, well, then you have the added advantage that, maybe, they won’t leave home.
You can take advantage of them for the rest of your sad life, instead of going off to find something to do for yourself.
And then, of course, you can take revenge on them if they do have any what would you call impetus towards courage, that you sacrificed in yourself 30 years ago, and that you want to stamp out as soon as you see it develop in your child.
That's another thing that would be quite pleasant.
That's what happens in Sleeping Beauty.
Well, none of this is pleasant, and nothing that happens in that story is pleasant.
Sleeping Beauty is naive as hell.
They put her out in the forest and have her raised by these three goody-two-shoes faeries, that are also completely devoid of any real potency and power. There’s nothing maleficent about them.
And then she falls in love so badly with the first idiot prince that wanders by that she has post-traumatic stress disorder when he rides off on his horse.
That’s what happens.
And then she goes into the castle, and she’s all freaked out because she met the love of her life for like five minutes, for God’s sake. That’s when the spinning wheel—that’s the wheel of fate—pops up, and she pricks her finger.
They tried to get rid of the wheels of fate, with their pointed end, but she finds it, pricks her finger, and falls down, unconscious. Well, she wants to be unconscious, and no bloody wonder.
She was protected her whole life, and she’s so damn naive that her first love affair just about kills her.
She wants to go to sleep and never wake up, and so that's exactly what happens.
And then she has to wait for the prince to come and rescue her.
Well, you think, how sexist can you get?
Seriously, because that’s the way that that would be read in the modern world—it’s like, she doesn't need a prince to rescue her.
That’s why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish.
You can say, well, the princess doesn’t need a prince to rescue her, but, you know, that's a boneheaded way of looking at the story.
The prince isn’t just a man who’s coming to rescue the woman—and, believe me, he’s got his own problems, right?
He’s got a whole goddamn dragon he has to contend with. The prince also represents the woman’s own consciousness. Consciousness is presented very frequently in stories as symbolically masculine, as it is with the logos idea. The idea is that, without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. You can read it as, well, the woman who’s sleeping needs a man to wake her up. Of course—just like a man needs a woman to wake him up. It’s the same damn thing: that’s the dragon fight in Sleeping Beauty. But it’s also the case that, if she’s only unconscious, all she can do is lay there and sleep like the sleep of the naive and damned. She has to wake herself up and bring her own masculine consciousness into the forefront so that she can survive in the world. Of course, women are trying to do that like mad, but that's partly what's represented in a story like that. That’s partly what’s implicit in this idea: unless the woman is taken out of man, so to speak, then she isn’t a human being: she’s just a creature. That’s partly what’s embedded in this story. So you don’t want to read it as a patriarchal…You don't want to read anything that way, really. I won’t bother with that. But, really, we can do better than that.
"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."
The other thing about Marriage —
This is really worth knowing, too, and I learned this, in part, from reading Jung.
What do you do when you get married? That’s easy : You take someone who’s just as useless and horrible as you are,
and then you shackle yourself to them,
and then you say, "We’re not running away,
no matter what happens." Yeah.
That’s perfect, because then
you don’t get to run away. The thing is,
if you can run away, you can’t
tell each other The Truth --
If you tell someone The Truth about You
and they don’t run away, then
they weren’t listening.
If you don’t have someone around who can’t run away, then you can't tell them the truth. That’s part of the purpose of the marriage. It’s like, I’ll bet on you, and you bet on me. It’s a losing bet—we both know that—but, given our current circumstances, we’re unlikely to find anyone better.
Two things that come off of that…You know, people are waiting around to find Mr. or Mrs. Right. Here's something to think about, man, and to put yourself on your feet: if you went to a party and found Mr. Right, and he looked at you and didn't run away screaming, that would indicate that he wasn’t Mr. Right, at all. It’s like the old Nietzschean joke: if someone loves you, that should immediately disenchant you with them. Or it’s the Woody Allen joke: I never belonged to a club that would take me as a member. That's a very interesting thing to think about.
You’re going to shackle yourself to someone who’s just as imperfect as you are. Then the issue is, you might be in a situation where you can actually negotiate. You might think, well, there's some things about you that aren’t going so right, and there's some things about me that aren’t going so right, and we’re bloody well stuck with the consequences for the next 50 years. We can either straighten this out or suffer through it for the next five decades. People are of the sort that, without that degree of seriousness, those problems will not be solved. You’ll leave things unnamed, because there's always an out. It’s the same thing when you're living together with someone. People who live together before they’re married are more likely to get divorced, not less likely. The reason for that is, what exactly are you saying to one another when you live with each other? Just think about it.
"Well…For now, you’re better than anything else I can trick, but I’d like to reserve the right to trade you in—hah—conveniently, if someone better happens to stumble into me."
Well, how could someone not be insulted to their core by an offer like that?
They’re willing to play along with it, because they're going to do the same thing with you. That’s exactly it:
"Yea, yea…I know you're not going to commit to me, so that means you don't value me or our relationship above everything else.
But, as long as I get to escape if I need to, then I'm willing to put up with that."
That's a hell of a thing.
You might think, how stupid is it to shackle yourself to someone? It’s stupid, man. There’s no doubt about that. But compared to the alternatives? It’s pretty damn good. Without that shackling there are things you will never, ever learn, because you’ll avoid them. You can always leave, and if you can leave, you don't have to tell each other the truth. It’s as simple as that.
