Reply #14: here's a Jungian analysis..

[grasswire]

..I found the other day:

http://www.awakeninthedream.com/georgew.html

Snip:

The truth now needs to be uttered. George W. Bush is ill. He has a psycho-spiritual dis-ease of the soul, a sickness that is endemic to our culture and symptomatic of the times we live in. It’s an illness that has been with us since time immemorial. Because it’s an illness that's in the soul of all of humanity, it pervades the field and is in all of us in potential at any moment, which makes it especially hard to diagnose. Bush's malady is quite different from schizophrenia, for example, in which all the different parts of the personality are fragmented and not connected to each other, resulting in a state of internal chaos. As compared to the dis-order of the schizophrenic, Bush can sound quite coherent and can appear like such a "regular," normal guy, which makes the syndrome he is suffering from very hard to recognize. This is because the healthy parts of his personality have been co-opted by the pathological aspect, which drafts them into its service. Because of the way the personality self-organizes an outer display of coherence around a pathogenic core, I would like to name Bush's illness "malignant egophrenic (as compared to schizophrenic) disorder," or "ME disorder," for short. If ME disorder goes unrecognized and is not contained, it can be very destructive, particularly if the person is in a position of power.

In much the same way that a child's psychology cannot be understood without looking at the family system he or she is a part of, George Bush does not exist in isolation. We can view Bush and his entire Administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell, Wolfowitz, etc), as well as the corporate, military industrial complex that they are co-dependently enmeshed with, the media that they control, the voters that support them, and ourselves as well, as interconnected parts of a whole system, or a "field." Instead of relating to any part of this field as an isolated entity, it’s important to contemplate the entire interdependent field as the "medium" though which malignant egophrenia manifests and propagates itself. ME disease is a field phenomenon, and needs to be contemplated as such. Bush's sickness is our own.



THE LIE

It is not that the threat of terrorism is not real, but that Bush's policies in dealing with terrorism are actually fueling the fire. A recent poll showed that the majority of Americans have finally recognized that the war in Iraq has actually increased the threat of terrorism. Talking about Bush's policies on terrorism and his pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, Al Gore says, "Instead of making it better, he has made it infinitely worse. We are less safe because of his policies…….the unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States." Bush totally fell into Bin Laden's trap. Bin Laden couldn't have imagined a better recruiting tool for terrorists than for Bush to invade Iraq. The way Bush is fighting terrorism is actually the very act which is invoking and creating more of it in the first place.

At the root of Bush's pathology is a deep dissociation. Like the terrorists, he has split-off from his own darker half, projecting the shadow "out there," and then tries to destroy this dis-owned shadow. By projecting the shadow onto each other, Bush and the terrorists are each seeing their own shadow reflected in the other. They see each other as criminals, as the incarnation of evil. By projecting the shadow like this, they locate the evil "out there," which insures that they don't have to recognize the evil within themselves. It's interesting to note that the inner meaning of the word mirror is "shadow holder." Ironically, by fighting against their own shadow in this way, they become possessed by the very thing they are trying to destroy, thereby perpetuating a never-ending cycle of violence. To quote C. G. Jung, one of the greatest psychologists of the twentieth century, "The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves."

Symbolically, this is the repetition compulsion of the traumatized soul gone awry, to daemonic proportions, acting itself out on the world stage. To quote noted psychologist Rollo May, the daemonic is "any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person …..the daemonic can be either creative or destructive …..violence is the daemonic gone awry." The disease takes on a certain autonomy and literally possesses the person or group, as it is self-generating, self-perpetuating and self-organizing in nature, like a closed and negative feedback loop. The person who is taken over doesn't suspect a thing as the field secretly conspires and colludes with and enables their psychosis.

Jung simply refers to projecting the shadow as "the lie." It’s interesting to note that one of the inner meanings of the word Devil is "the liar." Projecting the shadow, to quote Jung, "deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil." Jung stresses the importance of consciously developing what he calls one's "imagination for evil," which is to consciously recognize one's potential for evil. This recognition means embracing and integrating one's dark side into one's wholeness, which is made up of both light and dark. If we have no imagination for evil, to quote Jung, "evil has us in its grip…….for only the fool can permanently disregard the conditions of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil."

By projecting the shadow, Bush is unwittingly being a conduit for the deepest, archetypal evil to possess him from behind, beneath his conscious awareness, and to act itself out through him. At the same time, ironically enough, he identifies with the light and imagines that he is divinely inspired. He then believes that any action he desires is justified in the name of God, as he can rationalize it as being God's will. Unable to self-reflect, he is convinced of the rightness of his viewpoint, which he considers non-negotiable. This is a very dangerous situation, as Bush has become unconsciously identified with and possessed by the hero, or savior archetype. This figure is religious in nature, as it derives from the transpersonal, archetypal dimension of the collective unconscious. Being inflated with the hero archetype, he (archetypically) wants to save the world from evil and to liberate the planet.