The Predator: Recent Encounters
In 2008 I was travelling in Asia and had the following experience:
I am at an animal park where people pay to stand beside a female tiger and have their photograph taken. The tiger has a chain around her neck and a keeper who stands near her at all times. She maintains her impressive size and the lazy royal attitude that characterizes the large cats, but for the most part she looks dulled and heavily sedated - completely disinterested in attacking anyone. I watch her allow person after person to stand beside her, smiling at their relatives who tout cameras or phones, garish with big square teeth and holding up bunny fingers. I retreat inside myself. I feel sad and somewhat despondent. I grieve this majestic wild beast contained and treated like a stuffed toy. My mind wanders to ecological disaster and existential angst.
I am yanked back to the present when about 20 feet away, a small child darts away from its parent and, in a quickened heartbeat, the predator’s eyes are upon it. Her face is still and intense and there is an anticipation- the feeling of energy gathering. She tracks the child with her eyes and head. I can sense the electricity in the air as the connection between predator and potential prey turns to something palpable – almost solid. The crowd has noticed too and faces follow the gaze of the tiger. The mother runs after the child and in just a few moments the little one is back within the purview of her protection. The giant cat looks away, bored again. The spell is broken. The moment is passed and the predator resumes her lazy process of posing, acting the part of domestication.
After the first session of facilitating my most recent workshop, "Feeding the Instinctual Self: Living into Myth through the work of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés,” I had three nightmares in three nights. In each, a woman or girl is attacked by a man. Sometimes this man was her father, sometimes a stranger. Sometimes he was not visible, but there was a sense of him in the shadows. In each of these dreams I awoke in distress, my body and nervous system reacting as though I was under physical attack.
These types of dreams fall into the category of what Dr. Estés calls “dark man dreams.” She describes these dreams as being particularly common among those who identify as female, with most women reporting having experienced at least one by the age of 25 (Estés, 1991). In her theory, dark man dreams represent the natural predator in the female psyche, the force that Carl Jung posited acts in opposition to the life force – “contra natorum,” against nature. This force “seeks to inhibit the women’s ideas, energies, and thoughts” and when women express their thoughts, their true feelings, or take steps toward their dreams, they often experience a kind of psychological backlash. This natural predator responds to the emergence of creative new life. With attack.
On the morning after the third night of nightmares, I prepared to go for a run. I needed to shift my energy and as I fiddled with my saved podcasts and happened upon one I saved a while back – Donald Kalsched on Jungianthology talking about early trauma and dreams (Kalschad, 2015). As I ran, the built up residue from fear, upset, and distress pumped through my vascular and respiratory system and I listened to Kalsched describe several examples of “dark man” dreams. He works with clients who endured early “unbearable experiences” and contends that the predator is an archetypal (as he breaks it down – archaic + typical) defense that emerges from these early traumas and serves as both persecutor and protector.
This talk, in combination the physical exertion of running, helped shift my energy enough to transcend my previous state. I had woken that morning as the victim of a nighttime predator, carrying the pain and baggage of the attack in my body. Kalsched’s depiction helped me expand my frame so that my understanding was larger than my previous narrow view. And movement pulled the transition through the body.
In a previous essay, “On Overculture,” I explored the concept of internalized overculture. This is the idea that there is a set of forces that press down upon us and try to contain us in ways that do not serve the soul. Often the overculture is experienced as an amalgam of internalized messages from one or more authoritative entities we encounter in our development (family, school, work, mass media) and so there are multiple levels at which internalized overculture can operate. From this vantage point, one might say that Kalsched’s clients’ persecutor/protector operates at the family level as this is the young child’s sphere of reality (using family loosely here to describe whomever is in the child’s immediate sphere in early years). The “dark man” that Estés refers to could be operating at any of the levels, or at multiple levels. She posits that the internal predator is native to the psyche but add that “if we have difficult childhoods, this can make [the internal predator] more vicious and ferocious.” And that although men certainly do have an internal predator (she references La Belle Damme Sans Merci), she suggests that, for those who are raised female, the familial level predator may be compounded by the cultural predator due to the influence of patriarchal forces at the cultural level.
Interestingly, both Estés and Kalsched also highlight the beneficial side of the internal predator. Estés remarks that the dark man dreams are helpful in that they point to where the work is. She even suggests that sometimes the dark man dreams have a healing function such that if one is avoiding one’s calling out of fear then the dark man must be evoked by behaving in the feared way so that the tension between the new life that wants to be born and the predator can be felt. Kalsched contends that when a child’s needs are not met and this creates unbearable distress, the psyche creates the persecutor/protector to help the child survive the experience. The persecutor/ protector emerges to help the child bear what is psychologically unbearable. As such, the persecutor/protector becomes what he has called the “self care system” – designed to help the psyche manage unbearable experience and protect it from potential future trauma.
To those of us who are perceived as or socialized female, the overculture presents a specific set of oppressive messages, just as those with other oppressed identities (based on race, ethnicity, dis/ability, sexual orientation, gender conformity, to name a few) encounter specific sets of oppressive messages related to that axis of identity. I believe that for all of us with traditionally oppressed identities, our inner predator has been strengthened by experiences of internalized overculture along the lines of this nonconforming identity and that this strengthening has both an adaptive function (protection) and an oppressive function (persecution/predation).
To return to the “dark man dreams” that emerged during my seminar, sharing my views in a public, international forum evoked internalized messages about the place of women in society. This is the classic imposter syndrome experience – a well-relatable version of the predator/prey dynamic. The “new life” part of sharing myself publicly – the inner child of my creative energy emerging - instigated a predator/protector response in the psyche. Much like the small child wandering away from the parent did in my anecdote at the animal park.
