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and Power:
A Scorpio Triumvirate - 12,000 Words.
By Glenn Perry.
Because one cannot assimilate the shadow and stay the same, it is
associated with death. To integrate the feared thing is to die. For this to
occur, however, the shadow must be rendered visible by being projected
outward and encountered in the form of someone to whom we are
attracted. In other words, fear tends to become eroticized and embodied in
the person of the beloved. There the shadow lurks unsuspectedly.
Eventually, however, it precipitates a crisis in the relationship. It is only by
penetrating the shadow and integrating it into consciousness that one can
eliminate fear, take back the power that was lost, and restore integrity to
the soul. This process of healing and empowerment is implicitly sexual.
For by making love to what we fear, we die and are reborn in a new, more
powerful form. This is why sex, death, and power are inseparable.
It may not be immediately apparent that the need for safety and the
need for sensual gratification are two faces of the same principle. This
becomes more obvious when we look at Taurus from a developmental
perspective. I associate zodiacal signs with distinct developmental periods
of the human life cycle. Aries would be approximately the first 18 months,
and Taurus would cover the next two-and-one-half years. Research in child
development indicates that when infants reach about 18 months of age
they experience a crisis of sorts; that is, they go through a transition from
one perceptual framework to another. Prior to 18 months, infants
experience little, if any, separation between themselves and the outside
world. The world, in effect, is their oyster and infants view themselves as
omnipotent. All they have to do is scream or cry and their every need is
satisfied. There is no need to exercise any self-control over bodily
functions because they are not particularly aware of having a body. An
infant's orientation in space and time is limited to "me, here, now."
Astrologers can readily see the Aries temperament in this description. At
18 months, however, the infant suddenly awakens to the disturbing
realization that there is an objective world peopled with objects that have
an existence entirely separate from the infant and that are not always
subject to the infant's control. Piaget (1926) termed this the capacity for
"object permanence," meaning the ability to conceptualize that there are
entities who have a reality of their own and that continue to exist even
when one cannot see, hear, or feel them.
Sometimes Venus (and the 2nd house) is associated with "values," but
this part of human nature has nothing to do with values in the traditional
sense of the term, i.e., one's ethics or moral values. It is, instead, the value
one places on happiness and whatever affords that happiness. We might
call it "material values." This gets back to the idea of valuing whatever
gives one pleasure or provides security. The function of Venus is to value
and honor whatever it is that one wants in order to feel "good." So Venus
rules the process of acquiring things, having experiences, or attracting
people because of the pleasure and security they afford (which is, in effect,
their value).
It is the capacity for object constancy and its corollary, self-love, that
renders Taurus so lovable. The partner is not burdened with any
responsibility to provide love, because the Taurus-integrated person
already has it. We see this embodied in the relaxed, calm, serene presence
of Sun-sign Taureans who seem to exude sensuality through every pore.
Taurus is voluptuousness wanting to be violated, it is touchable, attractive,
earthy, beautiful, and therefore desirable. If Scorpio is the lover knocking
on the door, Taurus is the one who invites him in. If Scorpio is the plow
and the seed, Taurus is the fertile field waiting to be plowed. It cannot be
overstated that Taurus is first and foremost committed to the pleasure of
one's own body. With Jupiter in Taurus on the Ascendant, Mae West put it
best when she purred, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."
I have taken some time here to outline the principle of Taurus because
it is the foundation of what will later develop into the capacity for sexual
enjoyment. Taurus, in effect, is the ground of our being, the source of a
stable and secure sense of self - an embodied self - that is firmly rooted in
self-love. This is not to imply that safety and security should be the final
goal of love, for these will never provide for psychological growth and
cannot be sustained indefinitely anyway. The point is, an individual must
first be grounded in the pleasurable sensations of her own body before she
can welcome the experience of sharing this pleasure with someone else.
She has to feel safe and secure within her own boundaries before she can
willingly allow those boundaries to be penetrated. To "give it up," to be
taken, to penetrate and be penetrated, to risk being wounded, to voluntarily
relinquish control and merge in ecstatic union with the beloved: this is
Scorpio. But if the base security of Taurus is missing or damaged because
of a premature or forced violation of the body, then the individual will
experience tremendous difficulty feeling safe enough to tolerate the
experience of sex.
