The Ego Matter: About The Importance of Autonomy For Realizing Your True Self

THE EGO MATTER
SCHOLARLY ARTICLES BY PETER FRITZ WALTER
THE LAW OF EVIDENCE
THE RESTRICTION OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE AND WELLNESS TECHNIQUES
CONSCIOUSNESS AND SHAMANISM
CREATIVE PRAYER
SOUL JAZZ
THE EGO MATTER

THE EGO MATTER
ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF
AUTONOMY FOR REALIZING YOUR
TRUE SELF
by Peter Fritz Walter

Published by Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC
113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA
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About Dr. Peter Fritz Walter

http://peterfritzwalter.com
Pierres Blog
https://medium.com/@pierrefwalter/publications/
About the Author
Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzer-

land and the United States, Dr. Peter Fritz Walter (Pierre) fo-
cused upon fine art, cookery, astrology, musical perform-
ance, social sciences and humanities.
He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a

high school award for creative writing and editorial work for
the school magazine.
After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M.

in European Integration atSaarlandUniversity, Germany, and
with a Doctor of Law title from University of Geneva, Switzer-
land, in 1987.
He then took courses in psychology at theUniversity of Ge-

nevaand interviewed a number of psychotherapists in Lau-
sanne and Geneva, Switzerland. His interest was intensified
through a hypnotherapy with an Ericksonian American hyp-
notherapist in Lausanne. This led him to the recovery and
healing of his inner child.
After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal

coach, Pierre retired as a full-time writer, philosopher, and
photographer.
Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and

writes English as his 4th language after German, Latin and
French. He also reads source literature for his research works
in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. In addition, Pierre
has notions of Thai, Khmer, Chinese and Japanese.
All of Pierres books are hand-crafted and self-published,

designed by the author. Pierre publishes via his Delaware
company, Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, and under the imprints
of IPUBLICA and SCM (Sirius-C Media).
Our inner world is reality, reality even more real than
the apparent world; to call fantasy or fairy tale what
merely seems illogical means that one does not un-
derstand nature.
MARC CHAGALL
The authors profits from this book are being donated to charity.
Contents
Introduction 11
Chapter One 17
Building a Manifest Identity 17
The Ego Matter 27
The Beauty of Difference 42
Chapter Two 47
Introduction 47
Leaving Paradise 54
The Affective Confusion 57
Fusion and Autonomy 60
Fusion and Love 65
Identity and Wholeness 71
About Inner Peace 74
Realizing Soul Power 78
The Power Quest 91
Inside-Out Power 96
The Power Taboo 100
Autonomy vs. Child Neglect 104
Chapter Three 113

THE EGO MATTER
Chapter Four 141

What is Soul Power? 141
Soul Reality and Autonomy 145
Freeing Your Minotaur 151
What is Soul Reality? 160
Soul Development 164
Defining Your Values 171
Soul Values v. Social Values 177
Patterns of Living 180
Walking Your Talk 185
Soul Values and Jazz Ballads 188
Soul Marginality 191
Chapter Five 197

Codependence and Emotional Abuse 197
What Means Oedipus Complex? 210
Is the Oedipus Complex Universal? 211
Criticism of the Theory 216
1/8 Restricted Validity 216
2/8 Cultural Conditioning toward Homosexuality 217
3/8 A Distorted Psychosexual Base Structure 217
4/8 A Mechanistic View of Sexuality 218
5/8 Nature Fosters Copulation, Not Masturbation 219
6/8 The Oedipal Family Brings Perversion 220
7/8 The Oedipal Theory is Pseudo-Science 221
8/8 Oedipal Reality means Slavery for Children 222
Chapter Six 225

Castration or Permissiveness? 225
Are Masturbating Children Better Citizens? 227
The Dogma of the Autoerotic Consumer Child 230
Oedipal Hero 233
8
CONTENTS
The Complete Oedipus Story 250

A Teaching Tale? 258
Narcissus and Oedipus 286
The Postmodern Mix 296
BIBLIOGRAPHY 321
9
Introduction
What is Autonomy?
Etymologically the term of autonomy results from

the Latin auto (own) and nomen (name). Autonomous
is thus one who has got his own name.It is equally
true that in ancient times the proverb nomen est
omen was expressing a general truth. It meant that
the name is the destiny or in ones name is contained
ones destiny.
Those of you who have an idea of numerology

know that this is fundamentally true, and not mere
belief.In addition, initiates and psychoanalysts tell us
that we bring our names from the plane of life-
between-lives when we incarnate on the earth plane.
See, for example, Michael Newton, Life Be-

tween Lives: Hypnotherapy for Spiritual Regres-
sion (2006).
THE EGO MATTER
We can thus maintain that autonomous is the per-

son who owns his or her destiny.
With autonomy we commonly associate freedom

of decision, freedom of speech, freedom of creative
living, freedom of profession and partner choice, and
freedom of religion.Yet autonomy is also a psychic
quality of freedom, more precisely inner freedom,
which comes about through the integration of the un-
conscious, the disentanglement of the psychic fusion
with the matrix and the acceptance of living in the
present.
Without autonomy, there is fusion, symbiosis and

dependence. While for certain organisms, such as the
human newborn, symbiosis for a certain time is a bio-
logical necessity, this symbiosis is time-bound and
should gradually give rise to autonomy. While natural
symbiosis is needed for the first eighteen months of
the newborn, it should gradually come to an end after
that period. Unfortunately, modern culture is more or
less completely dysfunctional regarding this primal
movement from fusion to autonomy that should take
place, dynamically, in the growth process of the hu-
man baby.
12
INTRODUCTION
What happens is that the necessary biological

symbiosis with the mother, eighteen months from
birth, is neglected for various reasons; many babies
suffer from a more or less stringent tactile deprivation
that will leave scars for their whole lives. In order to
compensate for the lack of care bestowed upon the
infant, as a guilt-reaction and for various other rea-
sons, the post-symbiosis condition is not better for
the child: instead of growing into autonomy most
children in our culture grow into codependence with
their parents and caretakers; instead of building a
gradually larger extent of autonomy, parents tend to
gradually entangle their children in a tight net of stiff-
ening dependencies.
A naturally raised child is typically more inde-

pendent and more autonomous than a child who is
rarely touched, or lacks affection and has become
neurotic. The frequently observed clinging behavior
of modern city children, their helpless, clumsy and ir-
responsible behavior, even as late as when approach-
ing puberty, their immaturity in handling sharp or
fragile objects such as knives or glasses show well the
blockage of their emotional flow, and the codepend-
ent entanglement with their parents.
13
THE EGO MATTER
There is a natural striving for autonomy built into

every growing life. A child of three years of age needs
more autonomy than a child of fifteen months of age.
For example, a toddler of eighteen months needs

more autonomy than a baby of five months. Many
parents ignore that babies, toddlers and pre-
schoolers, already before reaching the age of primary
school, need to develop autonomy.
Many adults believe that children grew through

magic shifts, like the one from babyhood to child-
hood, from childhood to youth and from youth to
adulthood. The first shift is believed to take place
around seven years of age, the next one around
twelve years of age and the final one around eighteen
years of age.
In truth, these shifts dont exist in real life as all

growth is gradual and smooth. This is why all educa-
tion should be gradual and smooth.
While it is a good thing to have certain initiation

rites or ceremonies that mark important steps in the
growth of children, these rites are what they are: mark
stones that border an otherwise seamless road.
14
INTRODUCTION
I arrive at a mark stone, I see the mark stone, I

touch the mark stone, I pass the mark stone, I re-
member the mark stone. My passing the mark stone is
gradual, and smooth in time, and the mark stone itself
is of lesser importance than my passing it.
What is important is that I constantly grow, that I

remain moving. We learn the basic movement into
autonomy during our first year of life, and not later on
during adolescence or when we allegedly turn into
that magic world of adulthood.
I do not belittle the important changes that take

place in the life of adolescents, and their sometimes
passionate focus upon getting more autonomy, nor
do I belittle the marking shift from adolescence into
final adulthood.
But often we observe that especially those adoles-

cents who have rather repressive and possessive par-
ents get onto the obnoxious track and really push it
through for every millimeter of increased autonomy.
There is a logic in every behavior and adolescents
who put high stress on autonomy have a reason to do
so. The reason is rooted in much earlier years, in the
years of babyhood.
15
THE EGO MATTER
There is no alternative to autonomy. To make

down or belittle childrens need for autonomy is to
open the door to emotional and power abuse large
scale. This form of child-abuse is not perpetrated by
the proverbial stranger, but by mothers, first of all
mothers.
16
Chapter One
Ego-Identity-Difference
Building a Manifest Identity

A manifest identity is more than sexual identity or
gender identity. When I use the term manifest iden-
tity, I actually imply something much larger, more en-
compassing, and that impacts upon people around
us. Manifest identity is the facilitator of a social life,
and of our relationships.
What happens when you enter a relationship with-

out having an identity? You will be the proverbial fool,
coming over as a lunatic or daydreamer. Lacking iden-
tity is a big problem nowadays, but in the regular case
its never a total lack of identity, for the latter constel-
lation is typically the condition of psychotics, and thus
here we would be talking about true mental de-
rangement.
THE EGO MATTER
But generally speaking, among young people to-

day, there is a greater lack of identity as this was the
case in the past, and still is the case within natural
tribal cultures.
Why is this so? I will answer the question bit by bit

in the following text, for its a complex matter.
My core message is that we need a certain amount

of autonomy for building an original and manifest
identity, which goes way beyond a mere sexual iden-
tity or self-identity. When I say identity I speak of iden-
tity that is built on our most personal and unique tal-
ents and capacities, and on our lifes mission, our soul
values.
Building autonomy also implies to get away with

false identities and to realize soul power. What do I
mean?
I have encountered quite a few young men and

women who seem to suffer from a problem to build
their identity on top of their sexual attraction. These
men or women tend to have a low level of self-
knowledge, which is the characteristic of the boomer
personality.
18
EGO-IDENTITY-DIFFERENCE
While generally being rather intelligent and sensi-

tive, they lack out on a personal identity. They try to
compensate for this lack by adopting a certain life-
style, a certain group philosophy, or a certain choice
of personal characteristics they have seen deployed
by others whom they believe are successful.
The root of the problem is that they suffer from a

vacuum inside, and this vacuum is a lack of self-
knowledge. Instead of trying to find out who they
really are, and thus journeying form inside to outside,
they rather do the contrary, and go to search for truth
at the periphery. Instead of clearing their soul values,
they adopt certain social values they find fashionable.
Instead of accepting themselves, they crave for

gaining acceptance and recognition from others, and
instead of finding out about their own values, they try
to adopt for themselves the values that are accepted
on a group or community level.
Many of these young men and women, often

without realizing it, do suffer from their lack of identity
while they may be well accepted and even popular in
the particular groupings in which they are a member.
19
THE EGO MATTER
They try to do the impossible, that is, to be ac-

cepted as a no-name, to be recognized for certain
masks they are wearing and that are pleasing to the
group. With one word, they live their lives as if acting
on stage!
When I act my life out like an actor, I do not live my

life, for I do as if living my life. I call this condition liv-
ing a second-hand life. The qualities, the attitude, the
values and the lifestyle I display are not my own, can-
not be my own because I do not know, deep down,
who I am.
And when I do not know who I am, how can I know

what attitude, what values, what lifestyle fits my inner
makeup? The fatal misdirection in my life then comes
from searching outside what can only be found inside.
When you go around for identity shopping, you

will surely be successful. You will end up buying into a
second-hand identity or a multiple choice of second-
hand identities. This society, with its strong mercantile
makeup is set to lead you astray and get you to play
your passive role of an obedient consumer, a thankful
no-name, a willing credit card holder and money-
spender.
20
One of the hangers these young people use for

their identity is some or the other peculiar sexual ori-
entation; they thus are using their particular sexual
orientation as an identity-hanger. They actually seem
to believe in the myth that our sexual conditioning
was something that molds us for life.
I tried to help some of these unlucky youngsters

but so far I was not successful to win their trust. I
found them to be very defensive, while I could show
them with quite some evidence that sexuality is mov-
21
THE EGO MATTER
ing, changing and relative, and that it follows our

emotional predilections.
The reigning view of sexuality as something drive-

like and automatic was mainly forged by Sigmund
Freud (1856-1939) who considered sexual attraction as
an unconscious, and by and large uncontrollable
automatism, justifying his view with the argument that
sexuality belongs to those vital functions that are
regulated by the brain stem, and not the neocortex.
I believe this is one of the scientific errors Freud

committed, and that unfortunately was blindly taken
over by the modern psychological establishment.
Our breathing also is regulated by the brain stem,

and the functioning of our hormone glands, but for
that reason its not true that we cant control, for ex-
ample by meditation, or by biofeedback, our breath-
ing rhythm or our hormone flow.
All spiritual traditions around the world show that

its possible to influence these vital functions. So why
should that not be possible regarding sexual condi-
tioning? What we are talking about here are not facts,
but beliefscultural myths!
22
What are the consequences of these collective be-

liefs in the minds of those who hold them for true?
These persons obviously take their sexual attrac-

tion not only for granted and eternally fixated, but
also as a hanger for their identity!
For reasons that we need to discuss further, these

persons, and they are many in postmodern global
consumer culture, inquire only superficially, or not at
all into who they really are as individuals. Instead, they
fetch a standard misnomer such as homosexual, les-
bian, pedophile or sadomaso (sm) for defining them-
selves as a person.
This process of self-labeling brings about many

undesirable results such as a scapegoat belonging
because such an attitude encourages projection.
But despite the awkward situation this creates in

the lives of these individuals, the need for a form of
belonging is so strong in the human being that in a
time where social contacts get more and more imper-
sonal, if not inhuman, many people are craving for
some sort of grouping they can sign up with. They say
Look, here I am. I am a green frog. What a green
23
THE EGO MATTER
frog is can be looked up on my blog, my web site, my

community, or the grouping where I belong to.
Instead of defining themselves as persons who has

feelings, they do all for society to assume that they
are one-dimensional, narrow-focused and obsessed
freaks who hide their feelings for coming over as
tough, strong and outgoing, and social. Instead of
maintaining a position of equity where they can de-
fine their own reality and value-system, they more or
less unconditionally subscribe to the standard mis-
nomer concepts defined by a materialistic and spiri-
tually ignorant society.
With one word, instead of being simple, honest

and vulnerable, they want to be heroes!
To brand your identity with standard labels forged

by mainstream establishment is really the death of
autonomy, and psychologically it means you simply
do not accept yourself! Instead, you let society decide
about it, either positively by embracing you, or nega-
tively by rejecting you.
For if you do not accept yourself, how can you ex-

pect others doing it for you? Thus, whatever others
24
think about your particular sexual attraction is only

important for you if you make it important for you.
And you make it important for you when you use
these labels and thus apply for your own life the
whole belief system in which these labels are imbed-
ded.
This means you put yourself in a psychological

prison, thus becoming a slave of public opinion!
Suffices to browse some forums on the Internet to

see what many young people worry and are talking
about day by day: public rumors, law enforcement
policies, personal or group tragedies, or what kind of
erotically loving behavior might be acceptable or not
be acceptable.
Instead of asking that question to their soul, they

ask other people, some of whom they hardly know;
instead of quietly and rationally pondering how to get
to live in cultures more akin to their personal desires,
needs and expectations, they go on criticizing global
consumer culture or become activists against what
they consider to be the establishment.
25
THE EGO MATTER
The questions they should ask, for example the

one who they are, as individuals, and what their intrin-
sic personal dream is, what their personal wishes are
and their vision for the future, go for the most part
unasked. While the whole problem truly is one of lack-
ing exposure, of lacking experience, of lacking oppor-
tunity with actually living their love!
To say it with Albert Camus, if you want to know

yourself, you should assert yourself! That means, re-
garding your love, you have to live it and then check
back the feedback you get from the universe, for only
then you can know if its okay or not to render your
dream as a lifestyle and go for it.
No book, no guru and no grouping can do that for

you. And no book can provide you a standard answer
for it. And if in a group each member is not able to
build personal identity that is strong enough to sur-
vive in a highly labeling society, it becomes evident
that a group composed of virgin individuals who use
the standard idiot labels for identifying themselves,
cannot as a group have a common tenor for propa-
gating their worldview, let alone assume some sort of
social power.
26
To begin building autonomy you must begin with

a No in many cases, and not with a Yes. This may be a
No to your parents when they perversely ask you to
stay living with them forever, or a No to society as a
whole when it attempts to interfere in your under-
standing of yourself.
You may take a retreat, stop watching television

for a certain time or go on a backpacking tour to In-
dia, whatever, but you have to begin defining your
own values, your own expectations for your life be-
cause you, and only you, are the author and the
owner of your life. When you say I am a homosexual
or I am a pedophile, you refuse to assume this re-
sponsibility for your life and you discharge it upon so-
ciety, the group. That is, then, why the meta-group
has so much power over you, to a point to crush you.
The Ego Matter

There are people who havent got a fully functional
ego and who therefore need to build their ego, build
their self. I know that this sounds in apparent contra-
diction to spiritual teachings, especially those from
27
THE EGO MATTER
India, but this appearance is based upon a psycho-

logical misconception.
All spiritual teachings start from a premise to deal

with people who got a strongly built ego, and even
people who have got a hypertrophied ego, an ego
that is predominant and that is in the way of feeling in
toward the other, in the way of building true compas-
sion.
While this is not a problem for me and those like

me, because we are abundantly compassionate,
namely to a point to give up on ourselves at the
slightest occasion and put forward the point of you
first. And in this respect we are surely a minority be-
cause most people worldwide live from a base para-
digm of me first! This is why all those spiritual teach-
ings that admonish to do away with ego, or with self,
are written and elaborated for them, not for us.
In my activity of prisoner care I have once worked

with a Lebanese Shiite terrorist who shot a Frenchman
while hijacking an airplane. He was caught and got a
lifelong sentence, a man of only twenty-two years.
28
And after some sessions that served for warming

up and mutual trustbuilding, he began to talk about
himself and his former life. I was kind of astonished
because he already then added that interesting adjec-
tive, former, in his conversations which showed me
that somehow he must have drawn a line to his previ-
ous terrorist activities.
The unusual thing about this man was that he

really had taken the Koran serious and after tedious
study over several months that was assisted by the
Imam, he did something very uncanny. He sent the
Imam out and asked for the Catholic priest to come.
And he told him that he had a few questions about
Christian religion.
As their dealings were completely confidential I do

not know what they were talking about, but fact is that
about six months later this young man was baptized a
Christian.
And before that happened, and while he and me

were talking about his crime, he said that he was tor-
mented by the fact that he had killed another human.
He told me his whole life story, how still as a young
boy he was taught to handle a gun and sent to war.
29
THE EGO MATTER
He was fourteen years old when that happened.

And as he was so clumsy with handling the gun, he
said, and because he really did not want to harm an-
other, he was rather quickly taken by Israeli soldiers
and put in a concentration camp where he was ruth-
lessly and cruelly tortured.
I mean the man suffered that when he was still a

child. And it was during that treatment that he had
sworn lifelong revenge to Israel and all the countries
and all its supporters, among them the United States
and France.
But, he added, now I see that I acted wrongly,

emotionally, without control, totally under the spell of
that experience that I was subjected to as a young
soldier, extrapolating it and generalizing it, and as a
result of that I killed a human being who had nothing
to do with that. And acting that way, I have also acted
contrary to the rules taught to us in our scriptures, the
Koran. And as the Imam did not want to admit that
and told me repeatedly that I was misunderstanding
the Koran and that in reality I had acted righteously
and for the good of the Islamic cause, I thought that
the Imam had a rather political, not a religious, if not a
30
fanatic view of the world, while I, as he added humbly,

tried to see things as they really are.
I was humbled. This young man filled me with

deep respect and aweand not only me. He, who
had been the national monster in that country for
quite some time, dumbfounded and surprised the
general public to an extent I have never seen in any
other crime story. And I am pretty sure that to this day,
twenty years after these events, this man is free and in
full control of his life.
This story is beautiful because it teaches so evi-

dently that the human being, whatever happened,
and whatever we have done, is profoundly harmed by
harming another, deeply punished and relegated to a
state of suffering by the mere effect of karma, and
without applying any kind of moralistic rule to regu-
late life and human conduct.
Karma simply means cause-and-effect. Its a spiri-

tual law that makes that we experience exactly what
we do to another, negatively and positively.
In having shot that man, and having done away

with all artificial justifications and political cover-ups of
31
THE EGO MATTER
a clearly intentional murder, the young Shiite prisoner

was simply entering in communion with his inner
spirit, with the universal mind in him, and that univer-
sal mind communicated to him the truththe truth
that he had inflicted great suffering upon himself and
others by having done what he did. And because he
was truly religious and did not just fake something to
get away with a lesser punishment, he inquired into
his conduct and found the causes for it, but without
taking these causes for justifying what he had done.
And that was the way the man really experienced

inner freedom, and in this sense, he really understood
the sense of Christianity in its original meaning: you
are cleansed and forgiven when you see, with all your
senses and your soul, that you have done wrong, and
you admit it to yourself and your inner god, and you
repent it and feel that you are free of it. Then you are
free of it!
Now, if we humans, contrary to what most relig-

ions tell us, are basically good and decent people,
then let us see what is right and wrong in that doc-
trine that says that man became perverted because of
his ego.
32
Let us first see what these religious teachings

mean by ego, or by self?
These teachings basically affirm that while man has

a soul and a spiritual destiny, as well as inner guidance
through what they call higher self, there is a controller
instance built into that originally functional setup, and
that controller instance, they called the ego, or the
self. And that controller instance, they say, is artificially
built, a remnant of memories of the past, a matter of
conditioning, and as such not real, but an illusion.
I know that this sounds confusing, so let me in-

quire more deeply how all this is set in each other.
While religious teachings sometimes say simple
things in a complicated way, thus confusing us more
than enlightening us, the Indian sage J. Krishnamurti
(1895-1986) has given a clear definition of the egoic
self. He said that the ego simply is the total content of
thought and as such, the past. And that logically so,
when you want to live in reality, which is the present,
you must become free of the past. The ego, then, is,
as a total condensed version of our past and condi-
tioning, an instance that is at odds with reality.
33
THE EGO MATTER
Let us check if this is true and what it possibly

means for us. If the ego simply is the past, why do we
need it, and why do most of us stick to it?
If the ego simply is synonymous with the memory

matrix, why cant we just forget the past, and begin
our life every day anew, to feel newborn every morn-
ing, and to die every evening as a healthy spiritual
hygiene?
In fact, Krishnamurti expressed it exactly in saying

that the sage dies every evening and is reborn every
day anew, so as to live in the eternal present. But let
34
me ask, is that really doable? Or is it just another fic-

tion, another trick, another spell, another magic of the
ego?
The adjustment that I propose you to do is quite

the opposite of the adjustments that the world of
egoists offers to you.
What I am telling you is to adjust yourself to your-

self, to adjust yourself to your own universe instead of
continuing to fit in the universes setup by others who
just joyously indulge in their square miles of ego,
thereby rendering little you, who happened to come
across, with their habitual superior smile to nothing-
ness and oblivion.
But we are not made for swimming in the soup of

our egos, we are not made for indulging in our thou-
sand and one achievements, for thats nothing ex-
traordinary after all, as we all have received extraordi-
nary giftsonly with the difference that some got the
chance that the whole world talks about them, and
others got the chance that the whole world persis-
tently ignores them. What is it that some people al-
ways seem to stand in the spotlight and others in the
shadow? The answer is simple. The first group pro-
35
THE EGO MATTER
mote themselves and I dare to add, do nothing else

in their lives but promoting themselves so that really
the world will notice them one day, sooner or later.
And the second group goes on admiring those

geniuses and successes, endlessly trying to figure
why they themselves are constantly overlooked and
relegated to the second order of humans.
The result of all this is immeasurable human misery

and frustration, which in turn causes rampant suicide,
depressions, and psychosomatic illness worldwide.
What is the deeper reason for this?
The deeper reason for this is that while society

judges so-called selfish ambitions as bad and de-
structive, it has done nothing to really fight egoism in
the form of unfettered indulgence in egocentric be-
havior. In the contrary, the world kisses the feet of
those who with a smile and a sorry put themselves
first, always, and everywhere, and for the detriment of
society as a whole! Because its doubtful if these peo-
ple, who are in leading positions all over the globe,
are really caring for the common good because they
are simply not used to think beyond the miles and
miles of ego that they have built around themselves
36
during childhoods and youths in which they were

adored, pampered, and privileged in all possible
ways.
I dont say that they intently want to hurt another,

forbid! They are generally decent and well-disposed
humans, and they care for another in just the same
way as all humans care! They are not conscious of
their ego-drive, while we, their opponents, so to say,
are too conscious of our egos, to a point to be self-
conscious!
You see that the English language sees it correctly

and fully corroborates, by common language, what I
am saying here. To be conscious of your self, of your
blown-up ego, is the best way to get that ego down
to reasonable limits, because when you are self-
conscious, you are careful, you are restrained, you are
anxious to be adjusted and adequate.
Why do you want to build your ego? Let us have a

look what the ego, this controller instance is com-
posed of that everybody today tends to make down
while at the same time indulging in it. We already said
it is thought, conditioning, the past. But is that all?
No. These are rather the lesser important elements.
37
THE EGO MATTER
The most important function of the ego is that it

ensures that we can cope with reality and survive in
that reality. Its its survival function.
What is the most striking in that function is the fact

that it helps us to adjust to the expectations of others
around us, the group, the community, the family, and
generally to what we call human togetherness.
More precisely, the ego is an instance that tries to

put up a balance between our inner urges and de-
sires, on one hand, and the necessity of social peace,
on the other. Its like an ambassador between your
universe and the universes of others. The egos main
function is to ensure that humans can be social, and
this is truly a natural function, a function that nature
has created for good reason.
And for this very reason the ego cant be a patho-

logical phenomenon, or a cultural disease as it is con-
sidered by most religious teachers.
I have done once a numerological study of the

sages that with most emphasis speak up against the
ego and admonish us in their eloquent philippics to
38
give up our ego-centered behavior so as to strive for

the common good.
The result of that study was that those sages had

the strongest egos that one can even think of. It was
then obvious to me that they had created their teach-
ings for themselves and those who are like them,
people who consist of universes of ego. There is only
one among them, the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo
(1872-1950) who was honest enough to admit this fact.
Sri Aurobindo repeatedly says in his writings that

his spiritual teaching was addressed not to psychotics
but to sane people, people who possess, in his words,
39
THE EGO MATTER
a strong, structured and functional ego, and not peo-

ple who have problems with their ego. And very wist-
fully he elaborated further that the ego could not be
overcome if the ego was weak, but only when the ego
was strong, because something could switch polarity
only if it had strongly built the opposite polarity.
Implicitly, and perhaps not very agreeably so,

Aurobindo said thus that people like myself belong to
the realm of psychotics, that we have insufficiently
built egos and that for this very reason we are going
to do long to attain spiritualitywell, this option, if we
take his words serious, is simply excluded for us I
guess Aurobindo used a trick to justify his own blown-
up ego and the egos of his venerable colleagues in
sainthood!
It must feel great to be considered a second Jesus

or postmodern Messiahs. And yet, Krishnamurti re-
jected this role while he was chosen for it. Krishna-
murti did not ask me to throw my ego out of the win-
dow as so many gurus before him. He even refused to
be a guru.
And he said that all was fine with ego, with sex,
with human mediocrity and with all the rest of the
40
human soup. And that the problem begins where an

oligarchy that labels itself arrogantly spiritual or relig-
ious, because they wear long coats instead of suits,
have several servants and admonish every day so and
so many people for immoral conduct and an unspiri-
tual life got power over usto a point to crush us.
And I say this because I truly believe that the black

coats have a thousand times more power over us than
the whole of the police state with its blown-up bull-
dog chest.
The black coats have the real power, while the

modern state after all fakes a power that it does not
posses. While today, admittedly, people from a rea-
sonably intelligent vintage dont run in churches any-
more, they continue to run to gurus, travel to India
and chastise themselves for this or that sin, such as
smoking, drinking beer or eating sugar, which after all
is simply human.
Today they dont run any longer to the black coats,

but instead to the white coats, the fat and wealthy
Babas who preach their doctrines of ego removal for
spiritual reasons, and with vital commercial after-
thoughts.
41
THE EGO MATTER
Let them be spiritual, I have nothing against it, and

I have nothing against them, but my ego, the bit that I
have got of it, they wont getto be sure!
The Beauty of Difference

