The Drawn Script

“People find something in words, visit psychotherapists, get dogs …
But for the blind, even their guides are blind.” 👤📌

“Every person is the product of:
millions of separate moments,
thousands of states of consciousness,
hundreds of adventures,
dozens of life crises,
two parents,
and one life script.

A person needs this script in order to feel both feet standing on solid ground. Giving it up is as unthinkable as knocking the foundation out from beneath one’s house.”

Studying Berne’s script analysis while still inside a script is like throwing stones from a glass house.

And your idea that struggle lies at the foundation of life—like Lyalya—has bled out, because the conviction that one “must struggle” looks rather like a piece of script programming. Or is it the force that fights the script?

An orientation toward overcoming is what makes it possible to overcome any other attitude or pattern. Yet there is one thing it cannot overcome: the urge to overcome. The desire to fight can only be defeated by fighting; but once we use struggle, even to struggle against struggle, we have not escaped it. We are still using it. A tool cannot destroy itself while it remains in use.

Bang … It is a loop, a dead end.

The paradox of leaving the script

Within this theory, it is impossible to know with one hundred percent certainty that you have left your script 🔂.

When you tell yourself “I have left the script,” might that statement itself be your script? And this thought? And this “this”—was it predetermined? How could you verify it?

Perhaps in the way William James once spoke about will: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

A choice has to be made, yet choice is grounded in the fact that “the patient must make a choice. He usually makes that choice on the basis of his script. If the patient visits a family physician, that physician may choose a specialist in accordance with his own script” (p. 393).

The script analyst, too, may draw a script for the patient while relying on the belief that the analyst is objective—a belief that may itself belong to the analyst’s script.

No. Follow this line too far and you can almost taste the burning in your mouth. As V. M. Allakhverdov said, “If a person loses the sense of free will, that is a symptom of pathology.”

We want to draw a boundary and say: this is the script, and this is my choice. But “what can this line mean among myriads of endless lines, where there is no certainty at all?” (see 16 January 2020).

You may never learn whether you overcame a prescription or whether overcoming the prescription was itself your prescription.

I do not know. I do know that all these strivings and longings, readings, reflections, judgments, and pages of writing are an opening stage where everything may prove useful.

A script that has already been drawn does not mean you cannot keep drawing it.

What is needed is “something from outside, absent from the script yet capable of breaking it” (Eric Berne, p. 457).

All right … 🔱🔱🔱🔱🔱🔱🔱

Passing through the Shadow

I remember that January day.
I was a fallen Ariel.
The turning led the wrong way,
and there the ground was cold.

She lay there waiting for death;
it pressed me close that day
and cried so all could hear:
“Show me your dark temper.”

Carthage smoldered within.
Do you know what faith is?
Have you ever given yourself to an idea—damn it—
so completely that everything outside the system
was erased in those gardens of Eden?
To sit and think each day, unable to get away,
until even sleep removes the seal.
Do you think these are fairy tales?
Tell me, is there room to breathe in a turtleneck?

Just so, I became black paint;
each day I colored pictures.
I was faithful to her, like the loyal Husky.
I read all the meta-tales.
Perhaps I lacked tenderness;
I did not use ayahuasca then,
yet still I stripped the masks from the world.
And having escaped Lambaski’s fate,
I seek my road to Nebraska …

Integration as an alternative to repression and possession

“I believe healthy people are able to fuse and synthesize their conscious and unconscious lives. They do so gracefully and effectively. In that fusion, each enriches and changes the other. The unconscious no longer inspires fear. Such a person can become reconciled with the unconscious, with fantasies and wishes, and can permit himself to be poetic and mad.”

Maslow continues: the unconscious is opened, accepted, and assimilated; it no longer seems so dangerous or terrifying. As the process deepens, the person becomes familiar with what was once feared and learns that it can be handled.

He compares this to the relationship between men and women across history. A man may unconsciously fear a woman for the same reasons he fears his own unconscious, and therefore try to subordinate or dominate her. Psychodynamic theory suggests that women awaken in men their unconscious femininity—softness, tenderness, and related qualities. The long conflict between masculine and feminine, and men’s attempts to rule, humiliate, or oppress women, can thus be seen as clumsy attempts to control the unconscious. True love is impossible between a frightened master and an insulted slave. ✈

Only when a man is strong enough, confident enough, and sufficiently whole can he accept and eventually welcome a woman’s self-actualization and her effort to realize her potential. The reverse is also true: no man can realize himself without the support of a worthy woman. Woman educates and develops man, and man does the same for woman. Returning to the analogy, conscious and unconscious processes—fantasy and rationality—must nourish one another if they are to achieve genuine harmony (p. 129).

Keeping Maslow’s useful analogy, we can turn to Jung, who says that “the constellation of archetypal images and fantasies is not in itself pathological.” In Maslow’s terms, the appearance of the feminine (the unconscious) in a man is not pathological by itself.

But Jung continues:

“The characteristic feature of a pathological reaction is above all identification with the archetype. This produces a kind of inflation and possession by the contents that suddenly emerge, and they pour out in a torrent that no therapy can stop.”

Yes—here it is, the same “playing with fire that leads to a blaze” that Shakespeare wrote about.

If a man identifies himself with a woman—with “us,” with “my girlfriend”—he temporarily weakens himself. “In favorable cases identification may pass as a more or less harmless inflation. In every case, however, identification with the unconscious weakens consciousness, and that is its principal danger.”

This is why so many people become codependent or try to rule, humiliate, and oppress their “other half”: these actions can be understood as clumsy attempts to control one’s unconscious. As Fromm put it, they call their dependence love, and their possession love as well. 😬

Identification of man with woman, and of consciousness with the unconscious, is an extraordinarily difficult process. Most often we slide toward one of two extremes:

1. We repress the Id and suppress her.

2. We fall under the Shadow, which starts to possess and subordinate us.

“You do not ‘manage’ identification and you do not consciously ‘identify yourself’; you experience your identity with the archetype unconsciously and become possessed by it. In difficult cases it is therefore considerably more important to strengthen and consolidate the ego than to understand and assimilate the products of the unconscious.”

When the ego is strong, a person has a foundation carved into an inner spiritual world. Values and principles have entered the blood and body; the person stands firmly, rests on faith, and can then assimilate the unconscious. It becomes possible to accept the Other without making that person the center of life, without depending on them, and without trying to control them out of fear that losing them would mean losing one’s own support.

These inner convictions redraw the script and release a person from childhood prescriptions. The evidence that they were not simply given at birth is the price paid for them: pain, labor, blood, and sweat. These values are yours precisely because experience earned them.

“Any person would rather feel free than subject, entitled to choose rather than deprived of that right. No normal person wants to be controlled. He prefers both to feel free and to be free.”

True freedom is the result of overcoming objectively existing excess degrees of freedom. It is earned as principles crystallize in the furnace of difficult life situations. Individuality gradually takes shape. The boundaries of the person—especially the “front-line” boundaries—must have their strength and clarity tested by crossing them, as though to make sure that beyond them is no longer the self. Other borders remain indistinct and mobile, like smoke.

Drawing one’s own life script and individuality is a slow, gradual process. We might gladly accept a ready-made model supplied from outside, were it not for one thing:

“We ourselves want to be the makers and creators of our destiny.”

Very well. If you want it—become one. But know that it is a difficult and dangerous road.

Where does the road begin, and what is its essence?
👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

Virtutis et vitiorum grave ipsius conscientiae pondus est: qua sublata, iacent omnia — This is where the “Road … to Nebraska” begins. 🔱