What, we may ask, is the result of all this suffering and healing? The
answer is power. Whatever one fears has power. It has power because it
drains energy that would otherwise be available to the person. Herman
(1992), for example, writes that all traumatic experiences share a common
similarity of denial and disempowerment. To lift the denial and resolve the
fear is to take back the power that has been lost. Consider what happens
when one is afraid. There is a contraction of the self, a repression that
requires a significant expenditure of energy to keep the repressed in place.
Jung (1960) called these compacted areas "psychic complexes," which he
defined as a magnetic vortex of emotionally-charged contents and
associated ideas clustered around a central core. A complex constitutes an
image of a certain psychic situation, e.g., the enjoyment of one's body
(Venus/Taurus), that is incompatible with the habitual conscious attitude.
The individual, for example, may compensate his fear of bodily pleasure by
developing the attitude, "I don't need to be touched or loved - keep away."
The Venus/Taurus impulse is repressed and behaves, in Jung's words,
"like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness" (p. 96).
While the complex can be suppressed with an effort of will, it tends to
assert itself with a vengeance at first opportunity - perhaps when the
individual is stressed, tired, or disinhibited from drugs or alcohol. With a
Venus/Taurus complex, this "return of the repressed" might result in
inappropriate touching, overindulgence in food or drink, compulsive
shopping, and the like. Since Pluto rules Scorpio, we might expect to see
this complex symbolized by a Pluto- square-Venus aspect.
Rollo May (1969) points out that it is precisely the repressed instinctual
life that constitutes the complex, or what he calls the daimonic. "The
daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the
whole person" (p. 123). Because the power of the daimonic is bound up
with certain memories and needs that are abhorrent to the individual, it can
be destructive to the conscious personality in the same way that a monster
appears destructive. When this power goes awry and one element usurps
control over the total personality, we have daimon possession. Jung
referred to this as "enantiodromia." If one side of a pair of opposites
becomes excessively predominant in the personality, it is likely to turn into
its contrary, e.g., priests turn into child molesters. Enantiodromia helps us
to understand how daimon possession occurs. In a desperate effort to
repress the complex, the individual overcompensates in the opposite
direction by identifying with qualities and attributes that are opposed to the
nature of the impulse he fears. Sooner or later, however, the repressed life
asserts itself and the conscious personality is abducted into the
underworld of the psyche.
The myth of Hercules slaying the Hydra illustrates this principle quite
nicely. As one of his twelve labors, Hercules is sent to slay the Lernean
Hydra, a serpent-like beast who inhabits a dark cave in a swamp. The nasty
Hydra has been preying upon the folk of the countryside. A particularly
deadly creature, it has nine snake heads, each of which is equipped with
poisonous fangs. The problem is that no one can kill the Hydra by cutting
off its heads, for each severed head sprouts three new ones in return.
Hercules makes the mistake of trying to club the Hydra into
unconsciousness and then cut off its heads. But this only compounds his
difficulty because by attempting to "cut off" the problem, it only grows
worse. The heads proliferate and Hercules is about finished. Suddenly he
remembers that Hydras cannot tolerate light. So he drops down to his
knees, seizes the Hydra by its legs, and thrusts it up into the sunlight,
whereupon it shrivels up and begins to die.
The psyche seems to know that to fully experience the meaning of the
threatening encounter would destroy its core organization. So it is cut off,
delayed, dissociated. Also cut off is whatever part of the psyche is
associated with the traumatic experience. A child who has been molested,
for example, may cut off her connection to her body and need for sensual
gratification (Venus/Taurus). This whole area is avoided because it tends to
reactivate the original traumatic experience. As such, it constitutes a "dead
zone" or void in the personality. Just as you cannot cut off the head of a
Hydra, however, so too the original trauma does not go away, but instead
produces the panic attacks, agitation, nightmares, fatigue, emotional
blunting, and other clinical phenomena that are associated with Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Just as the Hydra bursts forth from the
cave to prey upon innocent folk, so the daimon bursts forth from the
unconscious in the form of intrusive flashbacks that disrupt conscious
functioning. Ultimately, the only way to heal the wound is to consciously
work it through. Generally speaking, this requires giving up control,
surrendering to feelings that emerge as the complex is encountered,
opening to and embracing the meaning of the experience, eliminating
negative attitudes and defenses that were developed to ward off the pain of
the original trauma, and integrating the contents of the trauma into
consciousness and long-term memory. This is holding the Hydra up to the
sunlight. And, as we shall see, it is not dissimilar to what happens during
sex.