To accept life means to accept yourself. It does
not mean that you have to blindly adopt the collec-
tively approved forms of living.As a matter of fact, the
more we identify with collective personality patterns,
the more we veil our original being. Thus, to accept
life means to affirm our difference!
It is our difference that singularizes us; in fact, it

renders us unique among our fellowmen.
When we are unique, recognizing and affirming

our natural difference, we live with grace and our life
will be fulfilled. Then we are authentic. However, as a
consequence of our alienating childhoods, many of us
are striving for some sort of lifelong fusion or pseudo-
symbiosis with others.
Of course, as a newborn, we ideally lived in natural

symbiosis with our mothers, and this symbiosis was
necessary as a prolonged gestation.
42
Fact is however that many today are still as adults

in need of symbiosis through identifying with parents,
friends, a group, an ideology, which then becomes
fusion, cofusion, secondary symbiosis, pseudo-
symbiosis.
Please note that I use these terms synonymously in

my work and in this article. Besides the term cofusion,
I also coined the term symbiotoholics, when I talk, for
example, about symbiotoholic parents. In fact, when
you unveil symbiotoholism you can see that it has
quite many traits in common with alcoholism. And in
fact, many alcoholics are also symbiotoholics, as the
addiction to substances and the addiction to people
share a similar etiology.
Much has been written about codependence and I

will therefore limit myself in this guide to the essential
points, as my special focus from the start of my re-
search was not partner codependence, but parent-
child codependence.
While some of my explanations may sound dry

and theoretical, they have a very practical impact
once you actually work on these problems and see
43
THE EGO MATTER
how difficult it is to dissolve your pseudo-symbiotic

bonds in order to build true autonomy.
Fusion is born from our longing for returning to

the nest, the matrix, the pedigree. The search for fu-
sion is deeply rooted in our need for emotional secu-
rity. Being scared of making the difference, we remain
shallow, lacking necessary touch with the depth of our
being; then we try to imitate others.
My point is that we long for perpetual fusion be-

cause we have been largely deprived of the essential
natural symbiosis we needed as infants with our
mothers. That babies suffer from this deprivation in
our culture, while for example in tribal cultures the
problem is unknown, has been elucidated in recent
years by psychological, sociological and anthropo-
logical research. There is now abundant evidence that
violence in our culture is primarily the result of our in-
fants being deprived of emotional attention and tac-
tile pleasure, and our youth being deprived of auton-
omy.
As a result, our natural psychosexual growth proc-

esses are impaired. The consequence is a society of
narcissistic giant babies who are hopelessly trying to
44
be good boys or good girls for their parents, sib-

lings, mates, neighbors or society as a whole.
Our fragmented emotional, sexual and bioener-

getic setup brings along sexual perversions, violence,
cruelty, self-alienation and a high rate of emotional
instability as well as a noteworthy incidence of autism
or schizophrenia that both are wrongly qualified as
mental illnesses.
I do not talk here about pathological cases but

about a problem that, at an underlying level, we are
all dealing with in our culture, and this because it is a
social or cultural phenomenon in all dominator cul-
tures. In thirty years of research about this complex
subject, I found that building autonomy is strongly
enhanced through acquiring self-knowledge, clarity
about our individual needs and a firm sense of per-
sonal identity.
Self-knowledge comes from listening to self, rec-

ognizing our needs and communicating them to the
outside world. When we disrespect our needs, we will
also tend to disrespect the needs of others. Hence,
respect begins with self-respect. We will have our
45
THE EGO MATTER
autonomous place in the community once we are in-

dividuals in the sense of undivided beings.
We become individuals through autonomy. In

other words autonomy works counter to fragmenta-
tion and brings about personal integration and inner
peace.
Before this can happen, we have to face our sym-

biotic needs and render them conscious. This, in turn,
means to face our most basic fear, the fear of aban-
donment, of solitude, of being truly alone. If we wish
to attain our original unity, we cannot avoid facing this
fear; a phase of more or less extended solitude seems
often necessary in this development.
Three phases characterize our growing into

autonomy and true interdependence with others, fu-
sion, individuation, and integration. Let us now have a
look at this process and what we can learn from it.
46
Chapter Two
Fusion and Individuation
Introduction
A symbol for the process of individuation is the
cell division.Out of one complete pattern a new
complete pattern splits off. This new complete pat-
tern is not a part of the former pattern, but a new
whole organism.
This is so because, as we know today, nature is

programmed in holograms. In each cell the informa-
tion of the whole organism is coded. Every particle in
every sub-unit contains the genetic code of the entire
unit.
The holistic coding of life-sustaining patterns

made it possible that very complex structures could
arise, primarily because even multiple cell divisions do
not cause loss of genetic information.
THE EGO MATTER
This picture from genetics should help us grasp

the process of individuation that is part of our grow-
ing mature. All springs from fusion and goes toward
separation, and at the same time from simplicity to-
ward complexity. In the genesis we hear that God
separated the waters; the popular ancient Chinese
myths tell us that heaven and earth, yang and yin,
grew apart so that all life could come to existence.
Biologically, cutting the umbilical cord puts an end

to the babys fusion with the mother. However, the
human baby, as distinct from the other mammals,
cannot yet survive. Fusion has to be prolonged by
means of a symbiotic relationship with the mother, or
a mother surrogate, if the infant is to develop their full
potential of psychomotor skills.
When this primary fusion, that should extent over

the first eighteen months of the infant, is inadequate,
be it because the mother was physically not present,
be it because she was not up to her task as a care-
taker, we face that the person, once grown up, tends
to long for pseudo-symbiotic relationships with oth-
ers. What this means is that we unconsciously try to
heal the lacking primary fusion by repeated pseudo-
48
FUSION AND INDIVIDUATION
symbiotic relationships. However, since those persons

that are invested with the role of ersatz mothers and
fathers can never give the missed primary fusion, dis-
appointment and depression will invariably ensue in
those relations. In fact, most of the modern psychiat-
ric literature speaks here of a narcissistic fixation or
narcissism.
Yet most people and even many psychologists

have a wrong idea about what narcissism is. Narcis-
sism is a pathological lack of self-love, an impossibility
for the subject to love herself, a giant inner wound
that parents or caretakers have inflicted on the child
by non-attentiveness, lacking interest in the child as a
person or outright child neglect.
Its a vicious circle in the sense that codependence

is a family curse even more than an individual addic-
tion. One of the reasons for parents being inattentive
and preoccupied with self-serving interests is the on-
going codependence they, in turn, live with their own
parents and the resulting incapacity to truly take care
of a new life that wants to grow into proprietary
autonomy and power.
49
THE EGO MATTER
All creation is destined to be autonomous and car-

ries in itself the will to achieve autonomy as a primary
life goal. The desire for autonomy can already be
made out in the behavior of the infant. In the case
where parents respect that will, the child grows into
true individuation because autonomy opens naturally
the way to self-knowledge.
If however parents and the environment disrespect

the childs striving for autonomy, the child has only
two possibilities to survive: killing off their emotions or
distorting the perception of their emotions. The first
defense behavior leads, in the extreme case, to emo-
tional numbness, compulsion neurosis and cruelty, the
second leads, in the extreme case, to schizophrenia.
Furthermore, the first kind of reaction can later

additionally develop into the cancer etiology, the
second into uncommon or outright perverse forms of
sexuality.
Authoritarian upbringing frequently demands from

children affective prostitution, a submissive attitude
targeting at the parents goodwill. This is not sexual
prostitution, but one that plays on more subtle levels,
affective, emotionaland where power is involved. In
50
families where ugly power games between parents

and children are daily reality, affective prostitution is
always present with the children.
Children who can manage to live within a sphere

of autonomy will later easily choose their profession
or partnership, for they know what they want. This
sounds simplistic, but it is really as simple as that.
Those who know what they want have much greater
chances to get it.
Butwe only know what we want if we know who

we are! Children who are raised by fearful and over-
protective parents lack self-knowledge, and thus do
not know what they want in life.This is so because
they had little opportunity to incarnate their wishes
and to find out about their limits.
Fearful parents tend to project their own wishes

and desires on their children: only if the children fol-
low their ancestors path of life, those parents feel se-
cure. Instead of giving their children the opportunity
to find out about themselves, anxious parents want to
make sure their children know, respect and model
their, the parents ways of life, the parents wishes and
51
THE EGO MATTER
desires, the parents hardships and the parents char-

acter.
Sensitive children who are born to narcissistic par-

ents are not able to develop their uniqueness, hence
what Alice Miller (1923-2010) called The Drama of the
Gifted Child, title of one of her best books.
Pseudo-symbiotic relationships are, to repeat it, a

prime obstacle for growing into autonomy. Because of
the dynamic interaction of the psychic energies in
play, codependence cannot be ended by mere physi-
cal separation, for example the sons or the daughters
moving out of the parents house.
As long as the self is not individuated, symbiotic

attachment persists on the psychic level.
52
Ending a pseudo-symbiotic relation then auto-

matically results in the search for a new symbiosis,
which replaces the former oneand so on.
The reason for our high divorce rate is that we try

to stage our missed babyhood symbiosis in marriage
and project the parent of the opposite sex onto our
marriage partnerwhich effectively sabotages every
marriage sooner or later.
It is obvious that our desire for eternal symbiosis

with our children is still more devastating than eternal
symbiosis with a partner. Children, with their natural
striving for autonomy perceive symbiotoholic parents
as persecutory and overbearing. That is why children
tend to develop anxiety as a consequence of their
feeling inadequate in front of their parents or the
symbiotoholic parent.
Symbiotoholics is the true reason of incest. Even

when no sexual interaction between parent and child
is involved, children of symbiotoholic parents have
difficulties to project their libido outside of the magic
circle of their family. By the same token, if a child has
enough autonomy, occasional sex between parents
and children will not necessarily lead to a sexual pa-
53
THE EGO MATTER
thology. It will rather be a form of natural while per-

haps unconventional body touch, a highly tactile
bond between generations.
On the other hand, even if sex is not part of the

game, emotional incest in the form of an ongoing
rigid demand for symbiotic partnership from the side
of a parent, or both parents, will be perceived by the
child as a real bother, and will in the long run handi-
cap their ability to stand on their own feet and be
recognized as what they are.
Leaving Paradise
Metaphorically, we can compare symbiosis with
paradise. Adam and Eve had to leave paradise. Why?
They had to leave paradise for developing their

individuality, their autonomy.
Paradises, strangely so, are no different from other

things in that they, too, have a shadow: positively, they
give us the almost complete illusion of security and
satisfy all possible desires. But negatively, they are
true prisons.The tree of knowledge was forbidden in
paradise to Adam and Eveand we must add, even
in paradise! Or, more clearly put, it was forbidden to
54
them because they lived in paradise. To live with their

full potential, Adam and Eve had to follow the wis-
dom of the serpent. Eating the apple, they knew each
other as man and woman: they got to know about
their sexual identity.
It was also their discovery of sexuality since the Bi-

ble uses the old expression to know another for sex-
ual intercourse. Through the fact of knowing the
other, recognizing the sexual identity of the partner,
we get information about our own sexual identity. This
is an important truth: love leads to self-knowledge
and is a part of our emotional growth process.
Without loving others, and I dare to specify, mak-

ing love with others, we will hardly get to know our-
selves. Through love we grow, we mature.
Leaving paradise is exactly this, leaving the child-

hood of dependency implying a self-centered, narcis-
sistic way of being and behaving, and opening up to
true relationship where every partner is a whole
autonomous being. Love means relating and taking
responsibility for ones love choices. All sentient be-
ings have to leave the nest of paradise. The fetus, de-
cided he to stay in the womb to avoid the trauma of
55
THE EGO MATTER
birth, would die right there! Adam and Eve, leaving

paradise, survived! Their leaving paradise was a birth,
a birth to life on earth, life in a body of flesh, created
by desire, an incarnated life.
The family tree and the phylogenetic tree both

symbolize the nest, the matrix. They are the symbols
for the hereditary roots of the person. But they are
also prisons and graves for the individual.
This truth is pointed out in many religious scrip-

tures and Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) expresses it
in the formula that we have to go beyond the confu-
sion that we are the body, that we should set aside
our unconscious or conscious identification with the
body.
56
Once we have found that we are spiritual beings,

sparkles of light in a universe of light or planets or
stars, as the natives say, we understand that the family
is only the nest and as such a kind of springboard
which should catapult us into life, into our own life.
The Affective Confusion

Taking dependency and people addiction for love
parallels the confusion between need and desire. Co-
fusion and confusion are not for nothing sounding so
similar; its obvious that both have to do with fusion.
Fusion means to melt something with something else,
to put two things in one pot.
Modern civilization with its inherent loss of initia-

tion rites, has created confusion and, with it,
cofusion.We are confused about our being fused.
Children are held immature for longer and longer

periods in a kind of extended childhood, as some-
what irresponsible and slavishly dependent beings
without autonomy and self-reliance. Most therapies
today are concerned with the basic problem that
masses of people never grow out of their original
symbiosis or that, rather in the contrary, they are de-
57
THE EGO MATTER
prived of it during babyhood and try to search for a

compensation in adulthood, clinging desperately to
their partners, parents or children.
In our high-tech cultures we can observe how eas-

ily people confuse pseudo-symbiosis with love, taking
the ersatz or compensation for the real.
Sometimes attempts of sensitive and intelligent

children for personal autonomy are punished and
harshly met with love-withdrawal or with threat.Some
parents react hysterically in the face of their childrens
natural demand of freedom because they themselves
never discovered their own essential life space and
live entangled in a network of dependencies, insecure
and immature.
Their childrens natural thirst for freedom and

autonomy is misunderstood as a lack of love for their
parents or family, and as such being perceived as a
threat. Truly, their childrens leaving the nest can be
deeply traumatic for parents who have these symbio-
toholic tendencies.
This is a real trauma and can produce all forms of

psychic and physical illness; it has for example been
58
discovered in alternative cancer therapy as one possi-

ble etiology of the cancer process, which is a disease
that starts years and years before the actual somatiza-
tion is visible to the physician in the form of a tumor
or else an alteration in the composition of the blood.
However, in popular culture rampant people ad-

diction is not perceived as pathological; it is even be-
littled in the psychological literature and specialized
media; else the problem exists outside the family, in
the partnership as well, while my own research spe-
cialized in parent-child codependence.
A long-lasting marriage or partnership may sud-

denly break off because one partner expresses a need
for autonomy that the other depreciates and misun-
derstands as a malevolent sabotaging of love and the
intimate bond. A fear to be abandoned, relict of some
or the other traumatic separation from the mother or
a parent during childhood, may become reactivated
in the partner who feels left alone and betrayed
whereas the other partner simply wanted to establish
a basis for creative space within the partnership.
This process, when it is lived consciously and un-

derstood as mourning, proves very positive for the
59
THE EGO MATTER
evolution of the concerned person, also with regard

to their future love capacity and creativity. After such
mourning, life will be lived fuller, with more energy,
more empathy, more completeness and more enthu-
siasm, on a higher level of happiness and integration.
However, if such an awareness building is re-

pressed, perhaps because the fears involved are too
disturbing or therapeutic help or counseling is not
available, the person will end one fusion in order to
search for another, as a compensation of the former,
which in turn will be but another sprocket in the chain
of compensations for the first lacking primary symbio-
sis.
Any such relationship cannot last because it is

based on an illusion.
Fusion and Autonomy

The end of fusion is the beginning of autonomy. In
fusion the self is hindered in its expression. It is not
autonomous since it defines itself with relation to
namely the symbiotic partner.
This is like a stone thrown in a pond which creates

waves only in the pond but not in the one who throws
60
the stone. To consider this mechanism energetically,

we have an outflow or loss of bioenergy here in one of
the fusion partners. And with the other partner we
have a gain of energy. We can see it as a closed en-
ergy circle in which both fusion partners are bound.
The realized, unfusioned self, however, vibrates in

itself and feeds itself; it is self-sufficient and therefore
available for all beings, like the sun, like a flower
whose beauty is real not only for the eye of the lover,
but for everybody who passes by; or like a fountain
that produces fresh water endlessly, without waiting
for someone coming by to drink it.
Here we can say that the persons reservoir of bio-

energy is fully at the disposition of the self. Connec-
tion to our self means connectedness to all beings, to
the whole universe.
The paradox is that the ego, once detached from

symbiotic interference is open to receive full guidance
by the self and can thus subtly bond with a far greater
range of beings.
Therefore, we can conclude that autonomy is the

condition for true interdependence with others. More
61
THE EGO MATTER
we are detached from partial attachment, more we

are attached to what is not partial.
By the way, since times immemorial this truth was

known by religions. Especially in India religious sects
have developed and practiced a doctrine of detach-
ment as an essential part of a religious lifestyle.
However, when detachment is sought after and

cultivated, it will rather turn into its contrary and be-
come attachment. Only in developing passive aware-
ness of our manifold attachments can we bring about
detachment!
Affective confusion means that I am melting with

you; as long as we are melted, how can we exchange
affection? How can there be exchange at all if we are
glued to one another? How can we give and receive
in a condition where there is not even a minimum of
distance, a minimum of autonomy?
It is difficult to imagine a person giving something

to another when both persons are tied to each other.
We stretch out our arm to greet, to give, to receive;
naturally, this gesture requires a certain distance be-
tween the personsthe distance of an arm length.
62
The role of some people we meet in life is to help

us detaching from alienating fusion, so that we can
build true autonomy. These people who catalyze in us
our true desire or mission are healers, therapists or
wistful lay persons who help us get free through their
love and devotion, their unselfish understanding and
friendship.
Often these people went themselves through the

problems involved in fusion and have therefore
sharpened their awareness. They then got to know
that true love is something different from pseudo-
symbiotic attachment to others and that love gives
freedom, not attachment.
Jealousy is a problem of fusion. If we believe we

can possess another person or that love contained
such kind of possession instinct, we confuse love with
fusion. Love can be seen as the highest form of re-
spect in front of the difference of the other. It is there-
fore incompatible with jealousy.
Yet, life is seldom pure and often love is to be

found in impure forms, melted with jealousy or even
hate, pseudosymbiotic desires, sexual desires of vari-
ous kinds, sexual desires melted with pseudosymbi-
63
THE EGO MATTER
otic desires, and so on. This is how we generally per-

ceive love around us.
There rarely are the extreme forms of pure love or

pure fusion.
Conceptually speaking, there are two develop-

mental models for transforming codependence into
autonomy and partnership love.
A linear model would see the process as gradual

change of a set of parameters into a set of different
parameters, the direction being from fusion to auton-
omy, and not reversed;
A nonlinear model would rather assume cyclic

fluctuations in relationships where the degree of fu-
sion, on one hand, and the degree of autonomy of
the partners, on the other, alternates continuously
within the relationship.
The scientific investigation of codependence

could follow either of these models which would re-
sult in quite different research results and conclusions.
The future will decide what kind of model is going to
prevail. My work being a maverick approach only
64
shows the options, and perhaps a rudimentary cata-

logue of possible solutions.
Every possible relationship, seen in its continuity,

could be evaluated using one of these two develop-
mental models. The first model considers codepend-
ence as a developmental transitory step towards love,
while the second model assumes codependence and
love being in a dialectic exchange with each other.
I will not develop these models further in this book

and come to a pragmatic question: which is the influ-
ence of love upon codependence? Is love enhancing
cofusion or is it fusion-solving?
Fusion and Love

In every love relation the partners, consciously or
not, move toward more self-knowledge, more auton-
omy, and less cofusion. To repeat it, cofusion is a lack
of autonomy because of lacking self-knowledge.
A child that is not mirrored by his parents does not

develop a sense of the I-Am force in him or her. De-
pending for survival on their parents love, the child
will substitute their own self-image with the image of
one of the parents.
65
THE EGO MATTER
Primary symbiosis is a psychosomatic process. It is

obligatory for the newborns first eighteen months of
life if the child is to develop healthily.
Yet a mother who has not resolved the cofusion

with her own parents will unconsciously project her
narcissistic dependency onto the relationship with her
children.
This is how cofusion is perpetuated over genera-

tions. Such mothers evaluate every little sign of
autonomy in their children as some form of love de-
nial and react with fear, bewilderment and and some-
times even aggression to the childs desire to move
from the family toward the world. Thus unconsciously
these mothers attempt to move the child back into
the womb.
There is abundant proof for these facts to be

found in psychotherapeutic practice, especially the
writings of Winnicott, Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, as
well as Franoise Dolto and Ronald David Laingco-
founder of the antipsychiatry movementregarding
schizophrenic children.
66
It is in this respect significant how the mother

feedbacks movements of the child which are directed
away from her. The baby carefully observes and regis-
ters the mothers feedback. The mother gives signals
that the baby can interpret as Yes, I find it good that
you are yourself and that you show it to me, or No, I
do not appreciate your being different from me and
feel insecure when you show it to me, or even No, I
would like you to remain a part of myself, as it was the
case before you were born.
It is obvious that in the two latter alternatives

these nonverbal messages of the mother do not sup-
port the child to gain autonomy, but rather inhibit the
childs healthy growing up. Perception problems that
in extreme circumstances can lead to schizophrenia
are then the result. The schizophrenic delusions signal
and demonstrate the inner conflict. In psychosis the
whole ego is overwhelmed by energies that have be-
come disintegrated.
In a less pathological sense many people in our

culture find it difficult to identify their own energy as
distinct from the energy of others. Yet we can learn to
67
THE EGO MATTER
feel our energy by becoming attentive to our inner

life.
Love begins with ourselves! Once we begin to re-

spect our more-than-physical needs, we learn to dive
into our own energy field. It is a question of passive
observation, through meditation or introspection, to
become sensitive and conscious for perceiving our
own intrinsic energy pattern.
From our dreams we know how this energy feels

like. In dreams we notably meet no physical beings,
but their energy bodies. Sensing their energy pat-
terns, we identify others.
This can be tested easily when you have forgotten

a dream and want to remember it after waking up. If
you have a vague remembrance of the dream figures
energy pattern and relax and focus on it, you once of
a sudden remember the whole of the dream. It seems
that dream memories are associated with energy pat-
terns involved in our dreams.
The fact that we perceive others as patterns of

light or energy shows that originally creation gave us
a sense for such perception, and that we lost it in our
68
busy world and lifestyle. With little exercise however

you can relearn this special extrasensorial perception
and it can help you identify where you are with others.
In observing attentively your feelings and thought
processes and their impact on energy patterns, you
apply the principles of universal love in your life and
achieve gradually more autonomy and identity.This
passive observation must however encompass the
whole process of life.
Spirituality is exactly this attentive observation.

Observation and attention without judgment are the
highest forms of spirituality!
This attentive observation must include your sub-

conscious thought processes because thought is a
process that happens on several layers of conscious-
ness. You can observe your subconscious thought
processes also by carefully taking note of your
dreams. Finally, you can do it by consulting special
devices such as the Tarot or I Ching oracle book, or
else by using astrology, geomancy or other divinatory
devices.
Then your awareness of ominous, parallel, syn-

chronistic events raises and you begin to grasp the
69
THE EGO MATTER
concept of synchronicity that Carl Jung (1875-1961)

developed years ago.
Once you can interpret the little omens you per-

ceive in your daily life, the little hints sent by destiny
and that we use to call meaningful coincidences, you
begin to gain more insight in the holistic pattern that
is woven into life as a whole.
Such intensity of consciousness requires a high

energy level. It is conscious use of your lan vital, your
vital energies, that leads to the dissolution of your
symbiotoholic urges, which restores your original
uniqueness, your singularity and your wholeness.
70
You may call this energy love or give it other

names. The names are not the thing as the finger that
points to the moon is not the moon.
Identity and Wholeness

There are different ways to gain wholeness. Some
people choose therapy, others prefer artwork, pho-
tography, musical performance, science or try to culti-
vate themselves through religious devotion. Still oth-
ers use modern techniques of self-development.
And quantum physics, interestingly, has in recent

years proven to be just another way of understanding
the metalogic of this universe, and it amply demon-
strates what I am saying.
It does not matter which way you go, which path

you choose. Ancient cultures and todays still surviving
tribal cultures know about the deeper meaning of life.
The initiation rites most of those cultures practice are
powerful means to cut the fusional bonds with our
parents or the family so as to root us into a larger col-
lective structure such as the clan or the tribe.
Since in our high-tech nations initiation rites have

been abandoned, and we have only rather insignifi-
71
THE EGO MATTER
cant substitutions in the form of diplomas, drivers li-

censes, academic degrees and so forth, we have to
find new ways to initiation. Psychoanalysis is one of
them, for example, but it often disregards the spiritual
dimension.
Psychoanalysis describes the growth of the childs

autonomy in terms of their psychosexual develop-
ment. The sexual development of the child, according
to mainstream psychology, proceeds in certain
phases, such as the oral, anal, genital, latency phase,
and finally adolescence.
Yet I wonder if analysis alone can reveal the mira-

cle of sexual identity? It appears to me that identity is
the fruit of integration, and not of analysis. Integration
results in a higher level of consciousness and it cannot
be pursued by using merely rational thought proc-
esses, such as aligning certain behavior patterns on
the timeline of a persons life.
I mean that we have to integrate our emotions in

our thought processes, and this without confusing
thought and emotions, and without defense reactions
that hinder this integration. For example, machismo
and obsessive maleness or femaleness are such forms
72
of defense. It is the foolish reject of our anima (in

males) or animus (in females), of all what is yin in yang
and yang in yin, female in male, male in female, cold
in hot or hot in cold. It is the refusal of our Moon en-
ergy, the archetype of motherhood.
This fear of the matrix or the archetypal expression

of it has produced the atrocities of witchhunts in the
past and the present and is found in mythology in the
negative female archetypes of Lilith or Kali. This fear is
the fear of life and of death. It is a neurotic fear of life.
Directly related to the fear of life is the fear of sexual-
ity as we encounter it throughout the course of patri-
archal history.
Every therapy catalyzes a process of inner alchemy

so as to transform retrograde yin into a positive yang
charge. There are many different forms or techniques
of therapy, but all have in common that they try to
help guiding us back to oneness and unity.
There is in fact no contradiction between the psy-

choanalytic theory and the spiritual truths as far as
spiritual teachings recognize the possible harmony
between our spiritual origins and our instinctual urges
as a fact of life.
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THE EGO MATTER
Most religions provide projection systems for our

inner processes which work with symbolic representa-
tions supporting us in the alchemy of inner and outer
transformation. This means that religions are integra-
tive systems designed to lead us to unity!
Also the so-called esoteric practices like astrology,

numerology, the Tarot or the I Ching can help us inte-
grate our unconscious thought processes and feelings
to guide us on the way to a higher level of conscious-
ness that we may call holistic or integrative.
The integration of all what is hidden or occult in

our psyche, and awareness of karmic or conditioning
factors in our various life cycles leads to something
like an integrated mindbody consciousness that goes
far beyond mere intellectual or physical knowledge.
You could call this state of enlightenment fusion

with your own self.
About Inner Peace

Inner peace is impossible without inner freedom.
Inner freedom in its highest form is the realization of
an autonomous self. Inner bondage, by contrast, in its
most damaging form, is the unconditional surrender
74
to a spiritual, ideological or sectarian system that de-

mands absolute obedience.
Such a system may be represented by an ideology,

religion, sect or fanatic guru. It can also be a feature
of your own unconscious self. As long as you have a
problem with that on the outside level, this is a signal
that you have some problem with it inside as well.
Inner freedom begins with finding out what you

really want, what, in the depth of your heart, you de-
sire to realize, and what is your lifes mission.
Self-knowledge is the door to inner freedom in

that it gives you the tools that lead you out of your
labyrinth of pseudosymbiosis.
Without knowing who you are you let yourself over

to being guided by others. Such entanglement in the
energies outside of the self leads, especially in the
spiritual realm, to a more or less complete alienation
from your own potential of light, riches and abun-
dance.
Self-knowledge opens the door to the treasures of

your own light and your own truth which is available
to all of us as spiritual beings. But this treasure is in
75
THE EGO MATTER
your heart and, with many of us, unfortunately too

well shielded and therefore buried there.
Self-knowledge, by contrast, is a continuous proc-

ess of self-exploration. It namely gradually unveils all
the secrets of your being and your individuality that
will remain untouched by collective religious
undertakings.
Self-knowledge leads to comprehending the rela-

tivity of truth and the incapacity of man to grasp an
absolute concept of truth. This limitation of the hu-
man existence is inherent in every truth. Therefore, on
the human level all that is objective becomes subjec-
tive, because subjectively related!
Inner peace is the fruit not only of the insight in

your understanding of truth but also consists of the
capacity to trust this insight. On the other hand, inner
peace is only possible when you consciously refuse to
convert others into your truth; its only possible if you
leave others the freedom to undertake their own ex-
ploration, their own journey into the pathless land,
as J. Krishnamurti called it, and engage in their own
treasure hunt. Missionarism definitely is not spiritual,
but related to the hunger for power.
76
The question that then arises and that has been

asked throughout the existence of humanity is if indi-
vidual truth can in some cases act contrary to the so-
cial framework.
This is perhaps the key question that every collec-

tive or state government confronts us with. It seems
that, throughout human history, most governments
were suspicious of the realization of truth through
self-knowledge or individual self-cultivation.
That is the true reason for humanitys indulging in

mass indoctrination, mass education, mass religion,
mass manipulationand mass obsession.Here we
see the primary reason why freedom and peace for
the individual has regularly been considered a threat
to totalitarian forms of government. And yet, it is ex-
actly this freedom to search for truth that is our hu-
man birthright as a spiritual being!
Inner peace can reign in you only from the mo-

ment you have replaced as it were the outer fusion by
the inner fusion which is fusion with your own self,
which makes that you are an individual (individus, lat.,
undivided).
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THE EGO MATTER
The problem of fusion is of paramount importance

not only in every form of spirituality, but also in a truly
responsible form of government.
Most religions try in some form to convey guide-

lines about how to achieve inner peace. The idea is
similar in all religious teachings. Islam and Christianity
consider inner peace as a direct consequence of be-
lief. It is doubtful, however, if inner peace will result
from mere belief, without a deeper understanding of
the psychological intricacies of life and living?
It seems that religions, instead of helping man un-

derstand his hidden nature, work with ideals, positive
pictures or models. However, ideals or models are al-
ways collective and disregard the individual, and indi-
vidual and unique wisdom of each and every human
soul.
Realizing Soul Power

