Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity by Robert L. Moore

Author:Robert L. Moore [Moore, Robert L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781888602210
Publisher: Chiron Publications
Published: 2011-05-14T18:30:00+00:00

THE MAGICIAN

What about the magician? The magician doesn't sit on a throne like a king and give out blessings, and he doesn't accept mission impossible like a warrior and charge out to do battle with the forces of chaos. The magician tends to be more introverted in pursuit of gnosis, knowledge and wisdom. The magician is the archetype of understanding and hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation. This covers psychoanalysts, scholars, and interpreters of all kinds.

Do you realize that just to read all the books written in the academic world in one year alone on the subject of hermeneutics would consume thousands of hours? If you tried to read all the technical books by Ricoeur, about Ricoeur, about the people who follow Ricoeur, whether Ricoeur is right about this, or whether so-and-so is right about Ricoeur, and then the relationship between Ricoeur and Gadamer, and the relationship between Derrida and Ricoeur, it would take you an awesome amount of time. But that is what academics do. They sit around and get ready for their annual meetings and worry about who is going to read what paper about what theory of hermeneutics.

Academics live in this world, and it is a wonderful world. I've spent much of my life in that kind of magician space. I love the search for detailed knowledge and understanding. That is where I started off early in my life and career. It is a beautiful and wonderful pursuit.

The creative people in archetypal psychology are excellent at this kind of pursuit of knowledge, the most prominent being James Hillman. Archetypal psychologists learn how to deconstruct everyone else's argument, because an inflated magus always has esoteric knowledge that is more incisive than yours. They always know better than you. Their hermeneutics are always more sophisticated than yours. They can always show that your methods of analysis are too literalistic or too simplistic, and they can go on forever with this. If a world problem comes up, an inflated magus will form a new study commission. When the world finally gets polluted to death, you will find an enormous number of scholars all tied up with study commissions studying toxic waste.

The magician is like a sophisticated technician who understands technical knowledge about how things work. If you are inflated in the magician and not balanced by the other archetypes, you would be like Sigmund Freud, who said he was more interested in developing a scientific psychology than in healing individual people. Think about that now. “I want to know how things work, and whether you get well is not as important to me as using the data to design a scientific psychology.” This kind of inflation would tend to make you schizoid, unattached, and untouched emotionally. You might not care very much about specific people, but you sure would know a hell of a lot. You would understand it if your analysands self-destructed. You would be wonderful at psychological postmortems. You wouldn't walk across the room to help someone, but you

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