We have seen how the insidious effects of trauma are caused by the
psychological aftershocks of the experience. Such shocks ultimately take
up residence in the murky swamps and dark caves of the unconscious,
where Hydras are born. Regardless of the nature of the original trauma,
whether physical abuse, excessive shaming, or threat of loss of a parent's
love, a child's psyche will tend first to repress the experience, and then
eroticize it. Sexual turn-ons are rooted in Plutonian processes that have
their genesis on a psychological level; that is, patterns of sexual arousal
are inextricably linked to old wounds and conflicts. One's core erotic
theme is an internal blueprint for arousal that transforms crucial
challenges and difficulties - unfinished emotional business from childhood
- into sexual excitation (Morin, 1995; Stoller, 1975).
From the above we can draw an important lesson about Scorpio. Each
time there was a crisis, it was resolved by the innovation of some new
evolutionary development. Life survived by transforming itself, whenever
necessary, into a more complex form. When single-celled prokaryotes were
poisoning the environment with their own waste, oxygen, they fused
together to create oxygen metabolizing multicellular organisms. By
developing the capacity to take in rather than eject out oxygen, they
embraced the very thing that threatened to annihilate them. It is a paradox
that seems to be at the heart of Scorpio. Only by integrating the
threatening agent were prokaryotes able to evolve into a new life form and
survive. In doing so they developed the capacity for sexual reproduction.
Sexuality brought about an extraordinary acceleration of evolution and the
proliferation of many new life forms, yet it required the death of the
individual organism. So from the beginning, sex, death, and transformation
were inseparable.
There is reason to believe that people do not fall in love by chance, but
in accordance with a specific unconscious plan (Blinder, 1989; Dicks, 1967;
Hendrix, 1988; Jung, 1953). The plan seems to be that individuals work out
with partners the unconscious conflicts and wounds that derived from
earlier important relationships. For this to be effective, it is necessary to (1)
select someone who has similar character traits and attitudes as one's
parents; and (2) resolve with them whatever unfinished business remains
with these parents. The partner, in effect, functions as a surrogate for the
healing of old wounds.
Jung (1953) provides a useful model for how this process operates. He
theorized that the human psyche contained unconscious, autonomous
psychic contents representing contrasexual elements of the personality.
The anima was the psychic representation of the "inner female" in a man,
and the animus personified the "inner male" in the woman. According to
Jung, the projection of one's anima or animus onto an individual of the
opposite sex is responsible for the phenomenon of falling in love. The
particular quality of our relationship with the opposite sex is determined,
says Jung, by the degree to which we have integrated the anima or animus.
For integration and healing to occur, however, it is necessary to first meet
the anima/animus in projected form. Otherwise these figures remain locked
in the unconscious and are not released to create the struggles that bring
the potential for a widening of consciousness. In this regard, projections
are necessary, for they serve the purpose of bringing the unconscious into
view. To integrate the anima/animus part is to develop a wider and deeper
conscious perspective.
If the child identifies with the good object only, this becomes the basis
for later attempts to establish symbiotic relationships with idealized others,
alongside a paranoid view of the now separated-out bad mother-world. The
bad-self is repressed into the unconscious, and the corresponding bad-
object takes up residence in what is perceived as a hostile and threatening
environment. This often leads to choosing a partner who initially seems to
be the fulfillment of one's fantasies, but quickly turns into one's nightmare.
Ironically, the very characteristics of the partner that were the major source
of attraction are the same ones that lead to struggle. Again, this is because
of the splitting of the light and dark sides of the anima/animus figure.
Recall that the anima/animus is an unconscious aspect of the subject's
personality that gets projected. Once the partner is unconsciously
perceived as embodying "lost" parts of the self, s/he is first idealized and
then subsequently devalued for the same quality! In other words, there is a
persecution, in the partner, of repressed self-parts that have been
projected onto the partner, even though it seemed to be this
"oppositeness" to the ego's conscious self-image that was originally an
important part of the attraction.
Eventually, however, the Hydra awakens and our friend begins to notice
that his sweet wife is also possessive, needy, and controlling. This is the
dark/Pluto side of the Venus complex - the negative anima, or "bad-object."