A world with more freedom and tolerance is pos-
sible to the extent that we accept to be true individu-
als, undivided beings that are oriented toward the
whole of life; and to repeat it, this requires us to have
gained inner freedom and the will to preserve it.
78
World peace depends on the fact that the group

of people who have reached this higher level of con-
sciousness steadily grows and helps not only shape a
new consciousness, but also helps building the outer
world in a new and different way. True liberation can-
not be reached by political, social or otherwise sensa-
tional breakdown of outer forms and structures.
All revolutions only lead to more chaos, more

bloodshed and suffering, more dominance, ignorance
and power abuse.
The only real change is a gradual, peaceful and

constant inner transformation of consciousness. We
are called upon to collaborate in this universal trans-
formation, which takes the form of individual trans-
formation going global. J. Krishnamurti has shown
with exemplary clarity the ultimate possibility and the
implications of such a psychological revolution!
However, spiritual evolution is not possible without

insight into our pseudosymbiotic bonds, our psycho-
logical striving back into the matrix. It must be ac-
companied by the gradual dissolution of our psycho-
logical umbilical cord that holds us entangled with the
matrix.
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THE EGO MATTER
To recapitulate, I start from the premise that power

is not an outside phenomenon, but originates in our
soul, as an inner vital drive projected outside in the
world. However, what we realize and identify as power
in the real world is not what it seems to be because
we often forget that power is first of all a projection of
the soul. What we see instead, are secondary powers.
Are they real powers? Perhaps on a merely worldly

level, but not on a cosmic, universal scale.
Soul power means to think and act in accordance

with cosmic laws and the state of consensus that the
universal spirit accords to our projects. This power, if
identified in the outside world, is not perceived as
power but as love. It is primary power our soul power.
Developing power in ourselves and others there-

fore is a process that acts from inside out. Power that
is built on the outside level without such inner con-
sensus is not power, but mere self-inflation. As such, it
is unstable and subject to decay.
Secondary powers typically are rigid, dominating

and unstable. Primary power, however, is flexible, re-
spectful and stable.
80
While most people foster a distorted understand-

ing of power and take it somehow for granted that
power is abusive, those who are truly and positively
successful know that there is no way to high achieve-
ment without having healed and integrated ones
natural quest for power.
Understanding and integrating soul power taken

as an inner asset is essential for triggering growth and
the development of our intrinsic soul qualities and
outstanding human abilities.
For most of us power is associated with worldly

riches, personal and social standing, some special
privilege, command over life and subordinates, and
all the rest of it.
There are gurus who reject worldly power while at

the same time exerting a much greater power over
their followers than the worldly approach would allow.
Such opinions are not only not true, they are not
only not spiritual, but they show how power is per-
ceived by most people, namely as a strange, alienat-
ing and dominating force that we either reject or ea-
gerly want to acquire. That is exactly why most people
81
THE EGO MATTER
live in an almost paranoid contradiction; while they

reject power, they are not aware that by so doing,
they reject their own soul power as well. Thus, they
throw out the baby with the bathwater.
And while they want to acquire outside power by

all means, they are not aware of the power they pos-
sess inside and which, striving for mere outside
power, they smash by non-attention. Unfortunately,
the result of this situation is that both the power-
rejecters and the power-seekers are blind to the ne-
cessity and the value of power!
The distorted image of their own power potential

makes them split the human race into the oppressed
or power-rejecters, on one hand, and the oppressors
or the power-seekers, on the other. They tend to ar-
gue that in life there is only one essential choice to be
made: to choose if you want to situate yourself
among the oppressed, or losers, rather than switching
to the side of the oppressors, or winners. Many peo-
ple unconsciously harbor this kind of inner program,
that is written in the language of either-or options. If I
do not want to be poor, I have to become rich. If I do
82
not want to be among the losers, I have to go for be-

coming a winner. And so on.
The blind spot of these philosophies is that they

exclude the tertium, the third alternative. In general,
when analyzing people with either-or philosophies,
you will see that they are torn up by fears, that they
are rather defensive and that their self-esteem is quite
low. If somebody else, a friend for example, tries to
put the finger on the wound and tells them about
their bias, they react either with aggression or call the
friend naive, or else jovially point out that unfortu-
nately the world is essentially bad or people are es-
sentially bad and that one had to make sure to find a
place in the sun, cost it what it costs.
Now, if you see this clearly, you can approach the

problem from a psychological point of view. This al-
lows you to gain insight in the human nature by dis-
carding out quick judgments about what we think or
believe human beings are like. For truly, that kind of
general judgments are conditioned by our past expe-
riences and hurts. They are highly subjective.
True knowledge about the human nature is not

abstract and hardly to be gathered other than by pas-
83
THE EGO MATTER
sive self-observation. When you observe the phe-

nomenon of power or what you think it is, both at the
outside and inside level, you see that there is some-
thing you could identify as soul power, and something
you could call worldly power. Worldly power always is
a projection, while soul power is the true power.
What does this mean in detail? Lets go slowly into

this, because it is a rather complex matter. The dan-
ger in this kind of analysis is to jump to conclusions
that are conditioned by the past, and by our habitual
and cherished convictions and ideas. To approach the
problem with a fresh mind means that we try to
change our point of departure; it is like changing the
observer, to use the terminology of quantum physics.
This implies that we look inside of ourselves to see

what power really is or how we usually perceive it. If I
do this now, supposing that you do it with me, what
do I see? I see that with all that I want, with all my de-
sire for fulfillment, for accomplishment, for recogni-
tion, for outside riches, I want essentially three things:
Live my life without fear;
Live in peace with the world;
84
Realize love and happiness in my relationships.
When I see now that this is what I really want, what

then? Would I not inquire why I experience fear at all?
And would I not be astonished why I want to live in
peace? Peacewhat for? I cant buy anything for that.
And why should I realize love and happiness in my re-
lationships? What value has that?
Once I have the position that gives me power,

once I have the partner that really fulfills me, once I
have the car I ever dreamt of and the house that gives
me enough space and freedom to feel at home
would I not feel satisfied and happy? Why should I
question this strange concept of power at all?
Of course, you can refuse looking at it. You are

free to do so. But once in a while, these questions
tend to come up anyway, if you wish or not, and a felt
sense of what you really desire comes up as well. And
then you are puzzled, because you wonder why you
should desire such commonplace childish things as
peace or happiness in a world that you think has no
place for that.
85
THE EGO MATTER
When you look again, you may stop a moment

and see that the world hardly can have a place for
that, if you individually do not give it a place. The
world is at peace. The only creation that is not is the
human being. Agreed?
What you get to see in our media world is disem-

powering for the most part. I even go as far as saying
that you, in your role as a passive media and informa-
tion consumer, are per se disempowered! And as long
as you are disempowered, your perception of power
is distorted.
If you look with this distorted concept inside of

you, you see yourself through thick glasses, because
your perception is conditioned.
Most of us have been conditioned from early

childhood in the absurd belief that soul power is
negative, dangerous, abusive, conflicting, inhuman,
diabolic, perverting, unnatural and so forth. We were
told that there was a Great Savior who came like a
sheep, held his cheek to his enemies to be beaten on
it and then agreed to be slaughtered like an animal,
and nailed to a cross. When we, with the impetuous
innocence of adolescents, replied that this man must
86
have been mad or had an unresolved masochistic

fixation, we were told that we were blasphemous and
sent out of the religion class.
This man, we were told, was Gee-Oh-Dee.
So what? What were we going to be, then? We did

not want to be slaughtered or hung on a cross and we
had no intention to hold the cheek to our enemi-
esor teachers, to be beaten on it. So we had no
choice than believing as children that power must be
something diabolic!
87
THE EGO MATTER
This teaching is the core of the Christian dogma,

and its perverse, to be true! To educate young boys
in the belief that one had to be submissive and only
think pure thoughts is perverse, for it stiffens and suf-
focates the lan vital, it is abusive education, whatever
it is officially called, whatever holy name it is given,
whatever religious or ideological dogma it is associ-
ated with!
And, then, the teachers, the parents, the grown-

ups, did they not have power? They were not behav-
ing like sheep, but rather like fools, contradicted each
other almost daily, were utterly inconsistent in their
actions, were brutal and abusive, forced us most of
the time to do things we did not want to do; they
were in no way respecting us in the first place.
So, honestly, how could we ever believe them

what they had written in their holy black book? How
could we trust these adults who were not adult at all,
those teachers who did not walk their talk?
There was a bug in their compassion!
And what about our power? It had become a cari-

cature, as the freedom to secretly masturbate on the
88
toilet, or get some amusement with another little boy-

friend and sharing the secret, having sex in dirty
places. Yes it was that. If I look at it now, I find it either
ugly, grotesque, or I smile about it, but then invariably
conclude Yes, that was our power, the only we had,
the only that was left for us within the utterly disem-
powering education they inflicted upon us.
They did not care about how we could develop

our soul power in life, how we could make it in a world
where power is a social game, especially among men,
how we could handle this incredible potential that we
all have got, constructively and for the common good,
in this world. They did not care. They made war in-
stead, war with themselves, inside of themselves, and
in the outside world.
And all their authorities were unendingly busy

amassing money and justifying the mess they create
and always created, in a course of ongoing madness,
since five thousand yearsare you aware of it?
Genocide, pollution, destruction, environment

disasters, children raped by soldiers and killed by na-
palm bombs, and so ontheir daily news!
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THE EGO MATTER
This was the way our identity, and our sense of

personal power was conditioned, was distorted,
veiled, messed up, and polluted.
While of course, everyone perceived that in a dif-

ferent way, there are common perceptions and many
parallels in the life stories of one and the same gen-
eration. For many thousands of my generation, which
is what is commonly called the hippie generation, sex
was considered a necessary outlet for developing a
sense of personal freedom, a deep feeling of togeth-
erness with others and somehow a gateway toward
real love whatever that is.
We wondered what that was, real love, when we

were youngsters. It was a quite nebulous concept of a
stable fulfilled relation with a girl, and it had to be
with a girl and not with another boy, a relationship in
which there was love and tenderness, not just sex, re-
spect rather than cunning calculation, and a feeling of
timelessness.
Yet I have never seen, nor one of my comrades at

the time, that this kind of love relation really took
place anywhere. It was more something like the Holy
Grail, an ideal, a mental concept. And in our lives, it
90
did not realize, in our marriages, it did not happen,

and after we divorced, it did not happen either. Today
I know why it could not happen. It was an illusion, an
ideal, a nice dream.
For me personally, it happened after I took a dis-

tance to women and turned toward children, at the
time when the disaster of my marriage was no more a
secret between my wife and me. Then, it really did
happen, which signaled me clearly enough that I am
loving children, and furthermore, that real love exists,
and is not just an illusion. But real love is not conven-
tional, and it is, as Krishnamurti said before me, never
respectable.
The Power Quest

Others realized other obsessions, for their power
quest is if a different kind. Observing this when I was
young, I really split the human race off into two dis-
tinct groups, the ones who long for soul power, asso-
ciated with the counterculture and the hippie genera-
tion; and the ones who long for social or material
power, associated with the establishment and the
older generation.
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THE EGO MATTER
In my young adolescent thinking soul power was

associated with a secure sense of identity, with love,
and also sexual love, with sharing, giving and receiv-
ing, including the possibility to know others and one-
self through the physical embrace. I thought from
early in life that sex possesses a spiritual and poetic
quality.
Social or material power was associated with ac-

quiring or, to say it in Erich Fromms terms, with hav-
ing rather than being.
I identified soul power being on the level of To Be,

while social or material powers were on the level of To
Have. I concluded that materialistic modern global
society with its denial to raise us in accordance with
our soul continuum was essentially perverting us with
its sordid hypocrisy that is the shadow of its sunny,
joyful capitalism.
At age fourteen I was reading Plato, Hegel, Hei-

degger and Fromm, beginning to develop a literary
passion for Russian writers as well as Thomas Mann
and Hermann Hesse, yet based my conclusions
largely on observation and on trial-and-error. I was
well admiring Hesses writings but never took them for
92
grantedbecause I realized some major perceptional

errors related to his very obvious narcissistic hangup.
And my awakening took off when, at age eight-

een, I was starting to read the whole of Freud, Jung
and Reich.
Today I see more generally the importance of rec-

ognizing the quest for soul power in every human be-
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THE EGO MATTER
ing, and to focus on diagnosing the manifold power

distortions most of us are torn up in, and which inhibit
the realization of our true and original potential.
This is the main reason I gave up a promising ca-

reer as an international lawyer and government func-
tionary after finalizing my law doctorate and devel-
oped a deep commitment for developing the human
potential, and the development of genuine creativity
that assists us in realizing our soul power and destiny.
Later, in my work with problem children I found

that their original quest for soul power is typically and
symptomatically negated by our societal environment
so that their power becomes twisted into nonsensical
or dangerous behavior, or else depression, which
equates fear of action.
Years later, to be true, working with adults in

groups, I saw that the problems adults have are es-
sentially the same problem children are confronted
with: it is the late or long overdue quest for realizing
their soul power for ultimately receiving recognition,
esteem and material fruits in everyday life.
94
The power quest is not something bad or non-

spiritual. In the contrary, power is an intrinsic part of
goodness.
Without power there cannot be goodness!
In human history, all disasters that man has pro-

duced are the result of disempowering feelings, of
powerlessness, not of soul power.
Feelings of power create goodness; feelings of

disempowerment create emotional turmoil, chaos,
violence and cruelty.
To run for spiritual progress without having re-

gained your lost power only results in an endless and
frustrating nirvana search and eventually ends in con-
fusion.
Spirituality begins with soul power, the power to

be yourself, integrated, to be whole, to be I-AM. To
Be. Many people do not see that and do not want to
do the tiring work associated with the quest for soul
power.
Therefore they create dependency with those in

power, be it worldly power or the power of those who
95
THE EGO MATTER
dominate others with their arrogant spirituality that is

not spiritual at all. They think it was a sign of humility
to bow in front of those who exert power over them.
They confuse humility with a kind of cultured and

polite masochism that never learnt to contradict.
They cant hold conflicting conversations or ex-

changes in a self-secured and constructive manner.
They surrender or they revolt, and this because
authoritarian thinking has distorted and dulled their
mind and their willpower, not because they were more
subjected to it than others, but because they allowed
it to happen. If we refuse, deep down in our eternal
self, to not being touched by any form of dominance,
we wont be touched, and our soul power will remain
intact!
Inside-Out Power
While my previous explanations were actually
more concerned with what is not true power, we may
now want to look at what soul power really is about.
I think it is not too far-fetched to talk about inside

power and outside power. Under outside power I un-
derstand all we habitually and somehow indiscrimi-
96
nately associate with power, that is, the social stand-

ing, the big car, the large bank account, the yearly
promotion, titles and honors. These are powers, too;
however, some of the outside powers are the fruit of
our inside power, and some not.
Now, observing this in your daily life, you can turn

the question around and ask yourself Well, do I have
power because I have all that, or was it because I have
power that I attracted all that? Do I gain inner power
through outside power, or is my inner power the
originator of all my outside powers?
I think the second alternative is true. Let us find

out why. We all know examples of people who gained
fortunes almost overnight, and even those who do
this on a regular basis. We also know examples of
people who lost fortunes overnight by negligence or
because they had not learnt the wisdom that money is
an energy that stagnates if it is not in flow within the
human community.
If I win much from others, but do not give anything

back to others, not forcibly to the same people who
made me earn it, but stillmy money flow will stag-
nate, and my soul development as well.
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THE EGO MATTER
You also know people who never seem to get into

the positive spiral, and you know others who became
phenomenal successes.
The principles of success are spiritual principles.

They follow universal laws such as the law of vision,
the law of praise, the law of magnetic attraction or the
law of faith.
Most people live second hand lives: they imitate

others, they try to copy others that they idealize, and
they want to become someone they are not.
What I mean is that copying and becoming are not

the ways of Being, but obviously ways of Becoming.
Success comes from being, not from becoming. I

want to convey a deep experience of my life, an expe-
rience that was not gained in one day, but in more
than forty years and that was hurting at times, that
was deeply uncomfortable because I resisted.
It is the experience of self-acceptance. It is the ca-

pacity to see your reality as it is, without moving,
without distracting yourself, without running away
from it. Once you see who you really are, you can also
see that you are a creature subject to continuous
98
change. Then, and only then, you can open yourself

to the new reality that you may want to create for
yourself, and you can project yourself into this reality
by means of visions, prayers, power work and actions.
But if you refuse to acknowledge who you are, at

the very first moment of your new journey, you run the
risk to lose yourself on the way. Or you may get on the
track of complying with an ideal to live up to, instead
of simply living your life.
Most people try to realize their secondary power

by achieving social standing, recognition, financial se-
curity or social safety, academic honors, prestige or
lots of money as a standalone exercise. They may be
very busy doing that, very tough, very professional. I
do not say that they have no success, but I dare to say
that they cannot have ultimate, sustainable and re-
sounding success if they do not make the first step
first and realize their soul power!
This step begins with accepting yourself uncondi-

tionally, putting aside all mental or moral concepts, all
rules of education and upbringing, all what you have
absorbed from outside your center.
99
THE EGO MATTER
The Power Taboo

To develop this thought further, let me keep on
inquiring with you why most of us are blocked to real-
ize soul power.
I go as far as saying that in Western culture soul

power is thwarted as early as in childhood. The child,
in our culture, is denied autonomy in origo by the so-
cietal denial of erotic love among children. Thus, the
child in our culture truly is deprived of one important
emanation of the power of love, the power namely to
relate to others on a basis of shared pleasure. What
do I mean?
Every human being is primarily driven by pleasure,

pleasure being a major principle of life and of survival.
Newest research shows that this principle exists not
only for humans and animals, but equally for plants
and even molecules. Certain electrons seem to spin in
a certain direction and then another because the pri-
mal consciousness contained in them is able to sense
pleasure and displeasure.
In all the Holy Scriptures of the world it is said that

the Creator received pleasure or joy from His Crea-
100
tion. Traditional education from ancient times was

more or less ignorant about this fact or else tried to
exploit and dominate humans by consciously thwart-
ing the primary pleasure in the growing human life.
And indeed, only thwarted and disempowered indi-
viduals can be subjected to abusive terror regimes
where they murder and despise their own species!
In our culture soul power became a taboo,

whereas collective secondary power is praised and
worshipped. It is this patriarchal power taboo that still
haunts, disabling people from being whole and pow-
erful and contribute to humanity from within their
pleasure continuum!
What all therapies and coaching methods basically

try to achieve is to help the client develop a new and
strong pleasure of living! Without pleasure in living,
there cant be success, there cant be personal cha-
risma, there cant be energy, and there cant be
goodness. As long as the power taboo hangs like a
Damocles sword over our heads, we are stuck in what
some call karma, others call sin, and still others call
complexes.
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THE EGO MATTER
The greatest sin, logically then, is to deny soul

power, for soul power is the essence of our abilities,
the energized potential of our drives, our talents, our
genius. It is our true inner virtue. Yet in the lives of
most of us, this innate or primary power has been
thwarted during our childhood by an education that is
both ignorant and violent. Or this power has been suf-
focated by symbiotoholic parents who are stuck in
dependency or possessiveness, and who therefore
resist the repeated attempts of their children to gain
autonomy. Perversions, violence and abuse of all
kinds are the outflow of this single unresolved power
complex in parents and educators.
How then, in a society where the concept of power

itself is more or less outlandish, can the youth em-
brace their soul power without being trapped in the
awkward association of power with abuse?
We can experience the positive values of power

only if we are free to use our power, including our
sexual powers. If we cant, our mental and physical
health will suffer from it; we will build a basically
schizoid attitude of either overpowering others or be-
ing overpowered by others, and thus will contribute
102
to uphold the eternal perpetrator-victim syndrome.

This is exactly what happens in our present civilized
societies. It is the result of the power-taboo for the
youth that is imposed by an ignorant, hypocrite and
manipulative majority that only cares for material gain
and that rejects the soul nature of all living.
When we face the problem honestly, doing re-

search on the roots of abuse, or gaining answers
through meditation or introspection, we will see that
the power taboo is a kind of magic spell. It is only a
problem for the one who believes in the magic, not
the one who defies and resists collective hypnosis.
To gain this freedom, it is needed to see that soci-

ety, imposing the power taboo on our youth, acts
abusively towards our offspring! Parents who thwart
their childrens power are abusive parents.
To see it means to be free from it. The power of

manipulation always ends with information! If you go
to a saint, a healer, minister or psychotherapist, you
will be asked why you came? When you say you came
because your power has been withdrawn from you or
that you do not own yourself, you will invariably get to
hear that this is an illusion.
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THE EGO MATTER
You will be told that you own yourself always and

that you own your power, and that it is delusive to
think somebody, be it your parent or another person,
or society, could ever take it away from you.
In other words, thwarted power is thwarted only as

long as you believe it is thwarted. Once you destroy
this belief, you naturally feel that you own your power
and that there was not one moment you did not own
it.
Autonomy vs. Child Neglect

Children who are not allowed to have free choice
relations, emotionally manipulated as they are from
their earliest days, will largely be unable to build a
manifest identity.
The main element, namely, that is the key for

building such an identity is autonomy. Without auton-
omy and a certain level of self-reliance, no manifest
identity can be built.
I have talked about child sexuality and how its

prohibition prevents the child from building a sexual
identity. But I would be reductionist if Id be saying in
my books that non-coercive, pleasurable and early sex
104
was the only requirement to be met for growing into

real maturity, and a real identity.
More is required, and Id say that prior to positive

sensual experiences, what is even more decisive for
children to grow into nonviolent humans is free
speech. Free speech is the starting point of culture,
which is why I am saying culture is language.
This is most often overlooked by modernist

authors and psychologists who stress the importance
of child sexuality. I am really the last one to contradict
them here, but its simply not all there is in life, and
prior to wanting sex, we want to be respected as be-
ings of culture, beings who come with an inborn thirst
to communicate!
Communication is so basic and so encompassing

that I can safely say that sex is just one form of it, a
nonverbal and randomly verbal form of communicat-
ing love and erotic attraction by means of two bodies
fondling, stroking, caressing, and interpenetrating in
various ways.
When parents let their children have sexual rela-

tions, as it is often the case in worker families, but at
105
THE EGO MATTER
the same time harshly prohibit children from talking

true language, forcing them to shut up or to lie, or to
keep their sexual experiences secret, then those chil-
dren do not have a real benefit.
I have seen this myself as a child in a low-class

worker family where the father was drunk most of the
time and shouted at his children worse than a farmer
would shout at his dog. The children had sex often in
the staircase with neighbor children and I saw that as
a little boy and felt very jealous for it, because I myself
grew up very protected, but one day the father in-
vited me to come upstairs, and I saw how he treated
his children. I was so shocked that I never went back
there.
These children were forced to live two different

lives, one life when they were alone, with other chil-
dren, where they were rude, aggressive and sexual,
and another life, when they were around their father,
where they were meek, silent, pale and obedient, hid-
ing their true identity.
And the father was not permissive regarding their

sex play, he was just neglecting his children, which is
quite a difference; he simply did not care and proba-
106
bly didnt allow them to do it in their flat, but only in

secret, in the staircase.
If such sexual experiences are positive for children,

I doubt it, which is why I am saying, parental permis-
siveness must be embedded in a democratic respect-
ful setting, where children are treated as full humans,
not obedient little toddlers and assault receivers.
Generally put, educational permissiveness is by no

means to be confounded with child neglect; the first
is responsive and responsible caretaking, the latter is
abuse.
Responsible parents, if they allow their children to

be sexual, will not push them out in the staircase for
having a quiet moment and let them have their little
affairs in a totally uncontrolled and perhaps chaotic
manner where about everything could possibly hap-
pen. They will care in one or the other subtle way for
their children having such experiences in an environ-
ment that, if its not spied out and controlled, pro-
vides as yet some basic safety.
While most sexologists and psychologists today

agree that a sexual identity is a prerequisite for build-
107
THE EGO MATTER
ing a manifest self-identity, I would like to stress that

autonomy is required for building both identities.
Autonomy is vital for all beings in growth, and

many young people, while having the freedom to
have their laptops, to have their cinema, and their
birthday parties and outings, even have their girl-
friends or boyfriends, still suffer from lacking auton-
omy when they are brought up with a built-in worry
pattern.
They worry about being recognized as what they

are, they worry about telling their name, and try to
hide behind fashionable brand names, they worry to
show their true face, they worry about being rejected
in groups and groupings, which is why they constantly
search to be accepted.
The worry trigger is the codependent relation with

their parents who educate them with a basically fear-
ful attitude that doesnt really embrace life but that
loves to talk about us and they.
When children are raised by parents who suffer

from a basic mistrust in life and others, and their gov-
108
ernment, they tend to constantly talk about they and

us, more actually about they.
These parents, themselves meek and lacking civil-

ian braveness, educate their children in a constant
fear something could happen to them, which of
course duplicates their own fear and clones it by rais-
ing another generation of worriers, Instead of raising
warriors, they raise worriers, who gather socially with
others for the sole reason to share their worries, and
by talking constantly about them; as a result, they ac-
tually attract much misfortune in life.
Such a fearful attitude toward life and other hu-

mans, while its generally not seen as a pattern that
has to do with autonomy, is in fact the result of over-
protectiveness in the form of Oh my dear child, if
anything happened to you, I would not survive it.
Love is free in the sense that it is not a texture

weaved with worries; true parental love doesnt fear
the child to be endangered and harmed at any mo-
ment of the day, and with any possible activity the
child likes to engage in. To repeat it here once again,
the typical clinging behavior of modern city children,
their helpless, infantile, irresponsible behavior, still
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THE EGO MATTER
when approaching puberty, their immaturity in han-

dling sharp or fragile objects such as knives or glasses
show well their (unconscious) incestuous fixation, their
neurotic blockage and codependent entanglement
with their parents, and the early psychosexual dam-
age a life-denying and pleasure-hostile education in-
flicted upon them.
All this, to repeat it once more, shares one single

etiology, the lack of autonomy for children in a culture
that loves emotional entanglement because it serves
consumerism, as all consumerism is ultimately the
commercial exploitation of lacking identity.
The rhetoric about fighting egotism as a cultural

obsession, and the sentimentality around all topics of
educating children to be selfless shows that ego is
about the greatest sinner in a culture that worships
selflessness as an ideal, exactly because it is structur-
ally selfish and based upon pure egoism.
One nation on earth consumes 75% of the globes

energy resources, and within that nation, there are
about six thousand people, or a few hundred families,
who basically have the whole of the world economy in
their hands.
110
These are facts that can easily be verified, and

they show with all too much evidence that egoism is a
substantial element in modern consumer industry.
Hence, the need to hide all this behind nice words
and phrases, because it sounds almost obscene.
In truth, a healthy ego is not a hypertrophied one,

not one that is boosted up into power hunger, but an
ego that is based on autonomy. Such an ego is
needed simply for building a robust self-identity, and
if its not built, many potential pathologies are the re-
sult. That is why I am saying that the ego matter is
perhaps the greatest taboo in our ego-culture, be-
cause its the matter that needs to be hidden as a
matter of decency, as modern society is almost por-
nographically egoistic, and this is a fact of modern
life.
Adequate parents and caretakers will not fight

the ego of the children in their care, but they will gen-
tly prevent egoistic pursuits in children when those
pursuits harm other people.
The difficult thing here is that with verbal admon-

ishments, almost nothing can be achieved. The only
way to help children build well-structured egos and
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THE EGO MATTER
functional egos is that parents and educators care for

having themselves such kind of egos, and if they dont
have them, engage a therapy or whatever to do this
work that is fundamental for sane education.
112
Chapter Three
Genius, Soul, and Narcissism
In my adolescence, devouring books about human

genius, Leonardo, Goethe, Einstein, Liszt and Pa-
ganini, I wondered what in essence human genius is.
I came to realize that genius is not just a boost of

our rational mind, our intellect, but that it somehow
has to do with a strong feeling of identity, and with
the flow and streamings of the bioenergy in the or-
ganism, and with what we vaguely know is soul.
As I was demonstrating in my book Creative Gen-

ius (2014), which contains a summary of my genius re-
search, human genius is really so broad and encom-
passing that it cant be grasped with our intellect
alone, and it surely represents also some form of con-
nectedness with all-that-is. I do not wish to use relig-
ious terms here, so I remain with this general expres-
THE EGO MATTER
sion, connectedness, which is something that cannot

be deliberately triggered. And yet you can find this in
the lives of all real geniuses, be it in science, in art, in
music or in business, fashion, banking or even warfare.
Religions of course also speak about our connec-

tion with the divine, but they use not only a specific
vocabulary for expressing this truth, but also base
their teachings on both ritual and faith, asking their
followers to believe in some or the other deity, savior
or saint.
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GENIUS, SOUL, AND NARCISSISM
This is not what I am talking about in this book. I

am talking about the individual religio, as derived
from the Latin relinquere, linking back. It is simply a
practice of silent contemplation, introspection or
meditation, that tends to remove the inner chatter by
going beyond the process of thought which links us
not to soul, but to the past.
This being said, when I talk about soul, I actually

denote the human energy field, the luminous energy
field that contains our true intelligence in that it con-
tains both the phylogenetic and ontogenetic memory
surface. I denote also creativity, imaginal thinking, as-
sociative thinking capacities, the skill of brainstorm-
ing, of coming up with daring and new solutions to
old problems.
In addition, I use the term soul for ambience, for

aliveness in daily matters, for radiance also, for the
vibrant charm of lively children and emotionally sane
adults.
Then, it thus becomes a descriptor for the power

of life incarnated in a human being, the vitality of a
person, the grace of an individual, the imaginative
powers of a poet or a painter, the charisma of a pian-
115
THE EGO MATTER
ist, or the eloquence of an actor. For example, I re-

member musical performances and opera evenings in
my early years, when, as an adolescent, I was en-
chanted beyond measure not just by the music per-
formed, but the whole of the ambience in our opera
house, the vibrant radiations of the public, the
womens perfumes that were fleeting-floating around
in the air like an ethereal smoke, the timbre of the
voices all around me, the swishing sound of the cur-
tain when it eventually opened, the cool air that burst
into the hall from the stage, the tuning of the orches-
tra with its resonant a, double a and triple a, and then,
like a revelation, the first measures of the orchestra
playing the overture.
All this, for me, is soul.
I also remember solo concerti I attended as a

young man, piano recitals or cello or guitar perform-
ances, and every time I had that strong remembrance
of a long-forgotten world of soul where all is vibration,
where all is radiance, light, fragrance, and vibrant life.
Also, when I think of specific pianists I adored in

my younger years, and I remember their charismatic
play, I would talk about soul. I associate here espe-
116
cially Marguerite Long whose play I first heard, as a

young boy, on 78 shellac records from my grandfather,
then also the young Arthur Rubinstein, Elly Ney, Wil-
helm Kempff, and Horowitz. I also associate here the
unique cello of Pablo Casals, and his interpretation of
Bachs cello suites, the young Michel Broff playing
Messiaen, the young Argerich playing Ravel, and the
baritone Hermann Prey singing Schubert Lieder, ac-
companied by Leonard Hokanson at the piano.
And even later, when I was already married, listen-

ing to Svjatoslav Richter playing Szymanowski in Paris,
Salle Gaveau, in 1982, was an intrinsic experience of
soul, so much the more as it was for me the first time I
listened to the music of this not very popular Polish
composer.
All these early experiences with musical perform-

ance connected me with soul, which was something
regularly absent in my life at that time, and were spot-
lights into the realm of creative experience that was
going to be my future, from about my mid-forties.
I think it is foolish to even try to define soul in our

very residual verbal language. I can convey those ex-
periences and I could convey the worlds of literature
117
THE EGO MATTER
where I discovered soul, as an adolescent, in the

works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Go-
ethe, Mann, Hesse, and especially Pearl S. Buck.
It is obvious that soul goes beyond the realm of

organized religion; it seems to me that soul is prior to
religion, in that it is an immediate outflow of the vi-
brant human, the creative human, the good human.
This is one of the reasons why soul can be found in

art, literature, music and musical performance rather
than in corporate life, because in the art world, you
can find authentic individuals, which means, persons
who do what they do for the very passion of it, not for
secondary, material or power reasons.
So we can say that in a way, soul has to do with

buoyancy, with a vibrant emotional life, with charisma,
with creativity, with human genius, with authenticity,
and with positive moral values, rather than opportun-
ism. And that is exactly why soul is real power. Its the
power of the complete human, which seems so out-
landish to us modern city dwellers today only because
we have lost so much of it in our modern life, and be-
cause we have become fragmented humans. That is
118
why we need those artists, starlets and prodigies to

remind us of our true nature, which is our soul nature.
I do not want to spread simplistic formulas, but for

me the notion of soul has somehow to do with being
different, with differentiation.
Joseph Murphy, a widely recognized spiritual

counselor and author of bestselling books on what he
called scientific prayer, writes in his book Think Your-
self Rich (2001):
You are unique. There is no one in all the world

like you, because you are you. Your thumbprint,
the rhythm of your heart, the pattern of your
retina, the secretions of your glands, the infor-
mation encoded in every cell of your body are
different from those of any other person in the
entire history of our species. Infinite differentia-
tion is the law of life. (Id., 3)
Thomas Moore lived more than a decade of his life

in a monastery, then left it and wrote Care of the Soul
(1994), a book about developing soulfulness in every-
day life. However, this book does not follow todays
tradition of easy selfhelp. It goes the other way, and
thereby touches you in a different manner than your
119
THE EGO MATTER
usual selfhelp book. Let us see what Thomas Moore

writes on the subject of soul:
Renaissance philosophers often said that it is

the soul that makes us human. We can turn that
idea round and note that it is when we are most
human that we have greatest access to soul.
() By trying to avoid human mistakes and fail-
ures, we move beyond the reach of soul. (Id., 4)
If the healing nature of love were properly under-

stood in our culture, we would not as a society suffer
from rampant depression and schizophrenia that
metaphorically show that most people have a vacuum
in their hearts, there namely where they should have
love. Moore writes:
The ultimate cure, as many ancient and modern

psychologies of depth have asserted, comes
from love and not from logic. () Often care of
the soul means not taking sides when there is a
conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary to
stretch the heart wide enough to embrace con-
tradiction and paradox. (Id., 5)
However when a moralistic approach is taken,

what happens is that an inner conflict is created which
results in people being trapped by alienating either-
or choices because the third option is not given (ter-
tium non datur); this is the somehow fatal conse-
120
quence of Aristotelian logic that has subsisted, like a

virus, until today. It truly is a virus for it has trans-
formed naturally integrated humans into schizoid
angel-demons who act from a personal base para-
digm of compulsion, and not from a sane and inte-
grated mindbody. Moore shows with striking clarity
the pitfalls of moralism:
Moralism is one of the most effective shields

against the soul, protecting us from its intricacy.
() I would go even further. As we get to know
the soul and fearlessly consider its oddities and
the many different ways it shows itself among
individuals, we may develop a taste for the per-
verse. We may come to appreciate its quirks
and deviances. Indeed, we may eventually
come to realize that individuality is born in the
eccentricities and unexpected shadow tenden-
cies of the soul, more so than in normality and
conformity. (Id., 6)
Moralism not only bypasses the soul, but it also

bypasses life. It is actually a denial to accept our hu-
manity, by suppressing self-observation and invalidat-
ing inner movements, desires, conflicts and emotions;
it puts up one or the other dogma that says a person
ought to be green, yellow or red, or they are anath-
ema.
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THE EGO MATTER
Moralistic people usually have learnt to kill per-

versity in themselves, thereby killing life; it is through
this inner fight, this violence they do to themselves
that they create the soil for violence in the world.
This is exactly how the hero culture works, the pa-

triarchal rut that is based on repression and denial: it
teaches people to kill, by teaching them to kill off
their emotions when they are still in the cradle. Moore
says that from the perspective of the soul, perversity is
meaningful, and has to be embraced instead of being
discarded out and wiped under the carpet:
Care of the soul is interested in the not-so-

normal, the way that soul makes itself felt most
clearly in the unusual expressions of a life, even
and maybe especially in the problematic ones.
() Sometimes deviation from the usual is a
special revelation of truth. In alchemy this was
referred to as the opus contra naturam, an ef-
fect contrary to nature. We might see the same
kind of artful unnatural expression within our
own lives. When normality explodes or breaks
out into craziness or shadow, we might look
closely, before running for cover and before at-
tempting to restore familiar order, at the poten-
tial meaningfulness of the event. If we are going
to be curious about the soul, we may need to
explore its deviations, its perverse tendency to
contradict expectations. And as a corollary, we
122
might be suspicious of normality. A facade or

normality can hide a wealth of deviance, and
besides, it is fairly easy to recognize soulless-
ness in the standardizing of experience. (Id., 7)
Embracing perversity is one leg of the integrated

human, embracing suffering, or pain, or discomfort, is
the other. Moore explains:
If you attend the soul closely enough, with an

educated and steadfast imagination, changes
take place without your being aware of them
until they are all over and well in place. Care of
the soul observes the paradox whereby a mus-
cled, strong-willed pursuit of change can actu-
ally stand in the way of substantive transforma-
tion. () Renaissance doctors said that the es-
sence of each person originates as a star in the
heavens. () Care of the soul, looking back with
special regard to ancient psychologies for in-
sight and guidance, goes beyond the secular
mythology of the self and recovers a sense of
the sacredness of each individual life. This sa-
cred quality is not just valueall lives are im-
portant. It is the unfathomable that is the very
seed and heart of each individual. Shallow
therapeutic manipulations aimed at restoring
normality or tuning a life according to standards
reducesshrinksthe profound mystery to the
pale dimensions of a social common denomina-
tor referred to as the adjusted personality. Care
of the soul sees another reality altogether. It
appreciates the mystery of human suffering and
123
THE EGO MATTER
does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.

