posted February 16, 2009 09:56 PM         

quote:

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. . . . In its more pathological forms, paranoia is a projection of a very powerful destructive feelings onto outside objects and people. Everyone else is murderous, but certainly not me. I am a sweet and loving person who hasn't got a nasty thought in my head, but the world is full of evil, vicious creatures who are out to destroy me personally. Severe depression, on the other hand, looks rather like the reverse. I am a vicious, evil person who doesn't deserve to live, while the world is full of wonderful loving people who wouldn't come near me if they knew what I was really like . . . .

. . . . The movement into the depressive position is a hard and painful one, and it involves the strengthening of the individual ego or sense of self, to the point where one can live with one's own contradictions. Then one can also live with the contradictions of other people without feeling so enormously resentful and betrayed. We could call this depressive position a capacity for realism. I think you can begin to see why I associate Pluto and Saturn with the entire issue. The powerful primitive feelings of the child, which encompass rage, the desire to devour, the desire to destroy, and the desire to merge, certainly seem to belong to that domain of human experience which I associate with astrological Pluto. Pluto is, in a nutshell, a symbol of primitive instinctual need. One hates the person one loves because that person has the power to hurt and humiliate by withdrawing. Saturn, on the other hand, has much to do with the realistic acceptance of human limits - the capacity to face and tolerate the ambivalent nature of the world and oneself. Maybe I might even suggest that, when these astrological significators are unusually powerful in a horoscope, then the person is faced with the challenge of not only working with this particular aspect of human development, but working with it at great depth. And not everyone makes it . . . .

Audience:
.. Then splitting is a characteristic of a Pluto-dominated person.

Liz.G:
.. I would say so, yes. Every sign has its own particular way of responding to life. When faced with the complexity of ambivalent emotion, the Plutonian personality will often divide the package neatly, and either the person or the world becomes good while the other becomes evil. I have met both kinds - those who identify with all the blackness and ugliness in the family and unwittingly carry the family shadow, and those who project all the blackness and ugliness onto other people and then try to fight or convert the evil outside. The religious world is full of the latter kind of Plutonian, busily attempting to exorcise the devil in others through a particular spiritual dogma. Psychiatric hospitals are full of the former kind, carrying everyone else's burden of excrement. But look at the creative potential, if one can embrace both. Now you see what medieval philosophy was trying to say by the connection between melancholia and inspired wisdom.

. . . . Depression is like a flag being hoisted by the unconscious, making a statement ' Look, there is something inside that needs to be felt and experienced and you are not dealing with it so here is a flag, a depression. Pay attention to it instead of running away from it. Go into it, find out what's inside it. Sit with your fantasies, and try to paint them or write about them. What picture does the depression make, what colour is it? ' .. If one allows fantasy activity into a depression, it comes alive. Otherwise the container is sealed, and nothing can move it. It just remains the same . . . .

. . . . If there is no connection with the depression, then the depression is a sealed container within which nothing can grow. If one can let fantasy loose in it, then something begins to happen - usually the realisation that one is terribly depressed. That is a beginning.

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posted February 18, 2009 05:52 AM         

Especially this:
"This depression is in fact healthy, because it marks the movement out of what is essentially an infantile view of reality, where the good guys ride white horses and the bad guys ride black ones".

This writing made my heart beat faster as it put into words issues and themes I have been struggling with lately. Cheers!