He defends himself against the hated bad-object by withdrawing, spending
long hours away at work, and generally avoiding his wife. Predictably, she
begins to nag and complain about his lack of availability. He responds by
withdrawing further. The pattern escalates and confirms his worst fears
that he is about to be devoured. Ultimately he loses all sexual interest in
the relationship. His wife spends most of her time with the children while
he reverts to his secret, sexual addiction involving excessive
masturbation, pornographic literature, and frequent liaisons with
prostitutes. With the latter, he acts out sadomasochistic fantasies of
domination and submission.
What is happening here and how can it be resolved? While this example
may seem extreme, it is actually derived from the case history of a famous
person whom I will identify in Part II of this article. The process begins with
the husband projecting his Venus complex into his wife. He utilizes
"splitting" during the courtship phase and sees her in an idealized way as
the "all-good" object - pure, unadulterated Venus. Soon, however, the dark
side presents itself and he begins to see her as the needy, suffocating
mother/woman, or "all-bad" object. In effect, he is trying to eliminate in
himself this fearful image of a devouring need, so he projects it into his
wife. She receives the projection and because of her own vulnerabilities
begins to identify with it. She becomes needy, possessive, and controlling.
Their complementary polarities become rigidly polarized so that the
differences that once beguiled and bewitched now become sources of
aggravated conflict. They begin to emphasize and exaggerate these
differences in ways that feel punishing and antagonistic. They forget what
it was that drew them together and lose contact with their earlier feelings
of attraction. He withdraws and she pursues at an ever more frantic pace.
As this rhythmic pattern escalates, both spouses become increasingly
rigid and their mutual pain builds toward an inevitable climax. Ultimately
there is a huge explosion as both partners release their pent-up feelings
and toxic emotions. Mutual hostilities may even be punctuated with a
resounding "Fuck you!" Following this release, there is usually an attempt
at reconciliation as the two work it through and try to resolve their
differences. In the sharing of their pain, and in the attempt to understand
its basis and origins, there is a potential for healing. If all goes well, a
single insight will penetrate one partner's defenses, resulting in psychic
fertilization. And this, in turn, may lead to psychological transformation.
It does not take too much imagination to see the above description as
an analog to what happens during sexual intercourse. The courtship phase
corresponds to the Taurus foreplay stage preceding coitus. The man's
projection of his psychic wound into the woman correlates with vaginal
penetration by the penis, or the beginning of the Scorpio/Pluto stage. Her
receiving and identifying with the projected part simulates the opening of
the vagina and incorporation of the penis. Just as there is a rhythmic
movement that builds toward a climax in sexual intercourse, so there is an
interactional rhythm that builds to peak intensity in the relationship.
Whereas in coitus there is a blurring of physical boundaries, in projection
there is a blurring of psychic boundaries. Right before orgasm the
musculature of the body becomes taut and rigid; so too the partners
become tense and rigid just before a fight. In sexual excitement there is "a
point of no return" after which orgasm is inevitable. Likewise, in marital
conflict, once the interactional problem escalates out of control, a
confrontation is unavoidable. Just as there is actual emotional pain
associated with marital confrontations, so there is apparent pain
associated with sexual orgasm. In both instances, there is a discharge of
tensions. A period of resolution follows orgasm and confrontation,
respectively, during which there is at least the potential for transformation.
In the sexual arena, this period is associated with the spermatic journey
into the womans interior that may result in conception. In the emotional
arena, there is a process of introspection that may result in new
"conceptions" regarding psychological wounds and vulnerabilities.
Of course, the obverse can occur, too, with the wife projecting onto the
husband. Suppose, for example, it is the woman who has Venus square
Pluto. Having been sexually molested by her stepfather, she perceives men
as dangerous, licentious philanderers who violate and betray women.
Accordingly, her need for intimacy (Venus) is repressed and projected onto
her husband, who carries it with a vengeance. Sensing her unconscious
hostility, he eventually grows tired of her distancing maneuvers and seeks
his pleasure elsewhere. His affairs, of course, only serve to confirm what
she suspected - that men are untrustworthy defilers of women. If, however,
her husband can contain her projection and invite her to talk about it
(rather than identifying with the projection and acting it out), then there is
the possibility of healing.
Conclusion.
References.
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