It sees every fall into ignorance and confusion
as an opportunity to discover that the beast re-
siding at the center of the labyrinth is also an
angel. The uniqueness of a person is made up
of the insane and the twisted as much as it is of
the rational and the normal. To approach this
paradoxical point of tension where adjustment
and abnormality meet is to move closer to the
realization of our mystery-filled, star-born na-
ture. (Id., 8)
For becoming whole inwardly and in our lives, we

need to embrace simplicity, and imperfection. Living
in a robotic culture, we can resist becoming robots by
embracing the ultimate truth that we are always im-
perfect. Moore has found a tremendously wistful tra-
dition with the Renaissance saints and healers that
warned, more than five hundred years ago, of the pit-
falls of perfectionism, which has become, in the
meantime, a real cultural disease in our high-tech na-
tions. More reminds Nicholas of Cusa:
Nicholas of Cusa, the great fifteenth-century

theologian who wrote a book about the impor-
tance of educated ignorance says we have to
find ways to unlearn those things that screen us
from the perception of profound truth. We have
to achieve the childs unknowing because we
have been made so smart. Zen also recom-
124
mends not losing the beginners mind, so im-

portant for immediacy in experience. (Id., 9)
The two major problems young people experience

in our modern robot-society is narcissism, which is a
denial of soul and of depth, and thus something like a
habit of shallowness, and boomeritis, which is an in-
capacity for integrating learning content within the
whole of the person.
Narcissists are our school children who talk with

the eloquence of university professors about subjects
they havent understood a bit of; boomers are our
students who instead of digesting the knowledge and
making it a part of their own being build layers upon
layers of unconnected knowledge around themselves.
Moore shows that there is more to narcissism, in that
modern culture is profoundly narcissistic by its very
setup as a scientific society:
Narcissism has no soul. In narcissism we take

away the souls substance, its weight and impor-
tance, and reduce it to an echo of our own
thoughts. There is no such thing as the soul. We
say. It is only the brain going through its electri-
cal and chemical changes. Or it is only behavior.
Or it is only memory and conditioning. In our
social narcissism, we also dismiss the soul as
125
THE EGO MATTER
irrelevant. We can prepare a city or national

budget, but leave the needs of the soul un-
tended. Narcissism will not give its power to
anything as nymphlike as the soul. (Id., 10)
I have offered free support to narcissistic and

highly problematic individuals for a period of almost
ten years, considering this as the social part of my
mission as a facilitator, and I found invariably that they
wait for society to accept them, instead of doing the
first step and accept themselves. Moore explains:
What the narcissist does not understand is that

the self-acceptance he craves cant be forced or
manufactured. It has to be discovered, in a
place more introverted than the usual haunts of
the narcissist. There has to be some inner ques-
tioning, and maybe even confusion. (Id., 11)
I had myself a narcissism problem over many

years, since my childhood actually, and it was not
cured in an Erickson hypnotherapy, but I could cure it
subsequently, virtually by talking to the trees.
It was when, living in the Provence, I took the habit

to go for a night walk every day; Id address speech to
some of the huge sycamores along a main street.
There were three of them I felt spontaneously at-
tracted to, and what I would do, late enough so that
126
no cars would pass by, was to put my left hand firmly

against the trunk of the tree, and talk to the tree, ei-
ther by thinking or by whispering my ideas.
Now, what happened to my surprise was that not

only was I greatly energized through this unique kind
of conversation, but I also got dreams where the tree
was talking back to me. And I learnt amazing depths
of wisdom from these dreams, and was very surprised
when I found the following passage in Care of the
Soul (1994):
I suspect that this is a very concrete part of cur-

ing narcissismtalking to the trees. By engag-
ing the so-called inanimate world in dialogue,
we are acknowledging its soul. Not all con-
sciousness is human. That in itself is a narcissis-
tic belief. (Id., 12)
And indeed, through my talking to the trees, I got

a sudden interest in shamanism and went on a spiri-
tual quest that took me several years. I engaged in
tedious research about shamanism from 2002 and
went to Ecuador, in 2004, to drink the traditional sa-
cred Ayahuasca brew.
See Peter Fritz Walter: Consciousness and

Shamanism: Cognitive Experiences in the Aya-
127
THE EGO MATTER
huasca Trance and their Theories of Causation

(Scholarly Articles, Vol. 4), 2015.
I left this initiation completely transformed and re-

gained the whole range of magical beliefs I once fos-
tered as a child, and this really has completely healed
the narcissistic condition. It is not surprising to learn,
then, that shamanic cultures, which are for the most
part tribal societies, do not know narcissism as an in-
dividual and even collective affliction. It is only in
modern affluent consumer cultures that we encounter
this problem.
Thomas Moore put a particular stress on the dan-

ger of collective narcissism and he investigates deeply
in the culture of the United States of America, to iden-
tify it as the model and prototype of a narcissistic cul-
ture. He writes:
Nations, as well as individuals, can go through

this initiation. America has a great longing to be
the New World of opportunity and a moral
beacon for the world. It longs to fulfill these
narcissistic images of itself. At the same time it
is painful to realize the distance between the
reality and that image. Americas narcissism is
strong. It is paraded before the world. If we
were to put the nation on the couch, we might
128
discover that narcissism is its most obvious

symptom. And yet that narcissism holds the
promise that this all-important myth can find its
way into life. In other words, Americas narcis-
sism is its refined puer spirit of genuine new
vision. The trick is to find a way to that water of
transformation where hard self-absorption turns
into loving dialogue with the world. (Id., 13)
When we wonder how present-day America is go-

ing to bring about this loving dialogue, we indeed
see that the puer spirit is strong. Not only is it strong
but Americans somehow like to choose their presi-
dents among puer personalities; this by itself may one
day result in a fatal outcome!
Mature cultures choose mature leaders, senior

personalities, people who have grown out of an ado-
lescence where Peter Pan was the dominating arche-
type. And it is very interesting to realize that curing
narcissism involves an expansion of boundaries:
Narcissus becomes able to love himself only

when he learns to love that self as an object. He
now has a view of himself as someone else. This
is not ego loving ego; this is ego loving the
soul, loving a face the soul presents. We might
say that the cure for narcissism is to move from
love of self, which always has a hint of narcis-
sism in it, to love of ones deep soul. Or, to put
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THE EGO MATTER
it another way, narcissism breaking up invites us

to expand the boundaries of who we think we
are. (Id., 14)
And here again, when we look at present-day real-

ity in the United States, boundary-dissolving sub-
stances, from DMT, over LSD to Marijuana have all
been declared illegal, which shows the degree of nar-
cissism at the top government level in the enlight-
ened nation. Only that the light seems to come from
the wrong source.
And the enlightened nation is an action nation. All

is action. When all is action, everybody is an actor.
Which means nobody is himself or herself, thus

everybody acts out his or her life, instead of simply
living it. This constant lack of time of the nation, which
is torn up in restlessness by its business values, busi-
ness standing for busy-ness, is one of the symptoms
of its cultural narcissism that is not even a present-day
phenomenon. When there is no more time taken for
soul, there is no more soul. Moore explains:
A neurotic narcissism wont allow the time

needed to stop, reflect, and see the many emo-
tions, memories, wishes, fantasies, desires, and
fears that make up the materials of the soul. As
130
a result, the narcissistic person becomes fixed

on a single idea of who he is, and other possi-
bilities are automatically rejected. (Id., 15)
Peter Pan resisted to grow up; astonishingly

enough, Thomas Moore writes that growing-up is not
a cure for narcissism, in the contrary:
But the solution of narcissism is not growing up.

On the contrary, the solution to narcissism is to
give the myth as much realization as possible,
to the point where a tiny bud appears indicat-
ing the flowering of personality through its nar-
cissism. () Narcissism is a condition in which a
person does not love himself. This failure in
love comes through as its opposite because the
person tries so hard to find self-acceptance.
The complex reveals itself in the all-too-obvious
effort and exaggeration. Its clear to all around
that narcissisms love is shallow. We know in-
stinctively that someone who talks about him-
self all the time must not have a very strong
sense of self. To the individual caught up in this
myth, the failure to find self-love is felt as a kind
of masochism, and, whenever masochism
comes into play, a sadistic element is not far
behind. The two attitudes are polar elements in
a split power archetype. (Id., 16)
When we apply this truth to the Peter Pan nation,

we learn that we have to let them run where they run
and let them break even more glass everywhere in the
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THE EGO MATTER
world, right? I am not sure if the author wanted to say

that because once of a sudden, after having ex-
panded into collective narcissism, he again speaks of
the individual affliction. Anyway, our daily news in the
hero culture really seem to suggest that Moores
analysis of collective narcissism, that is shared by
number of depth psychologists, would lead to an
abysmal accumulation of Peter-Pan like acts, per-
formed as a nation-narcissist on the world at large, in
order to gain depth.
I am not so sure if this psychological solution will

work out politically, because even the most optimistic
of Peter Pans around in the great nation may get a
hint of stretching the bow too much and interna-
tional repercussions may not permit the Peter Pan Na-
tion to continue his puer game indefinitely
Returning to the mere soul perspective, and leav-

ing political realities untouched, Thomas Moore
writes:
The secret of healing narcissism is not to heal it

at all, but to listen to it. () I am stuff. I am
made up of things and qualities, and in loving
these things I love myself. (Id., 17)
132
This is in accordance with the soul-based healing

approach that was prevalent during the Middle-Ages
and the Renaissance:
Robert Burton in his massive self-help book of

the seventeenth century The Anatomy of Mel-
ancholy, says there is only one cure for the mel-
ancholic sickness of love: enter into it with
abandon. Some authors today argue that ro-
mantic love is such an illusion that we need to
distrust it and keep our wits about us so that we
are not led astray. But warnings like this betray a
distrust of the soul. (Id., 18)
Interestingly enough, J. Krishnamurti approaches

fear, pain, humiliation and suffering in a very similar
manner. He often said in his talks that we should not
escape from what we consider as negative, hurtful or
humiliating in life, because if we do, there will be
scars, while when we stay fully aware and do not es-
cape the experience, there will be no scars.
Thomas Moores intention when writing his book

was to help people develop more soul in their every-
day lives; hence his idea of soul is not a religious con-
cept, but rather the missing part that most people
have discarded out of their lives and that would ren-
der them complete, if they got it back.
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THE EGO MATTER
Thomas Moore does exactly that, he shows peo-

ple how to take back that missing part, that missing
soul, that missing inspiration and vibrant awareness of
their soul being.
But for doing that, he had first to show people that

they are lacking out on something, for most people in
our somewhat robotic consumer culture are not even
aware of their lack of the essential, they are not aware
of their stuckness in routines, of their inner void, and a
belief system that delegates responsibility toward
others, scientific or medical authorities or the gov-
ernment without seeing that they are responsible for
all their thoughts and actions, in the first place.
In this context, it is important to understand that

following soul also means not following external
sense-givers in the form of gurus or sects who tend to
impose their own spiritual understanding of life, and
take it for granted that their followers adopt their
spiritual vision without questioning.
This, however, is a fallacy as the spiritual quest is

always individual, and cannot be duplicated.
134
Many gurus, for attracting followers, suggest that

they alone know the pathway to heaven, and the mas-
ter guru, Jesus, didnt make an exception here, as he
also asserted that those who follow him, will meet the
father in heaven, that he is the key and the doorway
to their salvation. Jesus may have sincerely believed
that and I dont put up any judgment here, but I sim-
ply realize that he was a guru just as any other guru,
eager to attract disciples and followers, to spread his
word. This might be legitimate, while it would be
against my own spiritual principles, to be honest.
I believe that people should really roast in their

own hellfire, by accumulating their sins, to one day
feel strangled to a point to take another route.
This is, after all, how we learn, all of us, and this is
again not a judgment about the human nature. Its
simply how we are. I have roasted in my own hellfire
long enough to one day wake up to another voice in
me who said: Do you really want to continue this
pathway, as it brought you so many trials, so many
disappointments, so much conflict with people?
And I replied, yes, right, I dont want to continue,

so please show me another way. And it was shown to
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THE EGO MATTER
me, and I was surprised that it worked, while I had

doubted it. This also taught me that the ultimate guru
is inside, its our own higher self.
This is why I caution you about religion, as it tends

to curtail your freedom to find out about yourself and
about your own heaven and hell, about your multivec-
torial and multidimensional personality, about your
genius, your uniqueness, your beauty, your ultimate
destiny within the whole of creation.
The most ancient of religions were always both

scientific and metaphysical because they knew that all
knowledge is limited; the myths and tales of old were
expressing the unknown realms of existence, showing
examples of how hidden connections can manifest
once the circular movement of thought is disrupted
by an unusual or tragic event.
For example, Taoism, the oldest known religion,

from ancient China, was scientific in that it was based
upon the I Ching, the Book of Changes, and the im-
mutable cosmic laws that this wisdom book embodies
and describes. So it is with Huna, the ancient science-
religion of the Kahuna natives in Hawaii.
136
See Peter Fritz Walter, The Leadership I

Ching: Your Companion for Daily Guidance, 2nd
Edition, 2015.
Today, even popular science books mention the I

Ching as a unique example for a supremely intelligent
view of life that explains cosmic dependencies, rela-
tionships between things, events and people, and the
hidden connections we use to call synchronicity, and
that we express through binary-code mathematics.
The other element, that might be called the delib-

erate uncertainty principle, in those traditional relig-
ions, is divination, which is a form of exploration out-
side the realm of certainty, and that runs as it were on
probability calculation, extrapolating the present con-
tent of consciousness on a timeline into the future.
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THE EGO MATTER
Ancient religious traditions were more wistful than

modern atheism and ignorance in that they saw that
there is no contradiction between the certainty of
knowledge, and scientific exactitude, on one hand,
and uncertainty as the tertium after thesis and an-
tithesis, on the other; in fact, they wistfully understood
that the relationship between both realms of human
perception is one of complementarity.
What divination does is to read our habitual and

repetitive thought patterns, and extrapolate them on
a virtual time line into the future. This is, then, what is
called predicting the future without for that matter
assuming the future was in any form predestined.
There is no predestination because we can change
our thoughts at every moment, thereby changing our
future implicitly.
When you explore religion with a scientific mind-

set, you will find that much of what the hyper-
rationalists held to be superstition and magic is actu-
ally a realm of knowledge that belongs to perennial
science; it is actually a highly interesting field of study.
While magic certainly is a discipline in this Science of
Mind, as it has been called by Ernest Holmes (1887-
138
1960) in 1927, there are many other disciplines that a

spiritualist or spiritual-minded scientist, or else a sci-
entifically oriented theologian, may want to consider.
After Holmes, Joseph Murphy and Catherine Ponder,
in the 1960s and 70s, founded the Religious Science
churches in the United States, gave rise to a new way
of thinking, and a new way of praying that virtually
revolutionized our religious habits.
I believe affirmative prayer is not only scientific,

but that it is also a form of positive self-
empowerment; even assuming you are empowered
by a divine force or god, the empowerment comes
139
THE EGO MATTER
from yourself, in the sense of coming from your higher

self; after all, you are sitting down for it. In giving that
effort, while its kind of effortless to do this, you are
participating in the divine plan.
Thus it can be said that we are exerting a form of

participatory consciousness when we pray. It doesnt
matter if you believe in a divine superpower or in your
higher self, your guardian angel, your heavenly par-
ents, your ancestor spirits, or whatever you call that
creator force; fact is that you, by an act of will, sit
down to pray.
By doing this, you create the thought forms that

are going to trigger a positive and creative response
from the universe provided what you wish to happen
for yourself or others is non-harmful, constructive and
ultimately in alignment with cosmic purpose.
140
Chapter Four
Developing Soul Power
What is Soul Power?

I define as soul power, primary power or self-
power the natural and non-abusive power of a basi-
cally sane human being. Soul power is the natural
power that the sane child develops when allowed to
grow into autonomy and self-reliance.
This is namely the case when the postnatal primary

symbiosis between mother and child during the first
eighteen months of the newborn was a positive expe-
rience for both mother and child, and when the
mother can allow the infant to gradually grow into
autonomy as the child widens the grasp and percep-
tion of the environment and thus gradually leaves the
condition of primary narcissism.
THE EGO MATTER
The development of soul power is however inhib-

ited in case that the primary symbiosis was impaired
and/or the mother is narcissistically fixated and pro-
jects on the child an ancestor or living parent, so as to
incarnate in the child a phantom spirit or split-self,
thereby obstructing the childs bioenergy flow and the
flowering of the childs own individuality and intrinsic
selfhood.
All growth starts in the womb, but that doesnt

mean we have to get back in the womb every time we
want to grow; it doesnt mean we should remain in-
quiring into the good or bad of our childhood.
It only means that a regard upon our childhood

may explain certain behavior patterns that otherwise
might seem very strange or outlandish. But that is
about all such a regard can bring. It cannot bring an
immediate healing, just by remembering ones diffi-
cult childhood. But the awareness of the pattern that
was built in that early period in life is a good thing to
begin with.
The work for dissolving the pattern is not work on

the pattern itself, but on your soul values; what has
been blocked namely through your huge unfulfilled
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DEVELOPING SOUL POWER
need for attention and self-validation is awareness of

your soul values.
That sounds a bit convoluted but its really how it

is. A child who grows up in a warm and loving setting
where their needs are met and where they get atten-
tion and care has a natural connection with their des-
tiny, with their soul values, or what might be called
their lifes mission.
Whereas a child who grows in an environment of

neglect or abuse will be more or less alienated from
that awareness. Needless to add that I myself was
among the latter vintage, for otherwise I would not
have written this book and all the others, and I would
not today want to serve others who went through
similar trauma when they were small and more or less
helpless.
Now first let us inquire what soul values are, and

soul reality. Soul reality is not personal reality in the
same way as soul coaching or spiritual coaching is not
personal coaching, and soul power is not personal
power.
143
THE EGO MATTER
The terminological change was not motivated by a

desire for fanciful expressions, but is linked to how I
define my own role as a facilitator. The term personal
is after all forged from the Greek word persona which
means mask. Do you want to further elaborate your
social mask, or do you want to realize your soul real-
ity?
After having answered this key question for your-

self, you may look, and look carefully, what kind of
coach you choose, because that choice determines
the choice of the coaching method to be applied to
your self-discovery quest. I have been myself in a
value conflict through the reality of todays personal
power coaching. This was a creative challenge that
actively encouraged me to position my own niche in
coaching.
I simply had to find out where and why I am differ-

ent from the personal power tanks. The solution came
as a surprise. After long reflection and observation of
that huge business called personal power training, I
saw myself exclaiming one day:
But the hell, the soul is missing in all that!
144
And that triggered a new insight that helped me

get where in hindsight I was already: my own contin-
uum or soul reality. The soul was missing in all that? I
pondered, then down-to-earth and curious. What
does that mean, in fact?
The answer came as a flash back in time. I remem-

bered information I had stored away in my mind long
before, and it seemed to be a whole mountain of in-
formation. And it was not new to me; already as a
child did I possess that knowledge. Then, tidbit by
tidbit, I scrambled it up again from my memory, and
puzzled it together to some kind of coherent whole.
Like one finds lost jewels after a long, long search.
This is why I do not speak of coaching, or of power
training, but of soul power and I do not call myself a
life coach. I may have grown into a shaman, in the
meantime. I do not know. My role is to be a facilitator
for helping catalyze the soul development of those
who read my books or listen to my audio books.
Soul Reality and Autonomy

Realizing your soul reality without autonomy is im-
possible. What is autonomy? Is it self-reliance, inde-
145
THE EGO MATTER
pendence, that is the absence of dependence or co-

dependence?
It seems it is all of this, but more. Let us look at it a

bit more deeply.
There is a natural striving for autonomy built into

every growing life. When autonomy is withheld, self-
realization is impossible. Realizing your soul reality
needs a sufficient amount of distance, of non-
attachment, of independence from any other current
reality you perceive. Thus, for example, naturally a
child of three years of age needs to have more
autonomy than a child of fifteen months of age. A
toddler of eighteen months needs more autonomy
than an infant of five months.
Many parents ignore that babies, toddlers and

pre-schoolers, already before reaching the age of
primary school, need to develop autonomy. What is
essential to retain in this context is that we learn the
basic movement into autonomy during our first year
of life, and not later on during adolescence or when
we turn into that magic world of adulthood.
146
This is how it should. Of course it doesnt go that

way in our culture, which is why I am doing what I am
doing. And if I thought that once a life is spoilt in
childhood, its spoilt forever, as 1970s child psychol-
ogy believed, I would not write this and other books
to help people develop autonomy and soul reality.
This being said, I am convinced that you can build

autonomy later on in life. I have done it. I never had
the chance to do it during childhood or adolescence.
I was hopelessly codependent with my mother, as a
child and even as a youngster. And I have been emo-
tionally and physically abused all over my childhood
and youth. So if I could do it, you can do it.
Often we observe that especially adolescents who

have rather repressive and possessive parents get
onto the obnoxious track and really push it through
for every millimeter of increased autonomy. There is a
logic in every behavior and adolescents who put high
stress on autonomy have a reason to do so. The rea-
son is rooted in much earlier years, in the years of ba-
byhood.
When we talk about behavior, we always talk about

two things, the actual behavior and the way the indi-
147
THE EGO MATTER
vidual deals with behavior, or put differently, the way

behavior is learnt, unlearnt, and relearnt. This is why
babyhood is so strongly marking us. Its not that we
could not change our behavior later, its because the
patterns of behavior acquisition, the way of learning,
unlearning and relearning behavior are imprinted
upon our memory interface as early as in babyhood.
To give an example. When I have learnt in baby-

hood that developing autonomy is a matter of dis-
tress, fight and humiliation, I have not only acquired a
codependent behavior pattern, but also a negative
imprint about behavior learning. Accordingly, for you
to learn autonomy later on, you also need to learn
how to learn behaviors, and how to relearn them.
That negative imprint is the fact that you experi-

enced learning behavior as humiliating and scary, and
the result of it is that later on in life, you will be at
pains with changing behavior. So you will tend to be
stuck in certain behaviors that are impeding you from
realizing your potential, that are enclosing you in a
shell pattern, that are keeping you low profile, that are
counterproductive to your growth, or that are simply
destructive for any form of human relations.
148
When this happens, and it has happened in my

life, then changing this unfavorable conditioning is
not easy; for people with a lesser amount of persis-
tence, it may be impossible.
But I am not superman. I have done it and there-

fore believe everybody can do it.
There is nothing more regrettable than human be-

ings who are limited in their potential simply through
a track on which they have been glued to in child-
hood and that they are unable to get away from.
Many of our historical human tragedies can be re-
traced to early childhood learning that was taking
place in an atmosphere of constant anxiety, intimida-
tion, humiliation, violence and depression.
You may suffer from one of the following irregulari-

ties, and if you do, this is an indication that you have a
problem with autonomy or that you have not devel-
oped sufficient autonomy for fully realizing your soul
reality:
Clinging behavior;
Pain and depression to let go of relationships;
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THE EGO MATTER
Few strongly symbiotic attachments;
Addiction to certain people;
Fear of being alone;
Anxiety in public places (agoraphobia);
Recurring destructive relationships;
Constant hurt experienced in relationships;
Strong and recurring feelings of powerlessness;
Strong and recurring feelings of worthlessness;
Problems with parents and/or children;
The feeling of being dominated by others;
Insomnia over extended periods of time;
Recurring nightmares;
Recurring panic attacks;
General anxiety (life angst);
Anxiety to be sexual with others (auto-eroticism);
Urges to humiliate and subdue others;
Urges to rape and sexually assault others;
150
Strong timidity and inhibitions;
Split of your loves in sexual and emotional;
Drug dependency and suffering from it;
Alcoholism and suffering from it, etc.
When you recognize some of your problems, or

some of your childrens problems in at least three of
the foregoing lines, then you might want to take the
opportunity and apply some of the advice I give in
this book.
Freeing Your Minotaur

The inner voices we disown work against us. When
you are blocked in expressing your most cherished
thoughts and feelings, you are far from realizing your
soul reality. You need courage and a good deal of civil
disobedience to get there. Most of us are blocked
against the carefree expression of our intimate
thoughts and feelings. Our cultural conditioning has
strongly emphasized that it was necessary to suppress
intimate thoughts or feelings entirely, or to at least
hide them in front of others.
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THE EGO MATTER
What most of us learnt in the art class at school

was to draw something recognizable, something re-
lated to the visible reality, thereby implicitly declaring
worthless or inexistent our inner reality. Thats how our
soul values are shunned by a materialistic society that
hasnt understood a bit of the real, and therefore is
caught in endless illusions.
This is so much the more grotesque as children

naturally live in different realities, the visible, touch-
able reality perhaps being the least important among
them. Children intuitively know that invisible realities
exist and that beyond, there are parallel realities that
we may be able to enter during altered states of con-
sciousness. Children do not express this in verbal lan-
guage, but it can clearly be seen from their dreams
and their drawings.
Repressing childrens natural and expressive emo-

tionality is still today the prevalent attitude in in the
majority of all public schools; it is damaging the soul,
and only renders children apt to fit into the standards
of consumer society. Consciousness-based education
is different; it recognizes soul values. Fortunately to-
day, there is a growing awareness of our need for a
152
holistically structured permissive education, both in

Kindergarten and higher schooling.
Most people in our culture deny the existence of

an inner reality, although their childhood experience
was telling them an entirely different story. But even
the remembrance of such experiences, which is of
course the best evidence you can get, most people
have repressed it. It was the price they paid to survive
in an inhuman mechanistic society! They have acted
like Faust and sold their soul to the devil!
However, there is another level of consciousness

and there is a world not less real than the one our five
senses can grasp. We only have to project our inner
images into the outside world to let them grow into a
new and better reality. Everybody can do that; every-
body is born a creator. Marc Chagall (1887-1985) af-
firmed:
Our inner world is reality, reality even more real

than the apparent world; to call fantasy or fairy
tale what merely seems illogical means that one
does not understand nature.
The first thing to do is to let go, and give up con-

trol. Mental control stands in the way when we want
153
THE EGO MATTER
the universe to help direct our lives. Our hand, guided

by the universal spirit will produce marvels!
There is no need to interpret the images, forms,

symbols or colors that are going to be the result of
spontaneous art work. The therapeutic effect is di-
rectly triggered by the free and harmless expression
of your subconscious images and emotions. Re-
pressed images haunt us only as long as they are kept
154
in silence, but they lose their destructive energy once

they are expressed and humanized in language. All
that comes to the surface of consciousness will lose its
negative, harmful energy and transform itself toward
positive expression of our whole being.
Our ego, with its dualistic moralism, has a ten-

dency to let our shadow or Minotaur imprisoned in
the depth of our subconscious ocean. However, if we
liberate the Minotaur, its destructive energy will be
channeled into constructive outlets. This energy will
not be lost; it will henceforth be at the disposition of
positive and constructive goals in our life.
This is what Freud called the sublimation of our

asocial instincts. Freud only rediscovered what the an-
cient sages, the healers, hierophants and shamans,
the poets and astrologers, the alchemists knew since
the earliest times of humanity. It is what in myths and
popular tales is referred to as the call.
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THE EGO MATTER
Theseus and the Minotaur
We are called upon liberating our shadow. The

Minotaur, in the old myth of King Minos, represents
our sadistic desires that are fed by stale, negative
bioenergy. The desires are not the problem; it is the
inhibition of pleasure that causes the obstruction. It is
the shadow that contains the pent-up energy that has
destructive potential.
Where does violence and our need for violence

come from? This is one of the key questions. Neuro-
logical research and sociology clearly came to the in-
156
sight that pleasure and violence represent mutually

exclusive energetic reactions in the human brain.
When pleasure goes down, violence goes up, and
vice versa.
The inner controller, as transactional analysis calls

that instance in us, is not a natural part of our psyche.
It is part of the secondary drive structure, a result of
our individual and social neurosis. It locks us in a mor-
alistic frame of reference, which drives us to belittle,
turn down, deny and condemn in self and others all
expressions of natural pleasure.
Functionally speaking, moralism is perversion in

that it turns natural life processes upside down. This
denial of pleasure is the reason of our violenceand
this not only on a personal level but also on a collec-
tive scale, on the societal and cultural level. The de-
nial of the pleasure function brings about an almost
unbearable destructive rage, a fact we can observe in
emotionally lively children when denied a candy or a
promised walk or a gift they were supposed to obtain.
This primal reaction of the brain is not a function of
age or maturity. It takes place in adults in exactly the
same way.
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THE EGO MATTER
When you practice some form of spontaneous art

for handling your repressed emotions, the original
rage that is at the basis of sexual violence, and that
was at the beginning not sexualized but pure revolt,
pure rage, pure anger, becomes activated and gets a
chance to be expressed in both a non-sexual way and
a way that is not hurting anybody.
It usually happens that this snake which is curled in

a deep slumber inside of us suddenly raises up and
fills us with a burning stream of hate that we might
experience as both frightening and pleasurable. The
fright comes from the fact that we do not normally al-
low us to exteriorize extreme forms of negative emo-
tions; the pleasure comes from the bioenergetic dis-
charge that the awakening of the snake brings about.
This hate, this extreme anger, this unbearable rage

can then be expressed in a non-harmful way by heavy
strokes of wax crayon on drawing paper.
The colors may be extremely vivid with a heavy

dose of red, yellow or black, and the crayon may get
into pieces from the violence we put into the activity.
After the rage has been exteriorized that way, a natu-
158
ral state of calm and inner balance usually arises, like

a Phoenix from the ashes.
The process of adaptation to the norms and social

rules of society, is a dialectic one. Only by accepting
yourself and by putting yourself first, which means ac-
cepting your shadow as a part of you can you prepare
yourself for getting onto a new track. It is neither by
liberating the Minotaur suddenly and let him devour
all the young boys and girls he can get, nor by impris-
oning him for lifetime that we will find the way out,
but only by feeding the Minotaur in such a way that
he gradually transforms into a tame animal that later
serves us humbly yet powerfully with its vibrancy and
abundance of vital energy.
Or, to use less mythological and more psychologi-

cal terms, complete adaptation would result in con-
formity and dissolve our individuality: we would be-
come robots. Total refusal of adaptation, however,
would result in asocial and destructive actions and a
lifestyle full of extremes. Extreme action however al-
ways results in karmic drawbacks. It is thus only the
midway between the extremes, that I call flexible ad-
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THE EGO MATTER
aptation, that is constructive both for the individual

and society.
The healthy ego is typically able to bring about

flexible adaptation to circumstances, no matter where
and when. Neither extreme repression nor a total and
unguarded acting out of our desires would lead to an
integration of those desires. The midway, however,
can realize this difficult transition because it bears
elements of wisdom. Therefore, the midway is the
fastest and most effective way of soul development
and, with that, to happiness, harmony and balance in
your whole life process. It is the key to supreme crea-
tivity and a life full of riches and love.
What is Soul Reality?

