Facing the Dragon Quotes

“This longing to commit a madness stays with us throughout our lives. Who has not, when standing with someone by an abyss or high up on a tower, had a sudden impulse to push the other over? And how is it that we hurt those we love although we know that remorse will follow? Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves. To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgment on oneself. —Henrik Ibsen”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“Human beings have an enormous desire not to know. It is very painful to know. If we did a popularity contest among all the defense mechanisms, the defense mechanism of denial would win hands down. It is the most popular one. Unconsciousness is difficult to deal with, and it takes a heroic struggle in the psyche to develop a strong ego. Certainly anything like an adequate ego function is not automatic. If you have evaluated your own ego function lately, you know that even after much therapy and struggle it is difficult to get yourself conscious and stay awake. This is the primal deep reality in this whole issue of spiritual warfare. It is a struggle against unconsciousness.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“The bad news about this grandiosity is that trying to avoid it by being humble only indicates the enormity of your struggle. I hate to disturb anyone's good day, but a really humble person may be having more trouble with grandiosity than someone who thinks they are pretty hot stuff. If you get depressed a lot because you think you are worthless, it indicates a mighty struggle with this little god within. You need to feel like you weigh a thousand pounds in your leaden depression so you won't float off into the sun and be destroyed by an Icarus complex. From this point of view, what is depression? It is your friend. Thank God for your depression, because it is the ballast on your psychic balloon. Without it, you would be flying into the sun of psychosis.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“My friends, I think we need to face how difficult it is for us to become empathic with other spiritual traditions and accept their legitimate needs for recognition and affirmation, their needs for being seen and given significant respect. Why? Kohut said that when we were children, we had not yet developed what he called “the cohesive self,” or what we would call a self-system that is integrated and stable. What we needed from others he called “mirroring.” We need to be seen. We need to be recognized and affirmed. You and I in our spiritual traditions would say we need to be blessed. We long for an experience of blessing.4”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“There is such a thing as humility, however, and we must learn the true humility that consists of two things: (a) knowing your limitations and (b) getting the help you need. That is all humility is. It has nothing to do with any ascetic personal style or with being self-effacing. It is simply knowing your limitations. That is what the grandiose self hates. The grandiose self does not want to know any limits, and it does not want to ask for help. The twelve-step programs are so powerful because they teach a form of humility that says: “Know your limitations, and get the help you need.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“It is important to understand that most people have narcissistic pathology, so this is not to dismiss Jung. We all have narcissistic problems. Someone has suggested that we need a “Humans Anonymous Twelve Step Program,” to help everyday people deal with their residual narcissistic pathology, and I agree. It's another way of saying that we need a more practical approach to our spirituality if we are to be effective in containing and channeling our grandiose energies.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“It is not enough, however, to say like some Jungians that the evil is all inside, and any trouble I have with you is just because I have it in my shadow. “If I could just integrate my shadow then I would see you for the wonderful, complete, perfect person that you are.” That is not true either. Such a position taken to extreme would suggest that if the Jews had just integrated their shadows in the late thirties, then Adolf Hitler would have seemed like a nice fellow. That can't be right. No matter how much the people in the ghettoes integrated their Jewish shadows, Hitler was still an objective reality out there in the real world trying to kill them. Remember the old joke, “Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you.” That is true in psychology as well.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“It is sheer fantasy to think that you can ever transform your grandiose energies so they will never seduce you again, that you can ever prevent your grandiosity from being seductive. Sometimes people think if they just prayed enough, or went to enough masses, then their grandiosity would stop being seductive. Or if they became a cardinal, or a bishop, or a mother superior, it would not be seductive anymore. The truth, of course, is just the opposite, because the more successful you get, the more seductive grandiosity gets. The more traumas and tragedies you have in your life, the more grandiosity will attack you. It can tell you how impressive it is that you are still alive, or it can chide you into depression by suggesting you might as well go ahead and commit suicide. Many suicidal thoughts come from a grandiose perfectionism.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“Campbell's work explains what world mythology says about all this. This includes every mythology, every mythic world, not just the Christian tradition. Human beings before the modern era understood these things. The modern world has forgotten how all this works and turned instead to the idea that we can strip-mine this territory. We expect to go in there and get some of that god-energy by strip-mining. This is the heroic modern ego trying to take control of it. We think that we do not have time to make long heroic journeys down into the god-energy and then come back again. We turn spirituality into a West Virginia coal mine, and our fantasy is that we can just mine all this god-energy whenever we need it and then we can manipulate it.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“Kohut noticed that grandiosity, rather than improving your sex life, either makes you impotent or makes you so promiscuous that you cannot sustain relationships and you put yourself in danger of getting AIDS and dying. In other words, grandiosity tends to destroy you if you don't face up it and learn how to regulate it.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“Some of my friends in concerned and committed activist organizations think that psychological analysis is actually the enemy of finding solutions. They think anyone with deep interest in psychology must be a total “navel gazer,” trying more to get away from the world's problems than to solve them. Some of these people believe that the world's problems would disappear if they could just translate all religious categories into Marxist terms and get everyone to be socialists. They assume, for example, that Marxists would never engage in cocaine trafficking, that a Marxist country would never have to shoot its generals for smuggling in cocaine, and that Marxists would never execute people who were longing for freedom. Did you know that? We would not have to execute students, or shoot them in the streets, if we were Marxists. You can go on and on with that, and it makes me sick, because it shows such an incredible naiveté about the realities of life. They need to read Reinhold Niebuhr's classic works on the dynamics of human pride that afflict all ideologies left and right (Niebuhr 1941–1943). The human predicament does not result from having the wrong ideology.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“if you are not in touch with the king in the other world, your life in this world is going to be a terrible mess.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“Apart from God everything is alien and remote and is held together simply by force. Satan by dint of his superior spiritual powers has succeeded in leading men astray by suggesting to them that they will become as gods. But by the pursuit of evil and by the substitution of himself for God, man, so far from becoming the God-like being of his dreams, becomes the slave of his lower nature, and, at the same time, by losing his higher nature becomes subject to natural necessity and ceases to be spiritually determined from within.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“The only thing that can be slain, however, is an ego organization that has merged unconsciously with the great dragon. The great dragon cannot be killed. It must be related to in a conscious way (see Edinger 1999). No matter how old you are, you are not an adult until you have slain that unconscious identification with the grandiose presence within. That is what human initiation is all about. Initiation is death. There must be a ritual slaying of this particular monster. We love to tell everyone else to slay their monsters. Whatever my race is, I love to urge you to slay your race's monsters. Whatever my religion is, I love to tell you to slay your religion's monsters, but I don't necessarily want to slay mine. Whatever my gender is, I want the other gender to slay its monsters, even though I resist facing the monsters in mine. That is how it works.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“If you come to me for analysis and therapy, and you absolutely refuse to have any spirituality, I will still work with you, but I will have to tell you honestly that without a spiritual practice it will be much more difficult, perhaps impossible, for you to deal effectively with your archetypal Self, its grandiose energies, and its unconscious projections. If you come into analysis with me without a spiritual life, you might project your god-complex onto me if you like me and idealize me. I will probably try to carry it, and we will be tempted to have one of those Woody Allen, twenty-year analyses. This is what happens with Freudians and other therapists who do not understand that an idealizing transference of the god-complex onto the therapist is a mythic and spiritual phenomenon. If a therapist has trouble letting people terminate their therapy, it is because it is not therapy, but unconscious religion. The therapist has become a little Holy Father with his own little pseudo-religion.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity