“What is remarkable about Cinderella is her response to the envy of her stepmother and stepsisters. She does not answer their ugliness; she is not spiteful. She does not in any way identify with the nastiness directed at her, does not treat her family or herself in equally nasty ways. It is not that she is impervious to the envious attacks. She cries. She feels hurt. But she does not wallow in her misery, or blame herself, or run away. She bears with her sisters’ ridiculous demands and accepts the tasks given her. She holds on to what her own mother gave her and does not despair. She falls, with the grace that defines her, into the role of suffering servant. She remains true to goodness despite everything that tells against it. And that attitude develops the fullness of her own goodness and deepens our understanding of it with her”
Ann Ulanov from The Envied and the Envying
depththerapeutics.com
On the deadly spindle of the mother's animus
The most dangerous spindle is the one that turns inward—invisible, uncaught, destroying the woman from within. These are women who fall asleep to their own lives in early youth, arriving at some self-destructive conviction that is never discussed or even recognized. From that moment, all inner development stops. They seem to move under a dark fate, stagnant, bewitched. They are not being dishonest—it simply never occurs to them that there is a problem to discuss. They have fallen out of life, pricked by the deadly spindle of the mother's animus.
“I remember the case of the pronounced psychological illness of a woman who could not digest anything and had to take all food in the form of pills. Half starved, she came to analysis, because her doctor had finally come to the conclusion that her illness must be psychological. The woman’s mother had been a nurse in a hospital and had lived the Christian, self-sacrificing attitude of considering her life valueless and wanting nothing from it. Life should be given to the service of others, and with this went a suicidal tendency, a real problem which many nurses in hospitals have— although this self-sacrificing attitude did not stop her from catching the head doctor of the hospital. After marriage her animus came up again, and she would moan to her husband and children that she should not have married or had children but should have remained a nurse. So the children grew up in an atmosphere in which the mother’s animus informed them from morning to evening that their existence was a mistake, that it was wrong for them to be alive. The daughter gave in to whatever was asked of her, since she felt she had to propitiate her surroundings. She was frightened of everyone, her basic attitude being that she had no right to be alive—“ but please do not kill me, and I will do anything you want!” She had been pricked by the deadly spindle of her mother’s animus opinion, which she herself had also adopted, namely that she should not be alive! She was just such another Briar Rose, stung by the mother’s negative animus, and did not know it.
Marie-Louise von Franz. The Feminine in Fairy Tales
depththerapeutics.com
“The ultimate goal of hypochondria was to drive him back, as it were , into his own body after he had lived in his youth only in his head. He had differentiated one side of his being, the other side remained in an inert physical state. He would have needed this other side in order to live. The hypocondriacal depression pushed him down into the body he had always overlooked. Had he been able to follow the direction indicated by his depression and hypocondriacal illusion and make himself conscious of the fantasies that proceed from such a condition, that would have been the road to salvation"
C.G Jung
Healing is not simply about curing symptoms or eliminating addictions. This view does not honor the gods or archetypal images that underlie our pathologies and inform their expression. For instance, one man may suffer from a Dionysian-style addiction to cocaine: Like the god of ecstasy, he seeks rapture at any cost. Another may suffer from a Hades-like alcoholism, which pulls him down into the stillness of the underworld, the home of Hades, lord of darkness. Or a woman may struggle with a Kali-style depression, striking out destructively at those around her much like the Indian goddess of birth, death, and transformation. But another woman’s depression may feel like a Persephone-style melancholy, which stems from her marriage to an underworld god. When we can uncover the god hidden within our suffering, we can begin to detect its story and what it is seeking there.
Connie Zweig & Steve Wolf. Romancing the Shadow
“What is remarkable about Cinderella is her response to the envy of her stepmother and stepsisters. She does not answer their ugliness; she is not spiteful. She does not in any way identify with the nastiness directed at her, does not treat her family or herself in equally nasty ways. It is not that she is impervious to the envious attacks. She cries. She feels hurt. But she does not wallow in her misery, or blame herself, or run away. She bears with her sisters’ ridiculous demands and accepts the tasks given her. She holds on to what her own mother gave her and does not despair. She falls, with the grace that defines her, into the role of suffering servant. She remains true to goodness despite everything that tells against it. And that attitude develops the fullness of her own goodness and deepens our understanding of it with her”
Ann Ulanov from The Envied and the Envying