I reached the insight that all human development
basically focuses upon reality, and this in a twofold
way: coping with perceived reality and aiming at
building a certain form of personal or individual reality
that differs from the reality that is perceived.
When I look at childhood and education today

with this insight in mind, I note the following: there is
an overweight and focus upon perceiving reality and a
160
marginal or at best intellectual focus on building indi-

vidual reality. To put it in more relaxed terms: we are
taught to consume reality as we consume goods and
gods, and at the same time are lacking the most basic
information about the essential in life, that is how to
cope with our perception of reality, and how to con-
strue and bring about on the daily level our own cus-
tomized and unique reality despite of the reality we
perceive.
I say despite of because typically the reality we

are going to build, if we build one at all, is different
from the reality we perceive, or even fundamentally
opposes that reality. Genius is marked by exactly that
characteristic.
Gandhi would probably never have built his gran-

diose vision of a free and democratic India was he
not, as a lawyer and journalist, particularly exposed to
perceiving the political reality in India at that time.
Edison would not have invented the light bulb had he
not perceived the reality of living in a home with can-
dle or petroleum light as dim, dull or fade. Karl Marx
would not have pondered about a more egalitarian
society had he not been particularly exposed to per-
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ceiving the reality of capitalism at his lifetime in the

form of extreme social injustice.
The human base setup, and this is proved by neu-

rological science in the meantime, is built around the
constant gain of pleasure combined with a constant
striving to avoid displeasure.
When ascetically-minded people still today, and

despite all scientific evidence, defend a morality-
based worldview, they fail to pay their tribute to the
destruction their belief system brought about in five
thousand years of moralistic patriarchy!
If it is true that pleasure brings about pain, as

Buddha, Krishnamurti and most other sages from In-
dia said, then why do we run for pleasure? An orgasm,
in some way, as a maximum amount of pleasure, is a
certain form of pain.
In addition, sages argue that all we are searching

for constantly renders us addicted and thus encloses
us in a vicious circle of dependence. From this rigid
point of view, all sexuality could be seen as a trap and
in last resort a debasement.
162
This is, in fact, the point of view of most religions,

even more apparently tolerant ones such as Bud-
dhism. And yet it is a point of view that is profoundly
contrary to life and lifes creational patterns of sexual
union, joyful interaction, the melting of opposite
forces and total communication through total copula-
tion in the form of an ecstatic cosmic dance.
Do what you will, you cannot really argue away the

fact that life proceeds by the up-and-down of pleas-
ure, by charge and discharge, by rock and roll, in a
sort of tidal movement, and not by a linear form of
nirvana boredom. I do not want to eat soup or pizza
every day. This is so evident that nobody really ques-
tions it. And yet this simple fact says all about life and
creative living, and about the necessity for human life
to provide pleasure on a constant basis.
This being said, I have to explain what I mean with

the expression soul reality. What is that reality I am
speaking about? Why do I find soul reality to be im-
portant to realize for every human? Is this reality afar
from our every day lifea sort of mysterious personal
nirvana? To give the answer straight ahead: it is none
of this. It is not a reality that is afar from daily life and
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THE EGO MATTER
it is not an artificial nirvana. It is our own individual

continuum, the reality created by our finest talents
and gifts and their realization. It is the career of our
soul! When I achieve living my soul values on a daily
basis, I am living my soul reality.
Soul Development
After this introduction, let me give you an over-
view over the work techniques you may apply for
yourself so as to trigger the realization of your soul
values in daily life. I would like to emphasize two basic
steps for liberating your soul, and discuss them below
more in detail; they are garbage removal and defining
your values.
The first phase or stage in realizing soul reality is

what I call garbage removal. It is developing aware-
ness of your conditioning, your status quo, your limi-
tations. How did you become the person that you are
now?
Are you aware of your cultural, social and intellec-

tual conditioning, and further the individual or filial
conditioning you suffered? In this first stage we are
not working on changing anything at this condition
164
that represents your now-reality. We only try to get an

utmost level of clarity about what makes out this now-
reality and what were the factors, all the factors that
contributed to your being what you arenow!
The good thing about consciousness is that it is

self-cleaning. Once you gain consciousness about
what has to be considered as soul-garbage, this gar-
bage is instantly burnt and destroyed by the laser
beam of consciousness. Here, you also deal with the
influence of the media and how it affects your self-
image, or rather, how it contributed to the building of
your self-image when you were still a child?
If you think that only adults are affected by the de-

structive influence of the media, you only have to read
some research on the effects of television to convince
you of the contrary. In fact, it has become widely ac-
knowledged by now that the media, especially televi-
sion, and here more specifically the childrens car-
toons have a highly destructive and aggressively con-
ditioning influence upon the childs mind and psyche.
You may say that you have no power to act

counter to such influences as they are collectively ap-
proved forms of entertaining children. But better than
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THE EGO MATTER
revolting and coming up with value judgments, you

can go one step ahead and ask why children have to
be entertained at all?
If entertainment, the highly non-creative and pas-

sive form of audiovisual consumption is obviously not
fostering constructive growth in adults, how can we
ever let our children be immersed in such frivolous
soul garbage?
In my coaching work with children I have invariably

observed that children who are regularly watching
childrens cartoons in the morning right after getting
up and in the evening, right before getting asleep
when their minds are especially receptivedisplay
without exception the following behavior abnormali-
ties:
Insomnia;
Hyperactivity;
Extended bedwetting;
Clinging behavior;
Agoraphobia;
166
Aggressiveness;
Lack of cooperative behavior;
High level of selfishness and egotism;
Lack of creativity and highly imitative behavior;
Lack of sensual and sexual expression;
Lack of sparkling expression (dullness);
Lack of spontaneity and gentleness;
Laziness, obesity, vulgarity, frivolity;
Sadistically blocked and dormant sexuality;
Emotional blockage;
Low emotional and erotic intelligence;
Low level of creativity.
The best method for changing the pattern of me-

dia dependency is a total media diet.
However, this cure does not work when you im-

pose it upon your children and yourself continue to
be a media rat. It only works when you show the ex-
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THE EGO MATTER
ample and yourself go through a media consumption

catharsis.
Stop your self-imposed television terror for one

month, for yourself and your whole family, including
parents, siblings and grandparents. Whoever does
not want to follow is free to leave your house.
I do not say you have to apply such drastic meth-

ods for your whole life and become a civilization hater
and forest hermit, beware! I say one month and I
mean it. This month will be for most of you a terrible
experience, but also a terribly important period of
learning. And if you say, you will do it, but only regard-
ing the entertainment stuff but still watch the news,
you overlook that there are no news in this world, that
nothing is new that you get served in tee-wee, be-
cause if there is really novelty in any respect, it will
surely not appear in tee-wee as it will be filtered out
from broadcasting.
There is no purity in news production, there is no

value-free information, there is no objectivity in any
media production, also if it arrogantly comes over as
scientific and objective or what you want. All in the
media world is assembled, composed and produced
168
by highly biased human minds, in all media produc-

tion studios and tee-wee stations over the world,
wherever you go.
The other trap is searching for what some gurus

call the reality, as if there was only one reality. The
very idea of one single reality is as fundamental a dis-
tortion of perception as is the idea of one single god.
If there was only one rigid dominant one-party reality,
personal reality would be an illusion, and personal
freedom would be utopian.
What we face in mass media production today is a

level of denial of complexity that borders insanity. Life
is unendingly complex, but media life, the artificial
mirror of it, is a reductionist soup that suggests to the
media consumer reality was flat, easy and linear, a
matter of plugging in to the right channel.
When we talk about the mass media, worldwide

news and mass entertainment, we talk about manipu-
lation and indoctrination. We do not need to even
think of personal freedom and individual expression
while these mass media pay constant lip service to
these values, in much the same way as the Church did
when it preached universal love and at the same time
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THE EGO MATTER
persecuted, tortured, and burnt peasant girls it la-

beled as witches.
What we should develop is not an anti-attitude

against the mass media, or a medieval or retarded
mindset, or sectarian opinions, but watchfulness,
alertness, an attitude that just observes the undermin-
ing influences around us, without judging them as
good or bad. This, then, is also the best way to edu-
cate your children! See, when you apply extreme solu-
tions over a longer time, say you want to buy your
kids into a zero-diet media consumption, you baffle
the human nature and risk to cash in the opposite re-
sult.
Before doing something as foolish as that, apply it

first to yourself and see how long you can stand the
torture! Always heed the advice that only the middle
way pays in the long run while extreme approaches
lead to a drawback at the end of the day, and pro-
duce rather undesired results. Your kids are most
probably going to watch all those violent movies with
the families of their schools friends, and without you
ever knowing about it; at the end of the day you will
170
have less control over them, and you may be less

connected with them.
So the whole process needs to be initiated by a

firm decision that is carried out with constancy and
equanimity, and subtle understanding.
I hope I have been clear enough until here. When I

suggest you, for you and your family, trying out the
media diet I am proposing, this is only meant as a first
step in a larger and much more encompassing con-
sciousness opening process that is by no means
meant to restrict your basic freedom.
Defining Your Values

The second phase or stage is to fill the vacuum of
conditioning with new content, content that you cre-
ate for yourself, instead of taking values over from
others or the meta-group. Now you are going to de-
fine your own values. It may sound surprising for you
to have a power for defining your values independ-
ently of the values of the culture you are living in. And
yet, this is what really is understood by soul reality.
And not group reality. As we talk about a personal
soul, and not a group soul.
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THE EGO MATTER
Soul reality without following your soul values is

impossible. You may never have pondered this. It may
seem even outlandish to you to ask such a question.
So, in the next paragraph, then, let us go directly in
medias res and ask:
What, in general, are soul values?
What are the values you wish to abide by in your

life?
How are soul values going to sustain your soul

reality?
How are you going to find these values?
What are the base patterns in your soul universe?
Most of the time most of us are not or only half

conscious of their soul values, while these values may
well drive us, unconsciously, and they may be even
fundamental for our lives. Soul values drive us even
when we are not conscious of them; the moment you
render them conscious, you begin to consciously in-
tegrate them in your decision making. That means
you are going to make better decisions, as they will
be more in alignment with what you really want, on
172
the level of your soul. What happens is that from this

moment, your soul values become creative.
Its like with dreams. Everybody dreams. Every-

body has soul values, if conscious of them or not.
When you are not remembering your dreams, you are
still driven by those unconscious images; but when
you render them conscious you can deliberately use
all the creativity and the information your dreams pro-
vide you with on a daily basis!
To give an example. Lets say that freedom of

thought is for you a fundamental social value. What
flows out from this social or constitutional value? Does
it affect your overall behavior? Does it make you be-
ing an activist? Does it make you become a social
fighter for safeguarding personal freedom?
When you look at it closely, you see that a social

value per se does not push you to take any specific
action, but rather forges in you a certain attitude, or
an overarching behavior structure. Thus, when free-
dom of thought is one of your fundamental social val-
ues, this does not mean that you will become an activ-
ist or street fighter for personal freedom. But it well
means that you are firmly convinced that without
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THE EGO MATTER
freedom of thought we are not living in what we call a

democracy. Thus, we can conclude so far that, in gen-
eral, values bring about convictions and a sort of
overall attitude that builds an overarching pattern for
all our actions; on the other hand, we found that soul
values do not trigger actions without our willpower
coming in and playing its part.
You can also say that social values construe a cer-

tain base structure in society upon which people build
their social plans and achievements for the sake of all.
And you see, while social values and soul values are of
course two different pairs of shoes, the process is not
different for soul values. I will discuss the following
topics about soul values here, not excluding that
there are more:
Soul Values v. Social Values
Patterns of Living
Walking Your Talk
Soul Marginality
Living Your Soul Reality
What are Soul Values?
174
Now, lets say you accept that you have soul values
set for your life, while you may not be conscious of
them, or not conscious of all of them. Can you find
out about your soul values, and how? And after you
have found out about them, can you change them,
erase old ones and install new ones, just like handling
computer software?
Yes, this is so, I say, and let me point out why. The
first process you are going to engage in is find out
about your values. I can help you catalyze this proc-
ess, but I cannot find the soul values valid for your
lifeonly you can. This is a consciousness process
that is highly individual and creative; its, to para-
phrase Krishnamurti, like a flame without smoke.
Consciousness can help you maintain the flame

burning, for a certain time. But please be aware that
you yourself are going to build that awareness of your
soul values, and that a facilitator cannot do that for
you.
I had to build it regarding my own soul values. And

in my case it was a matter of thirty years of time to
build that awareness, which is partly why today Im a
writer. Its because I was an extremely conditioned,
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THE EGO MATTER
alienated, codependent and emotionally and physi-

cally abused child and had to go a long way to get
back to my soul, and find my soul values.
And I had to suffer much violence that was used

by the adults, and also some of the children around
who tried to mold me according to their social behav-
ior patterns. All that created a lot of fear, a sort of
constant angst, and feelings of unworthiness, and it
took me many years to cope with that hangup. And
yet, while for me it took thirty years, it is not excluded
that you achieve the same result in thirty days only
or less.
It all depends on how much society alienated you

from yourself through what we call education and
which is for most people in our society, unfortunately,
a rather traumatic experience.
Finding out about your soul values can be done as

a sort of meditation or inner dialogue, or else through
dialogue with me in a coaching relation. And my role
in our exchange is of course to hold back completely
with my own values and instead mirror to you what
you are expressing not only verbally but through your
whole being.
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Soul Values v. Social Values
Your soul value mix may not be coherent. There

may be a hair in the soup, a bug in the system, a foul
egg somewhere in the kitchen. As you never con-
sciously made up your soul value catalogue, this is
something rather common to happen.
What am I talking about? Let me give an example.

One of your fundamental soul values may be the
natural equality of women, but for some reason you
acknowledge, share and endorse the social value of
male supremacy; evidently the two values cannot go
together without one value getting the overhand and
crushing the other.
Thus, in every daily situation where a question

about these values arises, you will experience a value
conflict. In such a situation, you need to decide which
of the two contradictory values you wish should pre-
vail, the soul value or the social value?
One you have to let go. This can be a difficult de-

cision to make, but please bear in mind that doing
this work triggers an enormous consciousness boost.
It is not a waste of time, but in the contrary a wise in-
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THE EGO MATTER
vestment of time and energy to reach clarity about

your soul values and do away with cultural, social,
mental, moral, racial or other values that conflict with
your soul values. If the decision is difficult, then ac-
cept this inner conflict until you see the end of the
tunnel.
I once befriended a woman who lived a very inter-

esting, even intriguing and quite eroticized relation-
ship with her little daughter. And I saw that, as for this
woman creative living and constant renewal was as
natural as eating and drinking, her daughter grew into
a real creator person, a child who was constantly busy
creating things, changing things, destroying things,
and questioning things, a child who was hardly ever
interested in taking her meals as she was really im-
mersed in her creative reality. And then it became
clear to me that what I wished to realize as my major
professional goal was helping people to live creative
lives so that they are really immersed in their own soul
reality. And I saw that when I was able to help a parent
get there, quite automatically the child would have
the privilege to go the same way, as all education
mainly is teaching by example.
178
After this shift of focus, my soul development work

was much more exciting than before, and much more
meaningful! I think that often we found our endeavors
upon secondary values because we do not see the
larger primary values hidden behind them. And these
primary values, if we know this or not, if we are con-
scious of it or not, are invariably soul values.
When you see that developing your soul reality is a

continuum that without interruption goes from birth
to death and beyond death over several or many life
cycles, which is an insight that karmic astrology gives
us, then naturally you will work with both children and
adults without a predilection.
What is the difference between child and adult

other than a question of degrees of development?
Most adults who live alienated from their soul reality,
and who are deeply molded and manipulated by the
mainstream consumer paradigm, are actually on the
developmental level of small children. And a child as
conscious as a genius, a Mozart, Einstein, Picasso or
Rachmaninov is an adult already before reaching the
age of six.
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THE EGO MATTER
This is so because these children live in total clarity

about their soul reality and their lifes destiny, and be-
cause they are immersed in this reality on a daily level,
and can by no means be turned away from it.
This example helps you realize that often when we

complain about lacking clarity in our professional or
private lives, we lack clarity about our soul values.
Once we have done our home work and made a value
check, we often see the light and can go to where the
break is coming from.
Patterns of Living
People change and with changing, their soul val-

ues may change as well. They also may obey to other
than soul values so as to free themselves from the in-
ner conflict of soul values contradicting social or cul-
tural values.
Changing a professional career often goes along

with, or is the result of, changing the values this career
was based upon. When you think that values is but
theoretical fuss, stuff invented by psychologists or
coaches and nothing tangible, you are perhaps not
aware to which extent your particular mindset, values
180
and beliefs are impacting upon your reality, thereby

constantly creating reality, and changing reality.
Our mindset is composed of both beliefs and val-

ues; the difference between them is that beliefs are
rigid and in most cases unproductive or counterpro-
ductive to creative living while values are living things
and subject to change and renewal. While beliefs are
holding us firmly bound in a limiting framework of
opinions, values are moving with lifes changes and
reflect our being bound by essential truth, which is
the reality of our soul.
You can say that beliefs are basically garbage

while soul values are productive assets for growth.
You want to get rid of beliefs as much as possible, but
you want to inquire into and develop your soul values
and grow in awareness of their existence and func-
tionality.
Soul values are not an outcome of judgmental

thinking or a moralistic life philosophy. The good
thing about soul values is namely that they are part of
any possible mindset. They are like salt in the soup. A
soup is not defined by the salt it contains. Even with-
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THE EGO MATTER
out salt, a soup is still a soup. But surely, a salted soup

tastes much better than an unsalted one.
Why are charismatic leaders so attractive? Why are

film stars and great musicians so popular? Why are
pop singers more interesting than your grandmother?
Its because these people have strong soul values to
share with a lot of people. What they do in their lives
and careers is to condense certain soul values and in-
carnate them through their art and media presence.
Think only of Michael Jackson.
You may or not share his soul values. But that he

incarnated strong soul values and that many young
people shared in these soul values is without a doubt.
The same is and was true for people like Mick Jagger,
Paul McCartney, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Andy
Warhol, or Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson
Mandela.
You may think that only certain chosen people

among the mass of uncreative nerds have the right to
display their soul values and invite others to share into
them. My answer is that choice is well the secret, but
the choice comes from the person herself.
182
There are no chosen people, true, but there are

self-chosen people. You are chosen because you
choose yourself as your sole leader and king in your
universe.
You can be a star tomorrow if you wish to. But you

also have to be ready to cash in the other side of the
medal; to be a media star, to be famous means to be
hyper-vulnerable and you have to put up your de-
fenses to avoid the worst. As a star, you are sitting on
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THE EGO MATTER
the toilet in a bathroom without walls! It needs great

courage to live the life of a star and it is in my view not
at all an easy life.
But it is also true that being popular is a unique

opportunity for promoting your soul values world-
wide. Its a privilege, but it has a price tag! When you
observe the life stories of stars, especially in film and
show, you see that they are almost addicted to their
soul reality, to a point they may overlook their daily
reality completely.
Love is one of the greatest soul values you can set

for your life. And love surely is a living thing and noth-
ing you can put in a book, in words and phrases, in
greeting cards and birthday wishes, nothing you can
accumulate and store away, or to keep frosted for the
next generations.
Love is fluid, and volatile, and yet extremely pow-

erful. Like water. Like a mountain. Like the shine of the
moon that so many people today overlook and call a
romantic fancy, because they have lost the perfume of
life and think they can store away love, accumulate
love and conserve love in the rose and blue colors
they paint their childrens rooms with.
184
And when you begin to put love in drawers and

label it good, bad or perverse, you are surely on the
track to hell. Because then you lost the meaning of
what love really is. Never mind that more than ninety
percent of your neighbors today are on that track, or
even your whole nation. Its nonetheless so. When
many are deaf, deafness is not becoming a virtue.
When a whole nation is deaf, deafness is not for that
matter to become a sanctified human condition.
Walking Your Talk
Soul values are seated in your heart, and they are

part of the continuum of your heart. This means they
are not intellectual ideas or productions of your mind.
Soul values are subject to intuition, not to reasoning.
Hence, you cannot gain awareness of your values

by thinking about them, but only by receiving them in
your intuitive mind in a state of quiet meditation.
Typically, when you have found a value that your

soul has integrated, you feel for a moment a deep joy,
a joy so wonderful and light as if you were, for that
blessed moment, in heaven.
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THE EGO MATTER
What makes the lives of great creators, artists, mu-

sicians and media stars so vibrant is their strong focus
on their soul values! They do not need to go out for
value-fishing, so to say, but have put their fish safely in
a box, to talk with the I Ching.
I do not search, I find, said Picasso (1881-1973),

and he did.
186
He created the foundations of what today we call

modern art and which has become a concept while in
Picassos life modern art was moving energy, living
soul reality expressed by constant creation, constant
renewal, constant finding new forms to express what
cannot be expressed.
When Andy Warhol (1928-1987) created his unique

art and personal style, he was labeled a pornographic
artist. Today Warhol is represented in the most con-
servative art galleries all over the world, and nobody
finds his art obscene.
I want to say that if you think your soul values are

squared clean little bugs with neat labels that you can
store away in your clutter box, you are misunderstand-
ing this book. You walk your soul values, as you walk
your talk.
And when you dont, you are not letting your soul
reality emerge but remain fixated in what I call a
second-hand life, which is about the worst that can
happen to you. It means you are among the millions
of dead people in this world, people who do not
know when they died and believe they are alive be-
cause they consume!
187
THE EGO MATTER
Soul Values and Jazz Ballads
I suggest you to listen to a group of good jazz mu-

sicians playing a jazz ballad, and you intuitively feel
what I am talking about. The ballad or standard is an
old soup, an old long-forgotten song originating from
188
one or the other musical, one or the other film or just

a popular Hollywood tune. When you read the stan-
dard in the fake book, lets say For Heavens Sake, you
begin to yawn. It contains basically the same jazz
harmonies as any other standard, a lot of alterations,
2-5 modulations, 13th chords that put the salt in the
soup, and the piano technique uses a mix between
stride style and swing, and a lot of locked-hand pas-
sages.
So now, then, is what I just described the soul of

that jazz ballad? The hell not. And when you hear that
ballad played by gifted jazz musicians, you are
amazed at every turn of harmony, at every little detail
of their personal rendition of the ballad.
The rendition is the essential thing, not the fact

that a ballad contains 2-5 walks without end. The ren-
dition is called rendition because it renders some-
thing, it renders the soul of the music.
The ballad is a jewel in the lotus, artfully wrapped

in technical reality, sixths, sevenths, repeated 2-5
modulations and endless styles, published in a fake
book in coded language that basically only jazz musi-
cians can read and set out in living chords.
189
THE EGO MATTER
With your soul values its the same as with playing

jazz ballads. You are not opening your souls fake
book and show people the page so that they are go-
ing to decipher the code. You are the one who is sup-
posed to do this work and what you present to the
outside world is a rendition of your souls reality. This
is what I call walking your values. You set your values
out like a Renaissance musician sets out the basso
continuo in a Cantata, or a jazz musician sets out the
harmonies written in a fake book.
You interpret the code of your life and present it to

the world like a complete score, a perfect piece of
music. And not only that. You also play that music, the
music of your soul, to the world. Thus, you are the first
and most important performer of your reality music.
And that means, to stay with the example, that over
time you will assemble around you a whole orchestra,
people who come to walk in your trail, and who feel
attracted by your soul values because they, con-
sciously or not, have chosen similar soul values for
their cosmic life cycle.
190
Soul Marginality
Many people worry about the fact that their soul

reality might be considered as marginal from the
point of view of most of their contemporaries, or at
least the ones they know. Of course, all is marginal
that is not mainstream. Do you wish to be main-
stream? Do you consider big boring default as the
right software setup for you?
If yes, please dont worry. But dont work with me

then and dont use my books. Because Im not run-
ning on that spur and will mislead you from your com-
fortable main road. My soul work is destined for those
who are at pains with society, whose soul values con-
tradict the values of present mainstream consumer
society, those who are as it were on the side road of
creative marginality. This side road of today inevitably
will become the main road of tomorrow.
Lets see how much power mainstream has over

you. Three percent of the total world population
spend seventy-five percent of all planetary energy re-
sources. Okay. But in number they represent a tiny
minority.
191
THE EGO MATTER
And the majority of the tiny three percent repre-

sent what we call mainstream. While they have much
economic power, their position in the world is rather
vulnerable. Among them nine hundred billionaires,
most of which are residents of the United States of
America, dominate or hold in their hands the biggest
part of the world markets. Nine hundred people in
five billion, a tiny fraction.
Surely, these people have their hand in the magic

media box that defines mainstream values all over the
world. So, is that appealing to you as a bunch of val-
ues or rather pseudo-values, when you only look who
represents these values and how they came about?
And second, when you see the reality of that main-
stream world, do you really think it has much power
over youif not you yourself grant it that power?
Perhaps this helps you realize that marginality is

quite a nice thing, and you may begin to appreciate
and embrace your marginality, your non-mainstream
values, your healthy criticism, your lucidity when un-
veiling the web of lies behind most of that main-
stream propaganda about a pretendedly clean and
nonviolent world that in reality is governed by highly
192
unclean and violent governments. Do you think you

can create a paper box when you have glue at your
fingers?
When you let mainstream values regulate your life,

you are dead before you have even started out to live
your life. Most people in one or the other way are not
totally abiding by mainstream values but let a back-
door open in their mind for escaping when things go
too much contrary to their own value system. But they
are afraid to admit it. Westerners especially consider
values as a matter of privacy and keep their value box
sealed. Of course, they talk about their values with
close friends, but typically not in public or with
strangers.
There is a strange fear around revealing personal

identity and values in Europe, and I am convinced that
this fear originates from the times of the Churchs In-
quisition and the brutality with which it has sup-
pressed, for centuries, the European intelligentsia. We
are still recovering from this first and largest holocaust
in human history.
For becoming whole inwardly and in our lives, we

need to embrace simplicity, and imperfection. Living
193
THE EGO MATTER
in a robotic culture, we can resist becoming robots by

embracing the ultimate truth that we are always im-
perfect.
We are beyond 1970s psychology that saw all the

problems in the world rooted in our childhoods, and
that saw no way out of that dilemma. No, we can
change what we wish to change, always, only that
sometimes it takes a little longer, or it takes a little
more investment of time and energy to change the
pattern.
The main problem here is duplication. You have

internalized the codependence pattern of your par-
ents, the pattern that they again took over from your
grandparents. And you will tend to give the pattern
again to the next generation, or children you are
working with as an educator, if you dont build aware-
ness about it.
Building awareness is all you can do, and all you

need to dothe rest will be done by your conscious-
ness; this is so because consciousness is by nature
self-healing, self-renewing and self-reforming. But to
trigger that transformative process, you need to build
acute awareness of the pattern, of your entanglement
194
and of your behavior that as an automatism will tend

to entangle children you are with, your own or others,
in your own emotional stuckness.
You will tend to stiffen their emotional flow, be-

cause yours is stuck, and that will not be good for the
children, because emotional flow is about the one
most important thing in health, in creativity, in the
whole of human evolution. When the emotional flow
is blocked, all is blocked.
So the process is simple, but to go through is not

that simple, you see? The emotional stuckness will
dissolve by itself as a function of your fluid conscious-
ness, provided it is fluid. It is namely not when you are
codependent, but it can be fluid again once you see
the pattern.
Consciousness by nature is fluid, as children by na-

ture have an excellent emotional flow, generally a bet-
ter emotional flow than adults. But only if they are
raised with respect and were able to build autonomy
early enough. So its never too late, you can start to-
day with building awareness of your entanglements,
your codependent hangup, and thereby you trigger
the reformatory process.
195
THE EGO MATTER
When the emotional flow is stuck, negative energy

accumulates, and negative emotions can become
overwhelming. This is how emotions and sexual at-
traction become demonic, and here you see why I call
the natural emotional flow emonic. Your emonic flow,
then, has become a demonic stuckness. In such a
case, I speak of the Minotaur, the monster that King
Minos incarcerated in a tower, unaware that it was his
own shadow. Your shadow is always there but it be-
comes much stronger when you repress it, and refuse
to become fully aware of it.
196
Chapter Five
Overcoming Parent-Child Codependence
Codependence and Emotional