In a more nuanced way, sharing my affinity for the work of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, someone whose work evokes a more (in my estimation) feminine, culturally-rich, poetic take on the hard science of clinical psychology in which I was trained, provoked another layer of internalized overculture questioning not just “who am I to share this” but “is this material valuable according to the constraints of my chosen field?” Finally, it felt imperative to both be my authentic self as I presented the material, and also to facilitate in an emotionally-present, heart-centered way that held the magical and liminal elements of the material (rather than retreat into my intellect and present in a more distanced way). This decision provoked an additional layer of internal persecution – one that has resonances through all of my education and also my early childhood where thinking was valued and feeling was taboo. In a sense, my internal predator (the dark men in my dream) tried to protect me from the censure I internalized from culture, my education, and my family by saying ~ “Be small – don’t draw attention. If you must speak, do so in an intellectual, distanced way. Have references, be secular and materialistic. Don’t show emotion, vulnerability. Don’t be yourself. I am doing this for your own good. But if you violate these terms, I must attack you to bring you back into the box.”
In her analysis of two predator stories she often tells, Bluebeard and Mr. Fox, Estés argues that the way that fairy tales resolve this dynamic is to “call the brothers.” That is, to evoke the internal healthy protective forces in the psyche[i]. In the tiger anecdote, this is the parent moving closer to the child, encircling him, putting the larger, more powerful body in proximity to the smaller one. This is to invoke a protector, a part of the psyche that can stand up to the predator and shield the child spirit so it can grow[ii]. The outcome of this is to “keep going.” Let the creative, child spirit live and thrive.
In Kalsched’s work, the resolution occurs relationally with the therapist. The child spirit reaches for the therapist relationally – allowing the therapist to be important to them, allowing themselves to feel a longed for attunement or connection. The predator/protector attacks to prevent the feared connection which has in the past been painful. The dynamic resolves when the client brings this experience to the therapy relationship, often in the form of a dream, and the therapist is able to respond with warmth and compassion for both parts, the child spirit and the protector/predator. The healing is predicated on the client’s ability to initiate the connection with the therapist, to continue in the relationship long enough to build enough trust enough that the child spirits’ longing emerges, and the dark man dream is evoked. And then the client brings the dream to the therapist. This is a way of “keeping going.” The final stage is to allow the self to witness the therapist’s compassionate reaction and allow both parts to be witnessed with love and connection. This is what allows the dynamic to be transcended.
So often my clients (and myself:) want to kill the predator. When we are identified with the child spirit, there is a wish to be free of the one who persecutes us internally and holds us back. When we are identified with the protector/persecutor, we just want the child spirit, the longing one, the vulnerability to shut up or go away. But as both Kalsched and Estés point out, the tension does not resolve through the annihilation of a part of self. My favorite resolution is the fate of the predator Bluebeard - he is dismembered and fed to the birds, but a hank of his beard, “blue as the dark ice of the lake,” is kept “at the convent of the white nuns in the far mountains” (Estés, 1996 p.40). The inner predator does not get to persist in current form, but is taken apart so his power no longer can damage the person and derail them from their path. He is transformed, by being given to nature, consumed by the birds and presumably digested and distributed in a different form that better serves the psyche. And what remains is held to be sacred, by a circle of holy women, in a place remote but contained where the air is cool and clean.
When working with human experience, it is usually wise not to limit ourselves to one perspective for too long. More often one angle works for a while and then another is needed to make room for our evolving psyche. In any given instance how do we know whether to befriend the predator or dismember it? My experience is that when I have a large enough frame, my inner wisdom can help me determine how to interact in a particular encounter. And so I offer these two options to you, to myself, knowing that as soon as I publish this post it is likely that the tiger’s eyes will lock onto this vulnerable description of my inner world[iii].
But, like Estés’ prescription – what is there to do but to keep going? Writing about my experience. Sharing lyrically and vulnerably in my own voice as best I know it the journey of my child spirit, and my predator/protector as they emerged most recently, knowing that doing so will likely provoke another encounter. And in some way also as Kalsched recommends, I bring this dream to you - stranger, reader, hoping you will hold my fumbling passage through these concepts with the compassion I have come to hold them. Hoping that in some way my journey will be connected to yours and that some new transcendent experience can emerge. That your child spirit will perk up her little ears perhaps and feel a bit emboldened. While the birds fly over ahead and far off in the mountains, and the sound of holy women singing carries on the wind.
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[i] I am evading the obvious analysis of gender here to maintain focus on the predator/prey dynamic. The attributing the quality of protection to the masculine forces of the psyche (fathers, brothers) is clearly influenced by social mores, though how much and in what ways will be fodder for another article.
[ii][ii] It is also worth noting that in Estés work, the internal protectors stand up to the internal predator, whereas in Kalsched’s theory, these are two sides of the same coin.
[iii] The night after I sent this out to a few colleagues to read I dreamed that my soul had discovered a treasure but that Hitler was there interrupting and correcting me as I tried to interpret and communicate what I had found. Dr. Estés remarks on how frequently Nazis and Hitler appear as predator characters in dreams, even among those who are of generations long past that which survived WWII. In this dream, one twist was the that tone was light – even comedic at times. This is one way I have found my dream world to evolve a theme – by presenting similar elements and varying the tone or emotion content. I expect that there are seasoned dream analysts who have previously observed and written about this but I share here out of my own personal and clinical observations.
References
Estés, C.P. (1992) Women who run with the wolves. Ballantine Books.
Estés, C.P. (1991) In the House of the Riddle Mother: The most common archetypal motifs in women’s dreams. Sounds True.
Kalsched, D. (2015) Early trauma and dreams: Archetypal defenses of the personal spirit https://jungchicago.org/blog/early-trauma-and-dreams/