You can just leave, and then
Two things that come off of that…You know, people are waiting around to find Mr. or Mrs. Right. Here's something to think about, man, and to put yourself on your feet: if you went to a party and found Mr. Right, and he looked at you and didn't run away screaming, that would indicate that he wasn’t Mr. Right, at all. It’s like the old Nietzschean joke: if someone loves you, that should immediately disenchant you with them. Or it’s the Woody Allen joke: I never belonged to a club that would take me as a member. That's a very interesting thing to think about.
You’re going to shackle yourself to someone who’s just as imperfect as you are. Then the issue is, you might be in a situation where you can actually negotiate. You might think, well, there's some things about you that aren’t going so right, and there's some things about me that aren’t going so right, and we’re bloody well stuck with the consequences for the next 50 years. We can either straighten this out or suffer through it for the next five decades. People are of the sort that, without that degree of seriousness, those problems will not be solved. You’ll leave things unnamed, because there's always an out. It’s the same thing when you're living together with someone. People who live together before they’re married are more likely to get divorced, not less likely. The reason for that is, what exactly are you saying to one another when you live with each other? Just think about it.
"Well…For now, you’re better than anything else I can trick, but I’d like to reserve the right to trade you in—hah—conveniently, if someone better happens to stumble into me."
Well, how could someone not be insulted to their core by an offer like that?
They’re willing to play along with it, because they're going to do the same thing with you. That’s exactly it:
"Yea, yea…I know you're not going to commit to me, so that means you don't value me or our relationship above everything else.
But, as long as I get to escape if I need to, then I'm willing to put up with that."
That's a hell of a thing.
You might think, how stupid is it to shackle yourself to someone? It’s stupid, man. There’s no doubt about that. But compared to the alternatives? It’s pretty damn good. Without that shackling there are things you will never, ever learn, because you’ll avoid them. You can always leave, and if you can leave, you don't have to tell each other the truth. It’s as simple as that.
You can just leave, and then
You don't have anyone
You can Tell The Truth to.
Jordan Peterson's Analysis of Sleeping Beauty
"Jung was profoundly affected by Nietzsche and Freud. Those were his two main intellectual influences—I don’t think one more than the other. He split with Freud on the religious issue. That was what caused the disruption in their relationship. I think it’s an extremely interesting historical occurrence. It might be of profound significance.
Freud believed that the fundamental myth of the human being was the Oedipal myth. The Oedipal myth, from a broader perspective, is a failed hero story. The Oedipal myth is the myth of a man who grows up, but then, accidentally, becomes too close to his mother, sleeps with her, not knowing who she is, and, as a consequence, blinds himself.
There’s a warning in that story about human development gone wrong.
I think that Freud put his finger on it extraordinarily well.
Human beings have a very long period of dependency,
and one of the things that you do see in clinical practice is that many of people’s problems are associated with their inability to break free of their family.
They’re consumed by the family drama.
They can’t get beyond what happened
to them in their family.
They’re stuck in The Past.
That’s equivalent—symbolically speaking, you might say—to the idea of being too close to Your Mother — of the boundaries being improperly specified. That happens far more often than anyone would like to think.
As I said, Freud thought that it was a universal.
Jung had a different idea. His idea was that it wasn’t the failed hero story that was the universal human myth: it was the successful hero story. That’s a big difference. It’s seriously a big difference. The successful hero story is—remember in Sleeping Beauty…You may remember this, in the Disney movie…The evil queen traps the prince in a dungeon. She’s not going to let him out until he’s old. There’s this comical scene where she’s down in the dungeon, he’s all in chains, and she’s laughing at him, telling him what his future’s going to be like. She’s quite evil. She paints this wonderful picture of him being freed in like 80 years and hobbling out of the castle, getting on his horse that’s so old it can barely stand up, and him with grey hair. She recites the story of his eventual, triumphant departure from the castle as an old and decrepit man.
She has a great laugh about it.
It’s nice. It’s a real punchy story.
It’s really something wonderful for children, that story.
The Prince gets free of the shackles, and the things that free him are three little female fairies. It’s the positive aspect of the feminine that frees him from the dungeon. It’s very interesting and accurate from a psychological perspective. It’s the negative element of the feminine that encapsulated him in the dungeon, and it’s the positive element of the feminine that frees him. The evil queen is not very happy, when he escapes. You may remember that she stands on top of her castle tower and starts to spin off cosmic sparks. She’s quite the creature, enveloped in flame, and then she turns into a dragon. And then the prince has to fight with her, in order to make contact with sleeping beauty and awaken her from her unconscious existence. It’s a brilliant representation of the successful hero myth. He doesn’t end up staying in an unholy relationship with his mother, let’s say. He escapes, and then conquers the worst thing that can be imagined, and is ennobled by that. As a consequence, he’s able to wake the slumbering feminine from its coma. That’s a Jungian story, and that’s the story that he juxtaposed against Freud.
Freud thought of religious phenomena as part of an occult tide that would drown rationality. That’s why Freud was so vehemently anti-religious. Jung thought,
"No, that’s not the case. There’s something
profound and central to the hero myth."
Jungian clinical work is, essentially, the awakening of the hero myth in the analysand—in the client, in the patient—to conceptualize yourself as that which can confront chaos, and triumph. That’s associated with the ennobling of consciousness and the establishment of proper positive relationships between male and female. I’m a skeptical person. I’m a very, very skeptical person. I’ve tried, with every trick I have, to put a lever underneath Jung’s story, lift it up, and disrupt it. I can’t do it. I think he was right, and that Freud was wrong—I mean, I have great respect for Freud. I think he got the problem diagnosed very, very nicely.
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