Abuse
There is something like a gradual relationship be-
tween codependence and emotional abuse; both eti-
ologies are sharing a common root in that emotional
abuse is but the higher octave of parent-child code-
pendence, the worsening of a pathological condition
that in most cases goes unnoticed and is yet detri-
mental to the child growing into autonomy and self-
reliance.
Needless to add that parent-child codependence

is way more devastating for the child than this may be
the case for any of the partners in a codependent
marriage or concubinage, simply because childrens
biosystem is so much more yielding than that of an
THE EGO MATTER
adult, and can thus more easily be imprinted with be-

havior patterns that, good or not, later will form the
overall behavior of the person.
Causative factors for parent-child codependence

that have been revealed in my own and other re-
search are:
Mother did not really want the child;
Mother cares more about her career than her

baby;
Lack of healthy parent-child physical interaction;
Parents leaving the child to babysitters;
Insufficient eye contact in the mother-infant rela-

tion;
Insufficient or no breastfeeding;
Mother was breastfeeding but felt revulsion;
Infant tactile deprivation syndrome;
Shame-based identity of the mother and resulting

rejection behavior.
Father left during pregnancy, after birth or not

long thereafter;
198
OVERCOMING PARENT-CHILD CODEPENDENCE
Father is as good as never present, alcoholic or

practices progeny;
Father refuses to take over any role in childcare;
Father is abusive toward mother and/or the child,

etc.
There are many myths that distort and tear down

naturally wellbeing in relations between parents and
children, and these distorted popular views actually
foster and purport codependence instead of helping
to avoid it.
For example, contrary to popular belief, the

pathological codependence between parent and
child is not the result of too much physical interaction
and shared affection and tenderness, but in the con-
trary of touch hostility and prudishness. For example,
it has often been believed that a boy will develop a
codependent relationship with his mother when he is
too close to her, or when he sleeps with his mother
in the same bed. This is simply not true. The causes of
mother-son codependence are often depicted in an
overly simplified or even distorted manner. To begin
with, it is not through abundant shared pleasure, af-
199
THE EGO MATTER
fection, tenderness, and body touch that codepend-

ence is brought about.
Its not through mother and son, or father and

daughter, sleeping together, taking baths together,
sharing nudity, and its not through their sharing a
naturally sensual and erotic attraction for each other.
In the contrary, if these elements were causative

factors in the etiology of codependence, any abun-
dantly sensual mothering or fathering would lead to
entrapping children in pseudo-incestuous relations.
But this is not the case.
If a mother is fully erotically present for her boy-

child, without being incestuous, and embraces him
sensually while giving him at the same time the nec-
essary amount of autonomy according to his age and
abilities, the boy will easily master his Oedipus Com-
plex and develop his fully functional heterosexuality;
he will then project his libido upon peer girls of his
age, or approximately of his age.
The same is true in the father-daughter relation

with regard to the girl-childs mastering the Electra
200
Complex and projecting her sexual feelings upon

peers boys.
The French child psychoanalyst and therapist

Franoise Dolto (1908-1988) analyzed this problem in
the mother-son relation, in her book Psychoanalysis
and Pediatrics, and she writes:
There are boys who stay lovingly fixated upon

their mothers; their behavior is characterized by
the fact that they do not attempt to seduce
any other woman. If the father is alive, the two
men are constantly disputing, for the fact that
the boy does not detach himself from his
mother and searches out other love and sex
objects proves that the boy has not liquidat-
edin a friendship of equality with his fa-
therhis pre-oedipal homosexuality. He will
therefore prepare for getting in trouble with
his father through his difficult and provocative
behavior.
When the father has left and the boy dedicates

himself to his mother, this behavior can be ac-
companied by real social sublimations, which
are associated with the activities derived from
the repression of genital and procreative sexu-
ality, but this boy cannot behave sexually and
affectively like an adult. He suffers from inferior-
ity feelings toward men that he unconsciously
identifies with his father; he can also be a hyper-
genital who is always avid to get new sex part-
201
THE EGO MATTER
ners toward whom he will never build real at-

tachment, but he will show impotent in relations
with any woman he really loves, because this is
associated in his unconscious with the tabooed
incestuous object.
The messages those boys and young men are

typically bombarded with are, for example:
You are egoistic
You are like your father
Think a little of your mother
Im always sitting at home
202
You should have more gratitude for your mother

And when the boy is on the right track and really

develops a unique genuine interest, mother will have
enough reasons to tell him that hes inadequate for it:
Why do you spend so much time for this, it leads

nowhere
Stay with your feet on the ground, you have

grandiose ideas
Like your father, big mouth and little essence
Others have done that before you, so wheres the

sense of it?
You better spend your time taking care of your

old mother!
Why dont you follow my advice, you are just

stubborn!?
I always told you, but you know everything better!
Much evil in the world done by men has its roots

here, in a stiffening mother-son relation that deprives
the young boy for years of his vital energies, blocking
his emotional flow to a point of self-forgetfulness. This
203
THE EGO MATTER
is, then, the reason why these men one day explode,
so to speak, for thinking of themselves for one time,
and do something horrible, to a woman, a little girl, or
an elder.
And who goes to jail is always the boy, then a man,

and not his mother. And that, in my humble opinion,
should be changed.
Women are to be made responsible for being

abusive as mothers, not only men, as fathers! Women
always claim to not being given enough responsibility
under patriarchy, but most women bluntly deny their
abusive attitudes toward their sons in our society,
which is an abuse of responsibility, an abuse of power!
Of course, in the clinical and psychotherapeutic

practice, codependence does not in the first place
manifest as a parent-child problem, but as a husband-
spouse problem, and that is why it comes up in mar-
riage counseling and family therapy. And that is ex-
actly what makes it so intricate and difficult to heal it
in the therapeutic setting. What many practitioners
overlook is that the problem does not originate in the
partner relation but in the earlier parent-child rela-
tions that both partners went through and that they
204
project, as a matter of unconscious automatisms,

upon their partner. We all project our parent of the
opposite sex upon our spouse or husband, only that
there are two essentially different ways of doing that,
a conscious way based on the letting-go of the parent
(mourning), or an unconscious way based on entan-
glement, confusion and hate-love.
In the Freudian terminology of the Oedipus Com-

plex, the first alternative corresponds to what Freud
called a liquidated Oedipus and the second corre-
sponds to what Freud called an unresolved Oedipus.
The main problem in our culture is the mother-son

relation and as good as all our social and relational
problems flow out from this major distortion. Many
men project their controversial feelings toward their
mothers later on their spouses, girlfriends, and even
little girls they encounter, with the result that the am-
biguous, ambivalent, and hardly conscious feelings of
aggression they bear against their mothers is pro-
jected outward in society, and creates havoc in man-
woman and man-girlrelationships.
This aggression in men comes about through the

combination of lacking autonomy in their boyhood,
205
THE EGO MATTER
absence of the father, demanding attitude of the

mother for the son to stay at home, strict education
with frequent humiliating punishment, isolation from
peers through motherly overprotection, attitude to
enclose the boy in an exclusive, intimate and emo-
tionally abusive relation, victim attitude of the mother,
and the explicit or hidden demonization of the boys
peer relations, friendships and social life.
A way out could be a certain persistence of the

boy in the face of such a situation, and a firmness to
be developed on his part that insists on his right to
maintain relationships with peers, teens and adults
other than tutelary figures and family, and that he asks
for a certain laps of free time, every weekend, for go-
ing out alone, and unmonitored.
This could give the young male the opportunity to

speak about his emotional pressures, about the hu-
miliation he suffers and his confused feelings, espe-
cially when the boy turns into adolescence and these
feelings of aggression begin to get sexualized and
become more or less violent sexual urges. While gen-
erally, with overprotected youngsters, a problem of
acceptance will occur at the beginning in any group
206
relation and a certain hostility may be experienced at

the start, it can only be beneficial for young people to
leave their nest from time to time to search out peer
company and also adult males and females, who may
be in state to support the young boy in his rightful
quest for autonomy and respect.
The advice that I give for such cases is to

strengthen personal autonomy, and to get into an in-
ner dialogue with the shadow, and the inner child, in
order to unveil the hidden distortions in the mother-
son relation that has been internalized and that can
be gradually rendered conscious through this kind of
work.
The outcome of my now thirty years of research is

that all sexual deviance in men results from mother-
son codependence that has reached a level of gravity
to be qualified as emotional abuse, and which is to be
seen as one of the biggest relational problems of our
times, and of all times.
Unfortunately, modern psychiatry only very re-

cently began to get a hint of the emotional abuse pa-
thology; when I started my research, back in 1985,
there was not yet any book published on the matter,
207
THE EGO MATTER
while emotional abuse now is considered as the worst

and most long-term form of abuse, as its of all abuse
etiologies the primary etiology.
Yet relatively few books are published about it,

while whole libraries have been written on sexual
abuse and father-daughter incest.
Contrary to most psychiatrists, I came to think

through my researchthat the long-term psychic strain
and fixations sexual abuse causes is not typically re-
lated to the sexual experience, if there was any, but to
the following factors that are, or are not, present in
such cases:
Suddenness of the experience;
Behavior of the adult was in conflict with social

code or family attitude;
Entrapment effect that led to immediate anxiety;
Debasing attitude of theman of the type I can

have all females I want;
Impossibility to speak up, that is, a milieu that

would endanger the child to talk to anybody
about the experience.
208
Much could be changed socially if anti-

abusesocial work could be based on these research
insights. The focus is obviously wrong, as authors such
as Stevi Jackson, a feminist activist,and Alayne Yates,
an American child psychologist,have shown in their
books.
The focus must be on fighting coercion, violence,

and entrapment, not sexuality, and our society should
eventually learn to accept all forms ofsexual behavior
as a non-vulgar, non-harmful, non-debasing and crea-
tive human activity. Sexuality, after all, is a form of
communication, and its a social, not an asocial activ-
ity.
The problem in our culture is the lack of autonomy

children suffer from in the urban nuclear family. Chil-
dren do not grow through being codependent ersatz
partners of their parents, and yet this is exactly what
the present culture is doing with them, imprisoning
them in the nuclear family and depriving them of the
whole bunch of hairy folk they were hitherto exposed
to, when still growing up in the extended family and
also a good part of the day living in the street, without
being constantly monitored and followed up.
209
THE EGO MATTER
What Means Oedipus Complex?

Sigmund Freud (18561939), an Austrian neurolo-
gist and co-founder of the psychoanalytic school of
psychology believed that psychosexual growth comes
in three stages, the so-called oral phase (0 to 2 years),
anal phase (2 to 4 years) and genital phase (4 to 7
years), followed by the latency period (7 to 11 years)
and adolescence (11 to 16 years) and that the child
invariably passes through these stages.
In addition, Freud argued that the intrinsic setup

of the sexual drive structure was taking place through
identifications, especially the identification, during the
anal phase, with the parent of the same sex, that
Freud called homosexual identification and the fol-
lowing heterosexual identification with the parent of
the opposite sex, during the genital phase.
This latter sprocket in the psychosexual growth

process was called Oedipus Complex by Freud.
More specifically Freud and later psychoanalysis

require the child to successfully liquidate each phase
or fixation, and conclude that if a child was not able to
do such liquidation, the sexual energy would become
210
stuck in the particular phase where the development

was arrested with poignant consequences on sexual
habits.
For example it is argued that when a child does

not successfully liquidate the Oedipus Complex by
developing a strong heterosexual relationship with
the parent of the opposite sex, the child was likely to
become homosexual later on. Freud has found this
first for boys with regard to their mother, and later
added it on for the girl-father relationship, which he
called Electra Complex.
Is the Oedipus Complex Universal?

I think a number of intelligent and child-loving
people find it makes sense when Freud affirmed the
basic sexual nature of the child and infantile sexuality.
But my question is if this understanding really implies
that they see and acknowledge Western cultures fun-
damental denial of the childs affective, emotional and
sexual complexity?
As a parent, to allow ones child to be sexual in a

culture that actually is against that kind of freedom,
really is a challenge; that is why only when parents get
211
THE EGO MATTER
the whole picture, they can do what needs to be

done. If parents are wishy-washy on this question, and
half-hearted, it makes it probably only worse.
When I was starting my research, I honestly had no

idea that children could have an authentic sexual life
in the sense of engaging in penetratory embrace, not
just in the sense of being autoerotic through mastur-
bation or mutual masturbation with a friend. I learnt
these facts through anthropological field work, ethno-
logical reports published by Bronislaw Malinowski,
Margaret Mead, and others, and through literature on
alternative childhood, and children in the counter-
culture.
In the absence of this vital and important knowl-

edge, Freuds theory that childrens psychosexual de-
velopment was a process of libidinal identifications
was for me an attractive surrogate for the real knowl-
edge! And it is an attractive lie, for it justifies the exis-
tence of the holy consumer family with a child as the
main stage clown who is used and abused under the
pretext of his or her infantile needswhile the reality
is that this psychological construct rather serves the
the parents needs for emotional security and the so-
212
cially sanctified and legally imposed prohibition of

childrens real autonomy through real erotic experi-
ence with people outside of the nuclear family.
The myth of infantile sexuality is obviously a re-

ductionist and pseudo-scientific cover-up needed by
todays mainstream child psychology to continue their
blinding out the fact that the child is a complete hu-
213
THE EGO MATTER
man from birth! It could appropriately be called child

sex mythology!
Freud was the avatar for what later became, and

today still is, the mainstream paradigm in child psy-
chology and education.
I critically reviewed Freuds theory of infantile

sexuality and came to the conclusion that Freuds
scheme is clearly detrimental to the childs building
autonomy, by keeping the consumer child in pseudo-
fusional dependence on their parents, thus creating
codependence and perversion, and a fake hetero-
sexuality that covers up all the undealt-with secondary
drives that are produced by forcefully impeding the
child from living out their natural emosexual attraction
toward peers. My wake up call had come not from
psychology, but from the side of anthropology and
the insights I got through my studies of the human
field, the energetic functionality of the organism and
the nature of the bioenergy.
It was first of all through the anthropological find-

ings of Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead and
their observations of biologically healthy child-child
sexuality with the Melanesian Trobriand culture, and
214
other tribal cultures, that brought about a change in

my regard upon child sexuality.
We have two ways to create a new reality, in which

society, recognizing the childs affective, emotional
and sexual complexity and high bioenergetic charge,
sets up new and comprehensive forms of child-
rearing:
by confining the child in an oedipal triangle

within the nuclear family, depriving them of non-
incestuous erotic relations, and thereby artificially rais-
ing their gerontophilic eroticism, while projecting this
eroticism exclusively upon the parents, and in turn
creating a striking conflict within the childs psycho-
somatic setup; or
by transforming mainstream culture and grant-

ing children their own domain of intimacy, outside of
the parents embrace, allowing the child to live their
affective, emotional and sexual complexity in free-
dom, thus helping the child to build true autonomy
and self-reliance.
The first alternative leads to the consumer child.
215
THE EGO MATTER
The second alternative leads to a complete hu-

man.
To summarize, Sigmund Freud has significantly

contributed to consolidating what I call Oedipal Cul-
ture, to a point to have prepared the subtle ideologi-
cal soil for postmodern international consumer cul-
ture.
Freud has less significantly contributed to helping

the modern child consolidating their natural quest for
autonomy and self-reliance, and their birthright for an
unobserved realm of intimacy.
Criticism of the Theory
1/8 Restricted Validity
The Freudian scheme of infantile sexuality is only

if ever valid for cultures where child-child erotic rela-
tions are forbidden and structurally impaired, that is,
for patriarchal culture and postmodern international
consumer culture as the successor, in a new garment,
of the patriarchal rut;
216
2/8 Cultural Conditioning toward
Homosexuality
The Freudian scheme represents systematic per-

version of the child and implies the cultural condition-
ing toward homosexuality because identification is
not the natural way for the child to build his drive
structure, and to individuate, but a culturally condi-
tioned one, which is why I call this kind of culture also
Hero Culture, implying the child is molded after their
parents taken as cultural standard molds, and not in
relation to their own specific soul structure, content
and emotional setup.
3/8 A Distorted Psychosexual Base
Structure
Building homosexual attraction before building

heterosexual attraction is not the way nature builds
our psychosexual structure, but is a pure projection
upon nature.
Small boys are erotically attracted to their mothers

and girls to their fathers, and not homosexually to-
ward their same-sex parents. This is so from birth, not
217
THE EGO MATTER
just from age four or five, as the Freudian myth as-

sumes. When, as this is admittedly often the case
within patriarchal cultures, children are well homo-
sexually fixated upon their same-sex parent, and re-
fuse to open up for embracing their parent of the op-
posite sex, exhibiting anxiety in front of anything
erotic, this is so because the child is narcissistic and
neurotic.
Needless to add that the neurotic child is of

course not the natural child; when this happens, it has
a reason, as it does not happen with children who are
educated with love. I have personally seen it over and
over with children whose parent of the same sex gives
only conditioned love, and where children lack emo-
tional constancy and security with their parents, or
even grow in disruptive and dysfunctional families.
4/8 A Mechanistic View of Sexuality
Freuds professional and private life philosophy

was patriarchal and at the same time materialistic, and
mechanistic. He had discarded out of his life any spiri-
tuality as well as his wistful Jewish tradition, and most
of his theories defy truly spiritual insights and truths.
218
The very essence of a holistic worldview, that sees the

hidden connections, was alien to Freud. This was one
of the reasons that his relational life was full of strife
and disruption, and ended in many painful separa-
tions and personal conflicts. It can be said, cum grano
salis, that Freud was abandoned later in his life by all
his real friends, which was one element in the etiology
of his atrociously painful death of jaw cancer. When
we consider that we are talking about love, and erotic
attraction, when we talk about the psychosexual
growth of the child, it denotes confusion to choose
Freud as the authority on the matter. He was not. That
Freuds theories are slavishly followed till today has
political reasons, and is in no way to attribute to any
real insights he had. In fact, Freuds psychosexual
theories are the ideological base justification for the
enslavement of the consumer child, with all that re-
sults from this cultural perversion.
5/8 Nature Fosters Copulation, Not
Masturbation
Freud overlooked not only female sexuality, as the

feminist movement rightfully alleges, but he also
219
THE EGO MATTER
overlooked that the small child is not an autoerotic

freak and serial masturbator when being allowed to
have full relations with other children. Freud ignored
the real natural emotional and sexual growth proc-
esses in children, as they are amply demonstrated by
non-patriarchal cultures where children enjoy full sex-
ual freedom from early childhood. In these cultures,
children engage in sexual peer relations that are tol-
erated and encouraged, by not interfered with by tu-
telary adults, as shown by the ample research of
Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead and Wilhelm
Reich, and many others.
6/8 The Oedipal Family Brings Perver-
sion
Freuds system reflects the power structures of pa-

triarchal society; he just put names on things that
were already there. In fact, todays global consumer
society is unthinkable without the conditioning
dogma of the Oedipus Complex, the resulting parent-
child codependence and the confusion it brings
about in the mind of the child. Truly, when natural
peer relations are forbidden to the child and because
220
autonomy and self-thinking abilities of the child are

replaced to a large extent by system-conform con-
sumer conditioning, the way is open for total addic-
tion in form of non-ending consumption. The result is
the perverse consumer child, and the so-called citi-
zen, that are both based on the massacre of the origi-
nal primal child that was naturally heterosexualand
more generally so, sexual in the first place.
7/8 The Oedipal Theory is Pseudo-
Science
The theory of the polymorphously perverse infant

that was erected by Freud is a result of the mechanis-
tic science tradition along the lines of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, La Mettrie, Baron dHolbach, Ren Des-
cartes and others, which considered man being a ma-
chine and infants to be born as a tabula rasa. While
this view today is scientifically outdated and while we
know that infants are born with a full heritage of for-
mer incarnations and resulting imprints in the soul,
positivistic modern child psychology has to this day
not done the necessary shift from a blind mechanistic
and highly doctrinaire pseudo-science into a real ho-
221
THE EGO MATTER
listic science of the bioenergy. I have created this sci-

ence and call it Emonics (Emotional Identity Code
Science).
Emonics assumes that our emotional identity is a

soul imprint, which is the blueprint of our later indi-
viduality. It also assumes that all in life is a function of
the human energy field or quantum field. Hence,
sexuality is but flowing vital energy and has little to do
with the mechanistic assumptions ignorant sexology
and doctrinaire psychology as well as myth-ridden
psychoanalysis projected upon it.
8/8 Oedipal Reality means Slavery for
Children
Responsible parents raise their children in total

opposition to Freud and the cultural slavery that his
theories and the power structures of patriarchal soci-
ety require, and give their children ample opportunity
for peer-peer, and peer-adult, emotional and sexual
relations, by interfering as little as possible in their
childrens love lives, which includes avoiding both
emotional and sexual incest, while at the same time
222
encouraging the child to project their libido upon fig-

ures outside of the family framework.
223
Chapter Six
Oedipal Culture
Castration or Permissiveness?
My criticism of Oedipal Culture is inextricably
woven with my critique of Sigmund Freuds cultural
concept of psychoanalysis, and here especially my re-
vision of his theory of the Oedipus Complex.
Many young parents believe psychoanalysis had

contributed to the liberation of the child; they tend to
think it was a professional vintage of permissiveness,
or a variant of permissive education. Nothing could
be farther from the truth. Freudian psychoanalysis,
applied to children is not permissive, it is normative; it
is actually a tool for forging the ideal consumer child
within a consumer culture based upon ordained con-
sumption. As such, it is an ideological pillar for the
functioning of a society that, as a matter of economic
THE EGO MATTER
necessity, needs to repress natural pleasure because it

replaces it by consumer pleasure.
Psychoanalysis is not permissive at all. It can be

proven statistically that the word most used in psy-
choanalytic publications is the word castration. Cas-
tration is a highly violent term that suggests the cut-
ting off of the male sexual organ or the infibulation of
the female sexual organ, the latter often also being
called clitoridectomy.
While psychoanalysis suggests to use a mythical or

metaphorical vocabulary, this vocabulary becomes
strangely real when it goes to take a measure that will
affect the long-term destiny of a child or a family. In
discarding out children who are judged as sex of-
fenders or social delinquents, psychoanalysis exerts
its full social power in that it can put people, not only
adults, but also children, in jail. The childrens jails are
cutely called educational rehabilitation centers, but
their regulating principles are the same as those of
jails for adults, however with the difference that in
child jails to this very day constitutional principles are
not applied, while those principles are well in place
for adult prisons.
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
This shows, more than anything else, the true atti-

tude of Oedipal Culture toward children, as it shows
the devils face of this matter called child protection.
Are Masturbating Children Better

Citizens?
Franoise Dolto (1908-1988), the late French child
therapist and psychoanalyst is very outspoken about
the benefits of masturbation but I interject that we are
not set in the world to masturbate, but to copulate
and lovingly embrace others. We are not set in the
world to engage in endless autoerotic self-
satisfaction, but to use our natural erotic desire for
building relationships.
In this sense, sexuality is social, a social factor, and

social behavior. Hence, people who are sexual are
more social than those who repress their sexual
wishes.
Child development, as a whole, today cunningly

cheats about this fact and relegates the child to eter-
nal masturbation in the name of their own best. Chil-
dren are encouraged to develop the habit of mastur-
bation, instead of learning to make love with another
227
THE EGO MATTER
human, which is the real, and natural, form of loving

sexual embrace.
What a split paradigm this is! The child is encour-

aged to be autoerotic, which means narcissistic, and
to develop erotic fixations upon their parents, but vio-
lently, with all the police power of modern society,
withheld from engaging in what is most natural: to
embrace others lovingly, others who are not incestu-
ous objects, and thus peer children and adults other
than their parents.
I really believe that Western cultures child-rearing

paradigm, whatever Dolto and others had and have
to say about it, is perverse, as it really puts life upside
down in the name of culture, morality or whatever
other fake arguments.
Dolto encourages professionals to take note of

the childs sexuality to better serve the child, but what
does this service look like down the road? To trans-
form loving children into egoistic masturbators and
incestuously fixated psychopaths?
The functional organic troubles of children she

mentions in her books are often the result of love
228
OEDIPAL CULTURE
prohibitions, not prohibitions to masturbate, but pro-

hibitions to have real love relations outside of the
family, and to have the basic freedom to build such
love relations in the first place. See the following
quote:
To prohibit the child to masturbate and sexual

curiosity means to force the child to pay unnec-
essary attention to activities and which normally,
before puberty, are unconscious or precon-
scious. () Developing consciousness prema-
turely in an atmosphere of guilt does great
harm to the development of the child because
it deprives the child of ways to use their vital
energies (libido) that is inherent in those spon-
taneous activities. Psychically healthy children
who have mastered the genital stage are toilet-
trained, graceful in their body and dexterous
with their hands, they talk well, listen and ob-
serve a lot, like to imitate what they see others
doing, ask questions and expect truthful an-
swers, and when they don't receive them, begin
to make up magical explanations.
It is of course true what Dolto says about the

negative effects of prohibiting masturbation. But the
trick is that the reverse argumentation is not per se
correct. To allow masturbation does not mean to give
the child real freedom for love. This is the logic error
here, and here is where society cheats the child and
229
THE EGO MATTER
argues from an irrational and mystical position that is

not factually verifiable. Dolto writes:
The truth is that normal masturbation does not

at all fatigue the child, but appeases the phallic
vital tension of which give his erections ample
evidence. Masturbation provides the child with
physiological and affective relaxation which
does not equal in intensity the orgasm of an
adult as there is no ejaculation ().
The Dogma of the Autoerotic

Consumer Child
It goes without saying that for those who are
against all expressions of childrens eroticism, Doltos
ideas about child masturbation must sound somewhat
progressive or permissive.
But from the background of the larger picture that

I am trying to paint here, masturbation, while its good
of course and while many children need it just for get-
ting rid of their surplus bioenergetic charge, is not the
real thing what the child needs and asks for.
To repeat it, we are born to learn copulating, not

masturbating, and what children should learn instead
of becoming proud masturbators is to become hum-
ble partners in a real sexual embrace where set and
230
OEDIPAL CULTURE
setting are correct, and where there is mutual respect,

dignity, love and acceptance. To say this, excuse me,
is not an apology for pedophilia, as such a social pol-
icy, once enacted, would naturally lead, just as in most
native cultures, to sexual relations among children
only.
But as matters are in our culture, the basic resis-

tance against children as erotic beings is not even
child-adult sexual interaction, but even more so,
child-child sexual interaction. According to Freuds
cultural preservation theory, to admit and endorse
child-child sexual relations is against the setup of our
culture. This dogmatic position of Freud is docu-
mented and led to a number of conflicts with his stu-
dents. It was the main reason for Wilhelm Reich taking
a distance to Freud, after the latter said regarding
Reichs activism for the sexual liberation of children:
Culture must prevail!
Franoise Dolto, when I interviewed her in 1986 in

Paris, put it in the following terms:
It is true that Freud was normative in this matter.

But why not? The task of psychoanalysis is not
to bring about a social revolution or changing
231
THE EGO MATTER
the cultural paradigm! We are here as psycho-

analysts to heal the neurosis, in the individual
case, that comes from the cultural repression of
the childs sexuality. This is our task, not more
and not less. Freud has seen it in the same way.
When mothers do not encourage their children to

develop autonomy, they are on the best way to en-
tangle their children in a codependence where the
parent is the winner and the child the loser, and where
the child, in most cases without parent and child be-
ing really conscious about that, becomes the ersatz-
mate for the parent. While this mating is in most cases
not sexual, the consequences of mother-son code-
pendence are devastating.
I talk about emotional abuse in cases where the

parent has received clear signals from the child for
being granted more freedom and autonomy, but
does repeatedly not comply with this request, or even
actively cuts down or prohibits love and erotic rela-
tions of the child with persons outside of the family,
whatever their age.
232
OEDIPAL CULTURE
Oedipal Hero
Oedipal Hero is a term I forged for an individual,
usually of male sex, who suffers from a specific pa-
thology that comes from a combination of unresolved
Oedipus Complex and a narcissistic fixation. In my
view, modern psychiatry has just begun to identify this
problem, and my approach to scientifically and psy-
chologically outline this pathology is therefore to be
seen as a pioneering work. Wilhelm Reich wrote back
in the 1930s:
The unarmored organism does not know an

impulse to rape and murder little girls, or to get
pleasure through violence. It is therefore indif-
ferent toward all moral rules that try to repress
such impulses. It cannot comprehend that one
has intercourse with another only because there
is an opportunity for it, for example being in
one and the same room with a person of the
other sex. The armored character, by contrast,
cannot envision an orderly life without coercive
laws against rape and lust murder.
While the true reason for repressing the childs

emonic vitality is hardly ever discussed in international
consumer culture, the lifting of the veil behind so-
called morality used to be a strong domain of post-
revolution French philosophy.
233
THE EGO MATTER
Most people in modern consumer culture really

believe the main reason for inhibiting the childs free
sexuality had to do with morality or with a concern for
protecting the childs natural vulnerability. This cultural
and social naivet strongly contrasts with other cul-
tures perspective, such as the French or Hispanic cul-
tures, and it stringently contradicts the life and love
philosophy of most tribal cultures.
French social historians such as Michel Foucault

and social philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze have
clearly demonstrated that the reasons for the childs
emotional castration are to be found in the setup of
Western consumer economy. It has economic, and
not moral reasons why the Western consumer child is
relegated to forced orality and deprived of tactile
stimulation.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their philo-

sophical expos Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism & Schizo-
phrenia, set out to formulate a detailed philosophical,
logical and ethical critique of Freuds theory of the
Oedipus Complex.
To illustrate my own point of view, I will provide

here some quotes of this major philosophical and
234
OEDIPAL CULTURE
psychoanalytic treatise by two great French social phi-

losophers. All the quotes are my own translation from
the French original.
People often believe that with Oedipus, its

easy, and you can take that for granted. But it is
not so: Oedipus presupposes an extraordinary
repression of desiring machines. And why, and
for what reason?
Does Oedipal imperialism only require to

abandon biological realism? Or has something
else, infinitely more powerful, been sacrificed to
Oedipus?
The un-Oedipal nature of desire production

continues to exist, but is aligned with Oedipal
coordinates that translate it in pre-Oedipal,
para-Oedipal or quasi-Oedipal,etc.
Since long I carry with me the idea to write about

what I perceive is a barely investigated behavior pat-
tern to be found among those raised since the baby
boom in the 1970s and 80s, and for the most part
without breastfeeding.
And they have suffered from tactile and sensual

deprivation in many other forms as well, as that gen-
eration was growing under the spell of a really mis-
235
THE EGO MATTER
guided pediatrics that in its life-denying ignorance

kept parents from touching their children.
Co-sleeping of parents and children, originally an

activity that forms part of the natural continuum, was
declared a crime, and assumed to be just another
form of covert incest they had discovered as the new-
est cry in fashionable popular psychology.
Parents caressing their children were blamed as

perversely sensuous and weak, as fondling and ca-
236
OEDIPAL CULTURE
ressing was connoted with spoiling the child. Sexual

permissiveness, while often declared as in for edu-
cated people, turned out to be a media bluff, as re-
searchers clearly unveiled.
This alienated child-rearing paradigm, Made in

USA, as so much of the same that is now exported
worldwide, was assiduously absorbed and cloned by
parents in Britain, Australia, Germany and France, and
to a lesser extent in Italy, Spain or Greece. In fact,
Mediterranean culture was always strongly in favor of
sensuality in the parent-child relation, and generally is
much more erotically intelligent as any country from
the Anglo-Saxon world with their debilitating history
of life-and-love-denying Puritanism.
Even today, while most of Spockian assumptions

have been found to betray the very core of healthy
nutrient childcare, Dr. Spocks manual is still sold. And,
interesting coincidence, the Dr. Spock who wrote it
has not little in common with the character of the
same name in Star Wars. Both emphasize the priority
and supremacy of the intellect, and belittle, if not
deny, the innate intelligence of our emotions.
237
THE EGO MATTER
The star war plot explains that the Vulcans have

assessed themselves as being too emotional, which
had created strife and turmoil in their relationships
and political dealings.
Mr. Spock in Star Wars
As a result and as it were as a remedy for their

high emotionality, they did away with emotions as
much as they could, developing something like a
Spartan attitude or lifestyle, which puts rationality first,
as something like a supreme value, and which assures
that in all their shortcomings, the intellect always got
the overhand over their emotions.
238
OEDIPAL CULTURE
Facial expression, way of addressing others, verbal

communication and body language of Spock ex-
presses this attitude very concisely. His diction is short
and crisp, his remarks to the point, his empathy one
of polite and calculated aloofness, his critique biting
and always brilliant.
He is able to demonstrate to everybody around

that hes intellectually superior, by nature, or by birth,
simply because hes a Vulcan. But this attitude, we
know it very well among us other humans! And this is
one of the attitudes of the Oedipal Hero I am going
to talk about in this chapter, because attitude betrays.
Attitudes are sign posts, not just the little critter in

our daily relationships. In Star Wars, the hero is given
a three-fold expression, part being incarnated by
Captain Kirk, part by Spock and last part, the heros
shadow, by Darth Vader.
So let us take this as the starting point for inquir-

ing what Oedipal Culture is actually all about, and
what the role of the Oedipal Hero is in this strange
plot.
239
THE EGO MATTER
I would like to get closer to the truth about the

tragic character called Oedipus that Sigmund Freud
dug out from the Greeks huge reservoir of mythology
for explaining the childs psychosexual development.
To put it in straight terms, and to repeat it, I have

not just vague, but clear-cut objections against
Freuds theory. Oedipus was not the starting point of
the human race. He was rather the starting point of
the decline of the human race.
I will show in this chapter that the man Oedipus is

not what is really interesting about him. He was pretty
much a victim of circumstances. So what actually
counts in Sophocles tragedy is not Oedipus, but the
strange circumstances that pushed him around like a
boat in heavy sea.
All tragedies have in common that the good will of

the hero does not positively affect his destinyeven
to the contrary. And here is a leitmotiv of this study:
its rather the heros too-goodness as it were that
throws him in the abyss, that makes him a prey of bad
forces.
240
OEDIPAL CULTURE
This goodness is false, its the narcissistic shell that

hides the shadow. Further, when we investigate those
circumstances that made out of Oedipus life an end-
less series of twists and turns, and ended him up in an
impasse, we see that there is something like a curse
upon him, or his family. His father got the strangest
oracle one can ever think of; he was told he will be
killed by his own son. The horrified man set the baby
out on a mountain, for who wants to have it may take
it. And a shepherd had a good soul and took the
baby, and through his good deed, the baby landed in
the arms of a kings family, while himself being from
royal origin.
The terrible fate is here, and thats one vision of it,

that by the very will of Oedipus father, King Laius, to
avoid the fatal prediction, he was setting all in place
to fulfill it. The other vision of it would say: anyway, if
he had kept the boy, the prediction would have been
fulfilled as well.
Speculation does not help. We do not know. It was

as it was. He wanted to avoid the worst and aban-
doned the baby. That would be an interesting topic
for a poll, I guess, so see how many people would act
241
THE EGO MATTER
like him, and how many would take a different ac-

tionand which action?
A psychological view of the story penetrates

deeper into the mystery of karma. To put it squarely:
nobody gets fatal predictions who has a good karma.
So who had the bad karma? First of all, the father.
Here is the key of the story. We have a father and a
son.
Everybody says the son is the bad guy but the

curse was coming upon Oedipus through his father.
No curse comes from nothing, karma is cause and ef-
fect. And here we are at the very core of the character
that I came to call Oedipal Hero. He is the savior of
his parents in saving them, consciously or not, from
their family curse, their Verzauberung, their narcissism,
their undealt life issues, and their bad karma. And his
very mission to save them is hismisunderstoodhe-
roism, what makes him a false hero.
Well, in this moment it should ring in your ears, as

it should appear obvious from this point of my expla-
nations that what the Oedipal trap in fact leads to is
narcissism, but I see that differently than mainstream
psychiatry.
242
OEDIPAL CULTURE
The difference consists in the fact that I see an en-

tanglement, a missing link between the tragedies of
both Oedipus and Narcissus that I have never seen
mentioned in any psychology or psychiatry treatise,
nor in any work on mythology. Generally, the two sto-
ries are explained as standing for different psycho-
logical complexities. This is of course generally true,
but that does not exclude that they can be seen to-
gether as well.
The astonishing thing is that when you do this, as I

did it for the first time back in 1992, when I wrote my
first sketch on this problem, you will see not just one
door, but a whole series of doors opening in front of
your eyes, and you will discover the whole why-and-
how our culture is so hopelessly entangled in parent-
child codependence, widespread emotional abuse of
children, a true denial of love, violence, self-
alienation, narcissism and widespread, and more or
less socially accepted schizophrenia.
And you will also begin to understand the true

etiology of pedophilia, a problem that until now is not
understood by Western psychiatry and sexology,
while a certain acceptance has been established in
243
THE EGO MATTER
the meantime for all sexual paraphilias. The fact that

pedophilia is misunderstood, and that adult-child
erotic relations are not socially coded, makes it easy
for political opportunism to creep in or even gain the
overhand and put up pedophiles as a new scapegoat
group that is to be sacrificed for the sake of public
order and other fake agendas that serve right-wing or
outright fascist leaders to hide their overall incompe-
tence and their pitiful spiritual ignorance to manage
political affairs in a highly complex world.
The political consequence, then, is to demonstrate

that the public is being misinformed, and perhaps in-
tently so, to believe that pedophilia was a family
curse, a genetic default, or another sort of mental de-
bility. All these assumptions have been voiced over
time, but they are what they are, hypotheses. In addi-
tion, self-labeled pedophiles added on to the confu-
sion by the very fact of their self-labeling. Their public
and online campaigns for acceptance of childlove
were not only hitting granite, but worsened their
overall condition as a sexual minority worldwide; this
is so because they steered public with the wrong
strategy.
244
OEDIPAL CULTURE
Instead of understanding that sexuality is not rigid

and eternally determined, this small but influential
group of pedophiles going public tried to gain social
acceptance in a similar way as formerly the homo-
sexuals, namely by affirming time and again they were
born as such. That very argument of course turned
against them in the long run, as it turned against the
homosexuals, while the latter still go on to believe
they had gained something like long-term social ac-
ceptance. In crisis situations and when polemics rise
because the reigning strata need a scapegoat for ob-
fuscating their pitiful corruption and political incapac-
ity, the homosexual cause will be torn up and blown
up again, and anarchy and chaos will again break
down the walls not of silence, but of their bars, shops,
cafs and houses.
The change of our attractions cannot be brought

about by coercion, not by imposing a behavior stan-
dard on certain people, not by force. Not by violence.
It can change by itself when the person begins to
weigh other love options, and takes chances in other
sexual avenues.
245
THE EGO MATTER
Sexuality is a matter of choice and predilection,

and first of all of emotional attraction that by and by
becomes sexualized. Hence, emotional choice primes
before it ever becomes a subject of sexual reasoning.
And here is where I deliberately contradict modern
sexology that in its mechanistic Cartesianism is unable
to grasp the primacy of our emotions, and the fact
that sexual attraction follows emotional predilection,
and not the other way around.
I have since long analyzed the public demonstra-

tion of pedophiles as the search for a fake identity,
which is just another manifestation of narcissism, but
it has to be seen that those who came up with these
slogans are a tiny minority within a minority. Contrary
to the standard assumption of mainstream psychiatry,
not all pedophiles are narcissistically fixated, and not
all pedophiles are rigid, exclusive and inflexible in
their love choices. Those who are, and who have been
at the forefront of the public discussion, are not rep-
resentative. They have to be blamed with the same
kind of ignorance as their opponents, putting up in
their public forums notorious assumptions about as it
were the phylogenetic if not the biogenetic etiol-
ogy of pedophilia.
246
OEDIPAL CULTURE
It is so easy to blame the fate of birth for all our

misfortunes in life, and it is most often a denial of re-
sponsibility to accept ones destiny. Destiny, contrary
to folk wisdom, is not a predestined fate, but pure po-
tentiality.
Nobody is born a mathematician, a genius, a ho-

mosexual or a pedophile, in the same way as nobody
is born a masturbator. There is potentiality for a cer-
tain pathway of self-realization, be it professionally, or
in love. Those pedophiles who told their story to the
public did this probably in an attempt to be taken for
what they are, in a naive hope society would finally
drop the debate and say Well after all, if they are so,
and born like that, we should better accept them. Yet
society does not reason that way. Many social policy
makers are reasoning out ways to establish new
euthanasia laws that in their fascist worldview would
end for all times the problem of pedophilia in much
the same way is Hitlers megalomanic idea of total
war.
Those narcissistic freaks who were at the forefront

of the debate of pedophilia, as the self-chosen repre-
sentatives for a community the contours of which can
247
THE EGO MATTER
hardly be defined in scope and quantity, have served

their own deficient egos, but they did a bad service to
the cause of loving children erotically. They brought
this cause down through their rigidity and their fear to
be homeless, having chosen the haven of pedophilia
addiction as their new home, as the hanger for their
fragile identity, because they never really cared about
their soul values and their spiritual belonging. This is
true narcissism, this denial of soul, this denial of com-
plexity, and here the pedophile propagandists and
their opponents, the Oedipal Heroes, have much in
common! And this is why, as a matter of holistic logic,
they had to clash. Because, if they know it or not, they
have much to share!
The truth? Not to be found on either side of the

ring, but in its very center, halfway between the ex-
tremes. The Oedipal Hero suffers from exactly the
same hangup as the pedophile, with the only differ-
ence that they repress their pedophile desire and pro-
ject it on others. The way out is not pedophilia or anti-
pedophilia, because its the wrong question. The right
question is to ask if the repression of childrens emo-
tional and sexual life is bringing anything positive to
248
OEDIPAL CULTURE
children, or if rather the absence of such repression

brings the true benefit for childrens healthy growth?
Both the Oedipal Hero and the Propagandist Pe-

dophile are blind-eyed to see that the only tangible
and provable etiology of both the Oedipal fixation
and pedophilia is the emotional and tactile starving,
and the sexual deprivation of children and adoles-
cents, as its rampant in postmodern industrial bour-
geoisie since about the second half of the 17th cen-
tury. When the complexity of sexuality is understood,
and once its energetic nature is clearly seen, when its
changeable and fluid nature eventually has been ac-
cepted, we are one step ahead.
When the true etiology of pedophilia is defined

within a larger systemic interdependence with other
social factors, we are two steps ahead. When we see
that we do not need any polemics about pedophilia,
that we do not need to bother at all with this matter,
nor with homosexuality or any other sexual
paraphilias, we are at the point to recognize that what
we have to tackle is the education of our children, the
way we help them integrate their vital energies, the
way we look at them as complete beings, not dwarfs
249
THE EGO MATTER
who are limited, because of lacking growth, to ex-

press their emotional and sexual feelings. Then, as a
matter of systemic logic, when we have changed the
social and legal situation as a result of our insight in
the importance of preserving childrens emosexual
integrity, and our responsibility to do away with all vio-
lence in relating to children, be it educational, then
our culture as a whole will change.
And the problems of homosexuality, pedophilia,

sadism, masochism and what I know more sexual fixa-
tions will not be problems anymore. I do not imply
that these manifestations of the life energy will com-
pletely disappear, but a society that has eventually
accepted the child, and the child within, will be able
to accept sexual diversity as it accepts ethnic, racial
and social diversity.
The Complete Oedipus Story

What Freud did was to mutilate the Oedipus saga
for it is originally imbedded in a greater epic cycle,
the tragedy of the House of Thebes, as it is referred to
in mythology. The myth must include, to be fully un-
derstood, at least one generation before Oedipus,
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and one generation after him. Without seeing the

family curse, how can Oedipus tragedy and suffering
be understood? And if its not understood, how can
the tragedy and suffering of the consumer child in
Oedipal Culture be understood?
The Oedipus saga is the account of a family curse.

It is about what the ancient Greek called offending
the gods, what Christians, Jews and Muslims call sin,
and what in modern language is called an abuse story.
The family curse aspect of the abuse was in this family
particularly heavy in that it went over several genera-
tions. But the expression family curse is inept as it
suggests something like an outside agent or a dubi-
ous notion of fate that triggers, like a Damocles
sword, peoples destruction. To believe this is an error.
It can well be made out, when analyzing this family
story, who the culprits were, and how what they did
triggered a negative response.
In case of that family, it is true, the behavior of our

heroes was particularly harsh and the response of the
universe was equally harsh, and even cruel. We have
to keep in mind that it is an extreme case, but its a
good moot court trial. It shows the principle. Liz
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Greene and Juliet Sharman-Burke write in The Mythic

Journey (2000), p. 51:
The mythic history of the House of Thebes is a

dark one, and begins even before Oedipus
himself. Sin follows sin in this family, worse than
any television soap opera, and the line is
plagued by the curses of various offended
gods. The House of Thebes is the ultimate dys-
functional family.
My hypothesis is that Freud chose the Oedipus

saga as a metaphor for the psychosexual develop-
ment of the child at the onset of the genital response
because he knew or assumed that our culture is inces-
tuous in its very roots, and abusive, especially in the
parent-child relation. How else could a sane mind dig
in human mythology to find the most abysmal story
ever told about human vileness, and glue it on the
back of every innocent little child? And here the word
innocent virtually rings in my ears - because it
sounds false.
If ancient mythology is true, we are not innocent,

not even as small children, as we bear, each of us, our
individual and our family karma, if we want or not, as a
matter of universal law. But I wont give a judgment
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here, I wont jump to any conclusion, and leave this

question open. Karmic astrology confirms what most
religions say, that is, there is both individual and fam-
ily karma every incarnating soul has to bear.
As far as I can see, the only philosophy that vehe-

mently contradicts this perennial teaching is the so-
called tabula rasa theory that probably originates
from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but that may be much
older. This theory assumes that every child is an un-
written leaf, an empty table (tabula rasa); we have to
see that at Rousseaus time, his theory was a fist in the
face of the Church, a very daring theory indeed. To-
day there is not much left of it and even fervent Car-
tesian biologists today assume that we inherit genes
or even gene mutilations from our genitors, if not a
whole range of so-called hereditary diseases.
Let us instead look at the details of the saga of

Thebes and see what water we can draw from it for
our question if Freuds theory of the Oedipus Com-
plex bears truth and can be validated, or if it has to be
dismissed as a cultural projection upon human nature.
The authors write:
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This tale is concerned with what the Greeks un-

derstood as the family cursean offense
against a god which is punished through suc-
cessive generations. In modern psychological
terms, we might understand this as the passing
down of unresolved family conflicts. What our
parents have not dealt with, we may find our-
selves facing, and these sins of the fathers will
in turn pass to our children if we do not deal
with them. (Id., 38)
Now let us look at the facts first. Laius, the King of

Thebes received from the oracle in Delphi a predic-
tion he might be killed by his own son, which could
actually have consoled him in a way because he was
childless and it was exactly for that reason that he
came to consult the oracle. So he could have rea-
soned, well, it was not meant to be, then. But what
did he? He first cast out his wife Jocasta. As she did
not know why her husband wanted to get rid of her,
she managed to get him drunk and made love with
the drunken man, and got pregnant.
This sounds strange, as the couple had been child-

less before, but anyway, it appears the invisible
threads of destiny were already at work. And Laius
was anxious then, and as soon as the child was born,
took the next chaotic step in unknowingly fulfilling the
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oracle: he took the baby to a mountain, pierced his

feet with a nail and left him there, exposed to all dan-
gers.
Coincidentally, the protector spirit of the Delphic

oracle is Apollo, and the child-protecting gods were
with the Greeks equally Apollo, and his sister Artemis,
which is why they were infuriated, and it was this act
that triggered the whole series of tragedies to come.
The gods then let a shepherd find the baby who
named him Oedipus which in Greek means swollen
foot. By another turn of destiny, the baby got in the
arms of the Royal Family of Corinth where Oedipus
grew up in good and equal standing. One day, some-
how anticipating his destiny, Oedipus went to Delphi
to ask the oracle about his future, and got from
Apollo the terrible oracle he would murder his father
and marry his mother. In a chaotic streak of action that
reminds of his father, Oedipus did not return to Cor-
inth, determined to prove the god wrong. He took his
adoptive parents for his true parents and thought that
by simply not being around them any further, he
could avoid the fate. Apollo however was infuriated
about so much human willfulness and sheer arro-
gance, and the next turn of destiny was again a blunt
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THE EGO MATTER
fulfillment of the prediction. As a strange turn of

events, Oedipus happened to meet the chariot of
King Laius, but he did not know it was his father. Laius
told the young man to step off the road, Oedipus
shouted a rude reply, and the king let the chariot roll
over Oedipus foot, thus opening the old wound.
In a fury, Oedipus flung Laius on the road and

drove the horses over him, thus murdering, unknow-
ingly, his father. In addition, what was considered a
particularly heavy crime in ancient Greece, he left the
dead corpse to lie unburied in the dirt. Here, the myth
seems almost unbelievable. When we consider that
Laius was a king, how could it be that he was attacked
so easily by a youngster who happened to cross his
way, without enjoying any protection from the part of
the chariot driver and other staff?
Coincidentally, Laius had been on his way to Del-

phi again, to find appeasement for having abducted a
young boy for sex, whereupon the gods had sent to
Thebes an ugly monster, which settled at the city gate
asking every passenger a riddle: What being, with
only one voice, has sometimes two feet, sometimes
three, sometimes four, and is weakest when it has the
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
most? Oedipus, who went to Thebes straight after

the murder of his father, guessed the right answer and
replied:
Man, because he crawls on all fours as an infant,

stands firmly on his two feet in youth, and leans upon
a staff in his old age.
The monster vanished and Oedipus was made

king of Thebes, and he married Jocasta, his own
mother, without of course knowing what he was do-
ing. But his glory did not last as a blind seer arrived at
the court and declared that King Oedipus was the
murderer of Laius. Nobody believed him but the
Queen of Corinth then spread the information about
Oedipus origins. Jocasta committed suicide, and
Oedipus blinded himself and, pursued by the Furies,
cursed his sons (and brothers) Eteocles and Poly-
neices, and went into exile.
And here we see the curse taking over the next

generation. After many years of wandering about the
world, guided by his daughter-sister Antigone, Oedi-
pus died, but peace did not come to the House of
Thebes. Both Eteocles and Polyneices died in the war
that broke out over the succession to the Theban
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THE EGO MATTER
throne. And Antigone was sentenced to death be-

cause she had released her dying brothers spirit
against the order of her father Creon. Polyneices son
attempted to regain the throne, but lost the battle
and Thebes was sacked.
A Teaching Tale?
Is this old myth perhaps a teaching tale? To begin
with, I wonder if we can trust the authenticity of the
tale. There are at least three incidences where the
plot is against common sense, when we consider the
custom of the times it originates from. And inde-
pendently of that context, the credibility of the tale is
weakened by lacking probability. These incidences
are:
A patriarch who casts his wife out will not possi-

bly invite her again for sharing a meal with her. How
could Jocasta get her husband drunk if he did not re-
voke his repudiation and invited her to join him
again? And if he did, her act of forcing him to copu-
late with her to get her pregnant when he was drunk
is at least equal in low spirits to his harsh act of repu-
diating her. In ancient patriarchy, an act of repudiation
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
did not need to be justified in any way. Every man had

the right to cast his wife out at any moment. And of
course, he equally had the right to take her again if he
repudiated her in a hot temper. If the story says they
were sharing a meal and wine was consumed, this
means that he had taken her again, and thus the
harsh act of repudiation was forgotten. To construe an
evil act out of the repudiation as such, as Liz Greene
and Sharman-Burke do in saying he had to inform his
wife about the reason of casting her out, is a typical
trap-reasoning of modern psychologists, who inter-
pret meaning into old myths, instead of taking mean-
ing out of them.
A royally bred and educated young man infuri-

ated about a kings chariot, reacts rudely and because
the chariot doesnt make way, gets hurt, and as a re-
taliation bluntly murders the king, tearing him from his
chariot like a street robber would do, and then
mounts the horses to treat him in the dust? Wait a
moment, this may fit in a Hollywood story, but it
doesnt fit in that time and place. A king was not driv-
ing his own chariot, and he was not being driven in
any kind of chariot, but a royal chariot, and he had a
horseman, or several horsemen, for doing that, and
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THE EGO MATTER
there were a number of other people around who

would have prevented the young man from tearing
the king down in the gutter and then let the horses
tread him in the ground.
A king abducting and raping a young boy?

Wait a moment, once again, and look at what boylove
means in ancient Greece, and what abduction means!
And here, a look at the original text would be needed
for what the authors call rape is again something
that is most of the time interpreted into old myths.
The abduction of noble boys was prohibited by

law in ancient Greece, but not the abduction of slave
boys. Abduction was at that time a frequent means
for having a fortnight of intercourse with a pubescent
boy. This kind of abduction was not, as today, fol-
lowed by murder. In the regular case it was followed
by setting the youngster free after giving him a more
or less important gift that depending on the social
status of the lover could be a substantial remunera-
tion.
As a matter of fact, abduction was frequently in

old patriarchy the foreplay of a marriage as well; this is
true for both Hebrew culture and ancient Greece and
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
Rome. The only obligation a lover had when abduct-

ing a girl for sex was to marry her, or to pay a com-
pensation to the father in case he did not. When the
lover was a king, he certainly had the right to enjoy
sex with young people, as this was the custom of the
time, and under the laws of the place he could get a
problem only if he had abducted a noble boy and did
not give the boy an important present, nor offered
any recompense to the father. Without considering all
these details, to construe out of Laius boylove an of-
fense against the gods, as the authors reason or
worse, to call this act a crime in the modern sense of
the term, is quite far-fetched and is, as I pointed out
before, just another intropretation of an ancient tale
that betrays the bias of the interpreter.
I have to resign here from further speculations as I

got long ago a strong feeling that this myth was con-
strued as a teaching tale, and as such would not to be
qualified as a myth that grew organically within a cul-
ture, to reflect the mores of that culture. This story is
either misconstrued or it was reconstrued later on to
fit the morals of our modern epoch.
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THE EGO MATTER
What I intuitively feel is that the story teaches that

patriarchy as a social paradigm is dysfunctional and
creates havoc in all possible relationships, parent-
child, husband-spouse, and ruler-citizen. I feel that the
actors on the stage are not playing their own selves,
but social roles. The roles they are playing are cultural
clichs. The question I was asking to myself when I
once read this tale for the first time was: How would I
react if I received such an oracle?
And I found I would reason What have I done that

I receive such a bad and fatal oracle? With this quest
for self-knowledge, namely, I would try to find out who
I am, what my roots are, what my parents have possi-
bly thought or felt when they conceived me, and what
the circumstances were of my birth. Had Oedipus
asked these questions, he would with some probabil-
ity have returned to Corinth to seriously find out the
truth about his origins by questioning his adoptive
parents. And if he had been honest, serious and
committed, there is again a chance they would have
told him the true story. And with this opening of his
consciousness, the spell of the oracle would have lost
a lot, if not all of its power.
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
The very act of inquiry, the quest for self-

knowledge is exactly what appeases the anger of
even the most revengeful gods, and this is why above
the gate of the Apollo temple in Delphi, visible for
everyone who visits the oracle, is written:
Know Thyself!
Ancient patriarchy as todays consumer culture,

which is but a modernized vintage of it, are against
the inner quest, and do not teach young people what
self-inquiry means and how it can be carried out. And
this is, after all, the greatest pitfall of this cultural per-
version we use to call patriarchy.
And to come back to Freud, I must note that I am

not ahead in my inquiry why he chose this tale for ex-
emplifying the childs psychosexual growth. I can only
guess that Freud chose this tale for exemplifying the
modern childs neurosis, or potential neurosis, the
modern childs cultural and individual neurosis that
namely results from a deeply schizophrenic cultural
setup.
Franoise Dolto, who was internationally reputed

to be one of the foremost child therapists, capable of
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THE EGO MATTER
healing psychotic children, said in one of her work-

shops on child psychoanalysis that most young psy-
choanalysts forget about the fact that only the neu-
rotic child is incestuously fixated upon their parents,
or the parent of the opposite sex, but not the normal
and psychically healthy child.
If I could, I would ask her: What about the per-

centage of children born in modern consumer culture
that are really psychically healthy in the sense that
they are fully sexual without being psychosexually at-
tracted to their parents? My own guess is, perhaps
ten percent.
So I am back at where I started, knowing what I

knew before, that is, that a culture is mad that ar-
ranges family in a way that incestuous fixations are
going to be a problem. That they are rampant in our
culture was indeed Doltos view, and her view was
based upon almost lifelong professional experience.
In her book La Cause des Enfants (1985), she writes:
In the nuclear family of today, especially in ur-

ban areas, the tensions and conflicts are much
more explosive, and this is so because they are
underlying. Today, the number of persons a
child is in touch with is more restrained than
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
formerly. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the child

could transfer their incestuous feelings toward
other women than their mothers who enjoyed
to play little funny sex games with little boys or
young people of whom they were not the
mother. (Id., 40)
So what am I to do? Blame psychoanalysis?
That sounds like blaming the messenger for the

message he brings. Freud analyzed his culture. He did
not create a new culture. He did not want to change
what he saw was an insane culture that brings more
evil than good with its moralism, its wars and taboos.
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THE EGO MATTER
He said his mission as a psychiatrist was to heal those

who suffer from the pathologies this culture quite in-
evitably brings about, not more, and not less. But I do
not need to follow Freud here, but can become an
activist for a new society where children enjoy sexual
freedom.
I can take the position that Wilhelm Reich at the

time took against Freud, who admitted and recog-
nized his cultural imbeddedness. Reich argued that
we are not the victims of the culture that brought us
about, but that we bound to help changing a culture
we see is based on principles that stir madness and
chaotic behavior in humans. I personally agree with
Reich, while Freud was not wrong after all. He only
was conservative. That was his choice.
I am ahead one step, a tiny step though.
I know that I can heal people who suffer from the

pathologies this culture creates, and I know also that I
can help changing this culture.
And more importantly, I know that for doing the

latter, I cannot harness the power of psychoanalysis.
As a matter of common sense, for changing my cul-
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
ture, I must go beyond analyzing it, or proving it

wrong. I must show a better way, and I do this first of
all by changing myself. What does that imply?
I already mentioned one part of it: find out who I

am, what my origins are, what my individual and fam-
ily karma is. And also, what my talents are, my unique
gifts, what my creative potential is like, if its mathe-
matical, visual, literary, or artistic, if its good for a ca-
reer in design, in painting, the performing arts, in sci-
ence, or in philology, or if I am manually gifted, to be-
come an artisan, or a pianist.
The next part would be to see what my spiritual

orientation is, what I personally understand under the
word spirituality and what I can take from the waters
religions offer, or what I cannot take from them. I may
choose to craft to my own religion, my own liberal or
not so liberal spirituality.
And what happens when I do that? I not only gain

self-knowledge, I also help changing my culture. Ex-
plain it as a morphogenetic response or in any other
way, fact is that all we individually achieve is an
achievement also for the whole of our culture. Thus
we impact upon culture, and, incrementally help that
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THE EGO MATTER
culture to reform itself, to change, to transform into a

better, more conscious and more harmonious culture
in the future.
For example, when I have suffered early child

trauma, I will seek out advice and try to cope with
what I see are consequences of my fixation, and I may
become aware of the fact that this deep early hurt
created anxiety and a constriction of my emotional
flow.
So I need to get to terms with my body and my

bioenergetic setup, by trying to have a harmonious
sex life that is as much as possible free of hurt in-
flicted to others, as much as possible free of anxiety,
and as much as possible free of compulsion. So I will
not obey to what society tells me because I know its
wrong and abject because its societys setup itself
that has brought about abuse in the first place; hence,
I will opt for free and consenting erotic relationships
that I feel are okay for me and my partners whatever
their age. This is the way of the true hero. In the next
sub-chapters I am going to explore the more convo-
luted ways of the Oedipal Hero. And then you may
see for yourself which is the better way for you. You
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
can choose what kind of hero you want to be, a true

hero or a false hero. Oedipus was the latter.
The true hero integrates self-knowledge, the fake

hero, or Oedipal Hero, does without. Thats really the
only difference.
But that tiny difference in our inner setup, in our

basic worldview, our attitude, our orientation, you are
going to see in the following pages, makes a huge
difference in the world, in what the person brings
about, as fruits, as karma.
To condense it, Id say that the true hero creates

human progress and evolution while the Oedipal
Hero creates denial, stuckness, stifled evolution or
devolution. Why this is so is quite easy to understand.
The true heros mission, as it is based upon conscious
choices brings about an increase of humanitys con-
sciousness. The Oedipal Heros mission, as it is based
upon unconscious choices is to decrease humanitys
consciousness.
In still easier terms, the true hero brings more light

to the shadows, while the Oedipal Hero brings more
shadow to the light. You could also say that the Oedi-
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THE EGO MATTER
pal Hero is the counterplayer to human evolution, and

was historically always prominent in times of fascism,
political restoration, religious tyranny and the retro-
gradation of true spirituality into fundamentalist relig-
ious fanaticism.
It may still not be clear what an Oedipal Hero ac-

tually is, so I need to further elucidate what character-
izes a man or woman who actually is an Oedipal Hero.
As a matter of terminology, the woman-type, ac-

cording to the Freudian expression, should be called
Electra Hero, but I may simplify matters, or rather re-
strict the topic to the male vintage of our Oedipus.
I think its wiser to leave it over to a woman to write

the other half of the story! I namely argue with the I
Ching that self-restraint is a virtue rather than a vice as
far as knowledge is concerned. To be true, I am not
possessing the emotional knowledge to write the
other part, especially with regard to our hot melting
sexual feelings; a man can only speculate how a little
girl experiences love for her father, and here is where
science finds its natural limitation. Science is not ob-
jective and will never be, and a man who explores a
womans sexual universe will never be a real scientist!
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
This is why, at this point of the study, I am going to

deliberately restrict the scope of this part of the
guide, and explore further on about the male vintage
of the Oedipal Hero only. And hereby, I imply that
there is of course a female version of the fairy tale,
and I do invite female authors to venture into writing
the other half of the moon.
And there is still another difference. The mother-

son relation can hardly be compared with the father-
daughter relation because the male is more fragile on
a psychic level, and therefore mother-son co-
dependence is more devastating for healthy psy-
chosexual growth of a boy than is father-daughter co-
dependence for the psychosexual growth of a girl.
This is recognized by most psychologists, psychoana-
lysts and psychiatrists today; this insight also is part of
perennial science and it is not a sexist view.
The male and female sexes are not construed in

the same way on the psychic level, a fact that has
been demonstrated time and again in times of crisis,
war and social upheaval.
Women simply are stronger and more psychically

robust than men. They live longer, are less prone to
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THE EGO MATTER
heart disease, chronic fatigue and depression disor-

ders, and can cope better with stress, both in the
work place and at home. Of course, as always, excep-
tions confirm the rule.
I think to advance theoretical reasoning and intel-

lectual deductions on what characterizes the Oedipal
Hero would be a tedious endeavor. Instead, let me
discuss the problem by using teaching tales or exam-
ples. As I do not wish to importunate anybody, I will
construe examples from living material, leaving it over
to the reader to see parallels to any known person of
the past or of present times.
To begin with, the main characteristic of the Oedi-

pal Hero is his lack of self-knowledge. He ignores his
true identity. He does not know anything or very little
about his roots, and has build a worldview that is not
unlike a torso. He has left out from his basic life phi-
losophy all that would betray his true identity, so he
rejects astrology, divination, and also any kind of
lesser esoteric knowledge that could inform him
about himself. In one word, he rejects truth, true
knowledge, and construes a science that delivers him
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
the half-truths that comfort him in his pitiful spiritual

ignorance.
In the same way as Oedipus did not reason after

receiving the oracle for finding the truth of that
strange prediction within himself, and thus within his
destiny, he goes out to save the world from evil, and
here is where his pseudo-heroic quest starts. In the
same way as Oedipus did not even think of journeying
to Corinth to investigate his origins, the Oedipal Hero
murders his father, metaphorically speaking, by deny-
ing his origins and his karma.
He betrays himself, and his biological, spiritual and

genetic roots by reasoning that he never had a fa-
ther, that he was growing up in a females-only
household, that he had nothing in common with his
father, as his father was in his words a lost soul, a
drinker, or a social freak, clochard or inept, a se-
cret homosexual or hidden pedophile, an eternal
student, hopeless philosopher, eternal abuser or
simply, somebody who should never have married
and put a child in the world. All these variations of
the theme father surge up in dialogues with Oedipal
Heroes, which are often dialogues with those who ei-
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THE EGO MATTER
ther got a problem with society, with rules, with

authority, or who are on a spiritual-only track.
The latter group of males is interesting because in

rejecting their father, they more precisely reject life,
the juice of it, pleasure, sensuality, and emotional in-
telligence, replacing rich life experiences by a rigid
and dogmatic system of fundamentalist beliefs. Thus
we got the social-inept, the home-sitters and misan-
thropes, the revolted ones who want to blow up the
system, if they call themselves anarchists or terrorists
or whatever, and we got the dictators and tyrants who
want to punish the world as a projective act for pun-
ishing their inadequate fathers. And we got the child
killers who want to punish little girls or boys for not
being nice enough to them when they play out their
unresolved father imago with the implicit but un-
voiced question Am I not lovable? and we got, last
not least, the social activist for any good cause for
teaching the world what real and unconditional
goodness is all about. All of them are Oedipal He-
roes, only that society in its eternal mysticism finds the
latter vintage okay and all the other vintages not okay.
Society, while not reflecting about the difference, wor-
ships the positive Oedipal Hero while it despises its
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
negative counterpart. Society somehow understands

that both characters have in common that they had a
hard childhood, but mainstream society sees a sign of
strength and virtue in the fact that a person denies his
wound instead of understanding that real strength is
to acknowledge ones wound.
Society does generally not see that both the posi-

tive and the negative Oedipal Hero are hurting oth-
ers, only that the criminal, the schizophrenic and the
terrorist do it openly and as it were honestly, and the
fake hero, the social activist who throws his weight
around as a dire persecutor, fundamentalist, spy,
world puritan and ruthless policeman does it covertly
and in a projective manner. He hurts those he slaugh-
ters in the name of doing good.
The sane mind does not need to save anybody. He

does not need to go out for wars against prostitution,
child abuse, womens rights or whatever hits his mind.
He accepts the world because he accepts himself.
And he accepts himself because he has accepted his
origins, his father, and his karma.
The main characteristic, thus, of the Oedipal Hero,

compared to the true hero is that he does not know
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THE EGO MATTER
who he is and why he does what he does. He believes

he is doing good for others and the world, following a
rather mechanistic scheme of values and good-and-
bad judgments he has internalized when he was the
good boy for his mom. As a result, his behavior code
is rather rigid, and his mindset is judgmental. He sees
the world divided in the good guys and the bad guys,
like in a movie, and his political opinions are following
this black-and-white scheme of extreme judgmental-
ism.
The psychological reason for the Oedipal Hero be-

ing often simplistic, harsh, clear-cut, dry and judg-
mental in his evaluation of the world, and human ac-
tion, is that he needs to defend the insight that lifes
complexity is smarter than him, telling him, one way
or the other, the fake-reasons he is acting for, and
what his true motivations are. He intuits that this, in
turn, would get him quite automatically on the track
of self-inquiry, and that he would by and by find out
about his origins, and his karma.
The truth is that life always guides us to gain more

self-knowledge and a person must really be rigid be-
yond reason and judgmental and projective in their
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
overall attitude that the natural quest for self-

knowledge is completely silenced. This means the
person needs to invest vital energy to uphold the de-
nial structure and the array of projects it has created.
And here we are at the core of the etiology of neu-

rosis as Freud and others have described it. Its a de-
nial of desire, the desire for knowledge that is inher-
ent in all living, and its this denial of knowledge that
is the true reason why the person denies sexual en-
gagements, because sex with others brings knowl-
edge.
While masturbation or autoerotic sex doesnt.

Only intercourse brings this knowledge; it is highly
significant that the word is also used for denoting so-
cial intercourse. It brings knowledge both about our
mate and ourselves. This truth is beautifully expressed
in the Bible where sexual intercourse is described as
carnal knowledge or when it is said that a man is go-
ing to know a women when he goes in to his wife or
concubine. It has often been said that the Hebrews
prohibition of masturbation had procreational rea-
sons, but it may also have been an encouragement to
seek intercourse in the sense of going out and multi-
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THE EGO MATTER
ply as a matter of social communication, instead of

staying home and masturbating ones soul off in
dreadful solitude.
The number one reason why free sexuality was his-

torically forbidden to slaves is that it brings knowl-
edge. In ancient Greece, for example, boylove, the
erotic and passionate love of adolescent boys, was
permitted only to noble men, not to slaves. A slave
who would arrogate to engage in a love relation with
a boy would have been jailed.
Another well-known example is the Christian

Church. The taboo on sexuality outside the marriage
bed and procreation was a powerful aid in the
Churchs quest for spiritual dominion and control; the
Church enforced this taboo draconically, by using
threat, persecution, torture and deliberate murder,
during the Inquisition. The result was a populace that
was highly ignorant, and is in wide parts still today, for
example about natural contraception, while before
the holocaust committed by the Inquisition, this
knowledge was freely available from midwives and
witch doctors.
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
By the same token, the rationale behind the child

being today prohibited to engage in sexual relations
with peers and adults outside of the family is to keep
children ignorant as long as possible in order to safe-
guard consumer cultures dominion and to insure that,
as they are starved emotionally and sexually, they be-
come avid and brainless consumers. The present
stronghold of multinational business over peoples
bodies and minds would be impossible to maintain if
children grew up knowledgeable about natural copu-
lation from early in life.
And here we may further understand that the

Oedipal Hero really is a masturbator in every sense of
the word, sexually, and also metaphorically in the
sense of rubbing himself against himself, thereby
avoiding the warm company of others.
This latter characteristic forms part of his self-

enclosing narcissism, and is not evidently related to
his Oedipal fixation. The Oedipal Hero is a brilliant
masturbator also in front of others, when it goes to
hold speeches where he can ejaculate all his poison
against his particular scapegoat target.
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THE EGO MATTER
The other main characteristic of the Oedipal Hero

is that, much to his own ignorance, he is a repressed
pedophile. He has strongly repressed and con-
demned his pedophile urges, to a point to forget his
initial attraction somewhere around adolescence and
early adulthood. Instead of asking what makes him
desire children, and because of fear and guilt, he pre-
fers to shut the door to that inner world and rejects
the whole of that itching need for closeness with chil-
dren; this is how, as a matter of bioenergetic retro-
gradation, he becomes a pedophile-hater and perse-
cutor.
The pedophile differs from the Oedipal Hero in

that he is conscious of his desire for emotional and
sexual closeness with children, and he more or less
accepts it. But there are also pedophiles who have
not really accepted the choice they have made un-
consciously, cursing their fate to be among a sexual
minority that is the most despised of all; these half-
cooked pedophiles are often also half-cooked Oedi-
pal Heroes.
I have known a number of exemplars of this vin-

tage and saw them invariably engaged in humanitar-
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
ian activities for destitute, poor or orphan children,

but they strongly condemn in themselves and others
every hint of erotic attraction for a child, and when
they see other pedophiles acting out, they strike, and
denounce them!
All Oedipal Heroes, fully or half baked, have in

common that they are out to prove the world how
strong, good, righteous, courageous, tough and de-
termined they are, and they tend to emphasize that
they do not do what they do for selfish reasons, but
for making a difference, for helping change the
world, or making a significant contribution. It is the
rhetoric of selfishness being bad, and altruism being
good, of egoism versus altruism, of ego versus be-
yond, and all the simplistic spiritual gimmick we know
from fundamentalist religions.
They have as it were customized that rhetoric for

justifying their persecutor if not terminator spirit that
lets them be eternally on guard, like the proverbial
baboon, with an erect phallus, to spy out the bad
guys and punish them by painful anal rapeat least in
their fantasies. (Most of them will do male rape within
the range of legalized persecution, thus in most cases
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THE EGO MATTER
by calling law enforcement, but some of them do

rape physically, when they happen to be in jail and
can spy out sex offenders). As a matter of fantasy, and
because they repress a good part of their genitality,
they are often regressed into anality, which makes
them not very cosy to have around, as they are never
relaxed, always constipated, dutifully busy, always on
guard, always ready to strike, always charged with
emotions they have never learnt to handle.
In their relations with women, these males are

most often rough, as they are confused about what
tenderness means, and believe a real man had to be
smelly, rough and always on top, also sexually. At
home, they hardly ever take care of the children as
they believe indoor activities are for females, and that
males have to win the bread most of the time.
They most of all abhor imposing females, and a

female is dominating already for them when she
doesnt want to follow but got her own opinions.
Then, she is found opinionated. When she refuses to
be beaten for daily little critter, she is found emanci-
pated. When she likes beauty and an aesthetic home,
she is called extravagant. When she is tender, sweet
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and caring with the children, she is called a hen. Be-

ware she is a beautiful woman; she will be constantly
supposed to have an affair! And when she did have
an affair and is found out, she is called a loose cunt
and cast out.
Oedipal Heroes are often to be found in rough

sports such as boxing or car racing, and they defi-
nitely are the species that populates our gymnasia,
and that need to order extra size for the suit, simply
as a matter of muscular hypertrophy. They prefer
bodybuilding over mindbuilding, and they are in-
creasingly to be found in politics, where mind was no-
toriously never asked for. Intellectually Oedipal He-
roes tend to be mediocre, while they may invest a
good time in learning and study, even when adult.
When around brilliant people, people at home in
academia, or geniuses, they tend to feel inadequate,
inferior, ridden with a complex to be intellectual infe-
rior, not smart enough, or to lack conversational abili-
ties, which results in their poor attitude when around
on parties, receptions or gala diners.
Regarding manners, they are rather unpolished

and tend to come and go in company, so as to have
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THE EGO MATTER
some backup in case they commit a faux pas. They

abhor to dress well and then go alone to a reception,
or they simply avoid it. They are the stuff of dreams of
naive country girls, and they have made their fame on
the back of that kind of populace, especially in Holly-
wood drama. Their clumsiness when being around in
good society is taken for the charm of the eternal
youth, the adolescent charming guy, the Peter Pan of
the fairies, the puer archetype.
They have helped decisively in forming the Ameri-

can Dream, and in the glamorous world of Hollywood
movies they are stage requisites. The hidden side of
the Oedipal Heros glory, his glorious goodness, is his
abysmal violence. In most cases, Oedipal Heroes are
aware of their problem with controlling their anger,
their violent outbursts and temper tantrums, and their
overall rather revengeful behavior. As if they waited
for an opportunity to get mad and run amok, so as to
prove themselves that they are real men.
The other side of the moon is well to be seen in

the movie Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde that shows the
schizophrenic nature of the Oedipal Hero in a beauti-
fully staged and orchestrated manner. Here the good
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
doc, there the bad dick, two sides of the same medal,
as the good citizen transforms into the bad animal-
man in a matter of seconds.
Nature is indeed revengeful to those who repress

their true nature, and they are controlled by the inner
selves they disown. In repressing our pedoemotions
or, generally speaking, in replacing love by moralism,
which is the bad choice the Oedipal Hero did and
where he acted against his better nature, his better
knowledge and his higher consciousness, he became
deeply fragmented, to a point, in some pathological
cases, that the personality splits apart and two sepa-
rate split personalities emerge.
But what the film shows, and what good psychiatry

can equally demonstrate, the split is already there in
the Oedipally fixated character, and as a matter of cul-
tural choice, this split is also part of our culture.
Which is why I call it an Oedipal Culture.
While we see Oedipal Heroes acting out on the

public stage virtually every day, as they are so popular,
and increasingly popular, we see only their light, and
not their shadow. We see only what they do and say
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THE EGO MATTER
officially, not what they do and say in private, and be-

hind closed doors.
We are not supposed to know about it because we

would be shocked!
Narcissus and Oedipus

This brings me to explain the narcissistic hangup
of the Oedipal Hero, his extreme narcissism. The
authors of The Mythic Journey talk about the tragedy
of narcissistic love.
In understanding the Oedipal Heros narcissism,

we will understand his destructiveness, and more spe-
cifically, we will begin to see why he is out to destroy
love wherever he meets with it. Liz Greene and Juliet
Sharman-Burke write:
This sad myth from Greece tells of passion and

rejection, and shows how retaliation and re-
venge, far from bringing relief, only increase the
agony. More importantly, it implies that if we do
not know ourselves, we may spend our lives
seeking this knowledge through self-
obsessionwhich means that we are not able
to offer love to others. (Id., 42)
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
Narcissism really is not what most lay people un-

derstand under this header. It is not selflove, but the
very contrary of it.
Narcissus was deaf to the whispers of the nymph

Echo not because he loved himself too much, but be-
cause he was self-obsessed.
Self-obsession is not selflove, it is a compensation

of their inner vacuum, which is a lack of self-
knowledge, and also a total lack of true spirituality. It
is a loss of soul. We cannot love another when our
lives are soulless, and meaningless, when we lack
spiritual orientation in life, when we dont know who
we really are.
Narcissists, and also those who have the double

affliction of an Oedipal hangup together with a nar-
cissistic fixation, that is, Oedipal Heroes, are under-
standing many things under the header of love. They
understand that it may allow one to control another,
to take advantage of another, to be comforted in
lonely moments, to have a wife that bears children, or
children who care for one in old agewhich are all
utilitarian concepts of love.
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THE EGO MATTER
He may foster other concepts of love, but they are

all not love, but conceptual molds for something they
do not understand. They are fingers that point to the
moon, but not the moon, as the Zen saying goes. And
what most narcissists most want when they say they
love somebody is fulfillment, satisfaction, emotional
and sexual, and often also material satisfaction. I
have one wife and two children. I have a family. I have
a home. I have company. I have security. I have com-
fort. I have.
The Oedipal Hero is fully on the side of what Erich

Fromm called To Have and very little or not at all on
the side of To Be. He believes a life of true To Be is
reserved to artists, children and life coaches. For him,
love must have a reason. And if it has none, he will
give one to it. The Oedipal Hero virtually bathes in
conceptual thinking; the idea that life may be some-
thing to be truly perceived only when doing away with
all concepts and put up a direct connection is an alien
idea to him.
I have got the proof of these facts many times in

my life, in relations with Oedipal Heroes, most of the
time those who worship a social ideal, and who are
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
violently against alcohol and consciousness-altering

compounds.
These people regularly suffer from depressions,

experience constant drawbacks in relationships, and
most of them complain about hard-to-control sexual
urges. When I suggest to them to once go and look
over the fence of their senseless activism by going on
a discovery journey, either by using Ayahuasca or by
doing some real spiritual work on their etheric bodies,
I get the answer that they are invariably against eso-
terism, against new ageism, against drugs and
against daydreamerism.
The ending -ism most often appears in their dic-

tion. One wrote about my Encyclopedia, he found it
quite good but could not understand my mysticism
and spiritualism, as he expressed himself. When I
pointed him to his need for love in his relationships,
and affirmed that love given was most often returned,
he said he had no sense for so much lovism. And in
subsequent mails he would come up with reasons why
love does not exist and can never exist with the hu-
man race, that love was but a religious idea or an in-
tellectual concept, and nothing real.
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THE EGO MATTER
The most offensive of Oedipal Heroes, in my view,

are the spies. I have discovered a number of them in
the rings of the pedophile movement, and what is
typical about them is that they want to appear more
pedophile than pedophile to attract the attention of
those who are really pedophile. They themselves, be
they outright police spies, be they half-baked pedo-
philes who are not clear about their feelings and how
they can cope with them, constantly are to be found
in search of contact with pedophiles, usually via online
forums and mailing lists, where they implore their af-
fliction and ask others how to cope with it, or if sui-
cide was perhaps the best solution?
What they are really searching for is love and un-

derstanding. They want to be loved and chose to mix
with one of the most persecuted minorities so as to
get attention and consolation of their inner empti-
ness, and their more or less total spiritual ignorance.
They may have felt an attraction once to a little boy or
girl, adolescent or child, and derive from such a single
event a conclusion of being a pedophile while they
otherwise completely ignore what this means and im-
plies. Which is just another typical habit they often
engage in: jumping to conclusions with a tidbit of
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
knowledge, or in total ignorance of what they are ac-

tually talking about.
The reason is boomeritis.
They pick up whatever they find fashionable and

cool, be it something others frown upon, if only they
can make a difference by indulging in it and pretend-
ing to be this-and-that. So doing will for a certain
while fill their inner emptiness; they have something
to gossip and rant about.
As to the facts, I have largely expanded about

what is, and what is not pedophile attraction in other
publications; the fact of having a one-time or transi-
tory sexual attraction for a child by no means implies
the person to being pedophile and still less to being
a pedophile.
I have particularly elucidated that we all have pe-

doemotions, which means loving feelings for children
that may or not become sexualized.
While pedoemotions are universal, pedophiles are

special in that their sexual attraction has crystallized
into something exclusive; their emosexual focus is on
children, and here even more particularly upon a spe-
291
THE EGO MATTER
cific age group and gender of children, not just chil-

dren as a generic group. Pedophile attraction is not
random, but specific.
A modern-day subject Oedipal Heroes rant about

is pedophilia, or rather what they project upon it. And
its no better when its about their own supposed pe-
dophilia, when in truth they are hooked up in a shal-
low normalcy and are looking for a girlfriend, a young
women, but dare not approach one, coward as they
are. Interestingly so, Sigmund Freud must have known
some exemplars of this vintage, but he was gross and
unscientific when generalizing that male pedophilia
generally was but cowardice to approach an adult fe-
male. In that general sense, Freuds statement is
blunder, but with regard to this specific group of
Oedipal Heroes I mentioned, it is true.
Oedipal Heroes bear their narcissistic wound often

in public, like one bears an amulet; this is especially
today the practice in the United States and in the
American media world; narcissism, as its the fashion-
able affliction of a whole nation, has become a sign of
class. Thomas Moore says in his book Care of the Soul
(1994) that America has a great longing to be the New
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
World of opportunity and a moral beacon for the

world. And further:
It longs to fulfill these narcissistic images of it-

self. At the same time it is painful to realize the
distance between the reality and that image.
Americas narcissism is strong. It is paraded be-
fore the world. If we were to put the nation on
the couch, we might discover that narcissism is
its most obvious symptom. And yet that narcis-
sism holds the promise that this all-important
myth can find its way into life. In other words,
Americas narcissism is its refined puer spirit of
genuine new vision. The trick is to find a way to
that water of transformation where hard self-
absorption turns into loving dialogue with the
world. (Id., 45)
In a way, narcissists suffer not only from their own

emotional starvation, and their inner lack of love, but
also, and more importantly, from the love and the
emotions they try to attack, invalidate and make down
in others. This terrible reductionism breeds destruc-
tiveness that they pay for by being increasingly nihilis-
tic and depressive, the older they get. Accordingly,
Thomas Moore observes:
Narcissism has no soul. In narcissism we take

away the souls substance, its weight and impor-
tance, and reduce it to an echo of our own
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THE EGO MATTER
thoughts. There is no such thing as the soul. We

say. It is only the brain going through electrical
and chemical changes. Or it is only behavior. Or
it is only memory and conditioning. (Id., 46)
The authors of The Mythic Journey (2000) com-

ment that The unhappy love lives of many public
icons testimony to this voracious hunger for love
which is meant to replace what was missing early in
lifea sense of being real as oneself. In a society that
has since long lost every notion of what love truly is,
because it has killed love, it is no wonder that it has
become a fashion to speculate love was just a con-
cept, and there was nothing behind but rhetoric, and
that what religions suppose is love is not.
Many males in our sensually deprived postmodern

neo-patriarchy believe love to be a mere concept, a
word, a religious idea, or a rose-colored birthday card,
because they really never experienced how love feels!
As children they were not loved, not desired, because
they had busy parents, parents who were interested in
money-making, science or banking, but not in the
children they procreated.
Thus, here is their huge narcissistic wound, as they

grew into a life that was basically felt as cold and hos-
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
tile, as they have felt their parents to be eternally ab-

sentminded, when they really needed their warmth,
their closeness, their touch, their kisses, their strokes
and fondling, their love expressed by the bodyand
not by nice-sounding verbiage. Many of them had
probably as parents those gossiping monsters that
American commercials lavishly portray as the nations
model parents.
In fact, this vintage obviously coins the mold for

the mass of shallow-minded individuals who are hos-
tile to touch as they suffer from the cultures bias that
assumes that all touch is somehow sexual. They thus
embody the politically correct American parent who
keeps his hands safely in his pockets! Noli me tan-
gere!
I think it would be a miracle when in such a culture

a family is not habitually violent, not schizophrenic,
not touch-hostile, and where a single child can grow
into a healthy and joyful autonomy and self-reliance. I
want to see that child! You can search for it as the
proverbial needle in the hay. For of course the collec-
tive picture of a society assembled of a majority of
Oedipal Heroes, mixed of the male and female vin-
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THE EGO MATTER
tage, is not your usual healthy collective, but a mad-

house.
The Postmodern Mix

In this last sub-chapter, I shall elucidate how the
Oedipus and Narcissus sagas hang together, and how
this has given the intrinsic taste to todays postmod-
ern consumer culture, which I call synonymously
Oedipal culture, hero culture, paranoid culture, par-
aculture, incest culture, rape culture, murder culture
or abuse-centered culture. I shall focus in this analysis
on how the violent impulse comes up to abduct,
sexually penetrate and murder young children, and
how it is related to both the Oedipal and narcissistic
fixations playing in synch, which, then, gives the spe-
cial postmodern mix of violent moralism.
This problem has never been understood by psy-

chiatry. In the case of the German child killer Jrgen
Bartsch, even today German psychiatric authorities
exhibit the nonsensical theory of Bartsch having been
at the same time a pedophile, a pederast and a ho-
mosexual. Which is about as saying that a cauliflower
is composed of a tree, an apple and a pear.
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
As long as Western psychology, psychiatry and

sexology do not recognize the primacy of the emo-
tional etiology in sexual paraphilias before jumping to
look for the culprit in the sexual setup of the person,
nothing will be understood here, not even in the fu-
ture.
I have drafted an approach to healing sexual sa-

dism that focuses on a bioenergetic view and that ac-
knowledges that in every sexual attraction the prime
motivating force is emotional, and not sexual in the
first place. It is this emotional predilection that in
some cases becomes sexualized, or charged with
sexual energy. The healing of the sadistic affliction,
then, is brought about through reactivating the natu-
ral emotional flow in the organism. Thus, when I want
to understand sadism and violent sex crime that is an
outflow of this sadism, I must focus on the emotional
setup of the person, and inquire if emotions are flow-
ing, or if the emotional flow is blocked.
In fact, sadism can only be understood when the

fact is seen that emotions, as a condensation of lan
vital or life force, naturally flow in the healthy organ-
ism, and are changing in a kaleidoscopic way, and that
297
THE EGO MATTER
every blockage of this flow brings about a violent

outburst because the energy will free its way to full
discharge. (If the latter is also prohibited by the per-
sons superego, the person will not be a sadist but
grow a cancer or throw a heart disease).
I shall develop further along the lines of the Nar-

cissus legend and ask a few questions. According to
the myth, Narcissus fell in love with his own self-
image. Was he never loved by anyone, or why did he
feel such an urge to fall in love, an urge so strong that
in absence of any tangible other love object, he chose
himself? Since his childhood, his beauty had been
admired by everyone.
Narcissus himself, however, who has never seen

himself in the mirror, was unaware of his identity. One
day, when he walked at the border of a lake which was
a virgin lake as no animal had ever drunk from it, and
no tree ever plunged its branches in it, and no human
had ever seen it. Here, the youngster felt a sudden
fatigue. He sat down at the lake and bowed over the
water for drinking. And, for the first time, he saw his
double. Fallen in love with himself, the myth says, he
spent hours in melancholy and in regretting that he
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
would never be able to possess his twin sister, which

was his living self-image. Eventually, concludes the
tale, Narcissus could not stand the agony of this im-
possible love and ran a knife in his heart, bursting out
in: Farewell, beautiful love that has no hope. And on
the place where his blood fell on the ground, white
narcissi grew that had red hearts.
This for the legend.
On first sight one may think that this is a story

about vanity. But in reality the legend stands for the
discovery of identity. What is identity? Identity can be
defined operationally, as its very difficult to give an
overall definition to it, about as difficult as it is to de-
fine love. Functionally speaking, identity is character-
ized by the fact that all what we can discover in an-
other, we must have discovered in ourselves first.
And the end result of this self-discovery is identity.

This means that we cannot perceive the qualities of
another if, and as long as, we ignore our own. Narcis-
sus apparent egocentrism is truly the first step, and a
necessary one, in his self-discovery, which is catalyzed
by the discovery why he is lovable. Selflove is the
condition for our capacity to love others.
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THE EGO MATTER
This psychological insight must be put in relation

to education and the childs relationship with the
mother. It is not haphazard that in the legend, the
mother took all kinds of precautions to avoid the child
discovering himself in a mirror! Such as Narcissus
mother are mothers who have never time and atten-
tion for their child.
The mother is the mirror of the childs ego. The

ego can develop only in a child whose mother is able
and willing to mirror that ego.
A narcissistic mother cannot do that. This is why

children who have narcissistic mothers, also called
witch mothers, do not know who they are, and their
ego development is deficient.
Such kind of mothers search in their children what

they, when they were young, searched in their par-
ents: they try to mirror themselves in their children,
thereby changing the roles, and the rules, in that they
burden the child with an ability a child cannot have,
namely to be a parent for their own mother. This re-
sults in the child as a later adult having in turn a defi-
cient ego. As it is already obvious after this short ex-
planation, narcissism is by definition generational,
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
really a family curse, to use the old term, and here its
correct, but not for the Oedipal hangup.
The problem of narcissism is especially virulent

with single mothers who got a single male child, and
when the father of the child is absent forever or most
of the time. Here then, in this constellation, as I have
shortly outlined earlier in this study, the Oedipal han-
gup comes in and makes itself felt.
When the boy cannot identify with his father dur-

ing the Oedipal phase, the boy will develop an Oedi-
pal hangup. That means the boy will cling to his
mother in an unhealthy and neurotic manner that will
negatively infringe upon his emotional and psy-
chosexual development.
In the legend, Oedipus killed his father and mar-

ried his mother. He however did this unconsciously,
for he ignored his parents. The tragedy was triggered
by the father, not the son. If we say it was fate, and
only fate, we in last resort deny responsibility. An
Oedipal fixation becomes a problem for a little boy
especially in case the mother is a home-sitter, a
woman who has abandoned any hope to find a viable
partner, and thus projects her erotic wishes on her
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THE EGO MATTER
son. This may be expressed in erotically seductive be-

havior, but in most cases these women are actually
erotically blocked on a conscious level. The problem
here is that the boy wont leave the home in search of
a partner and that the constant emotional demands
of the mother trap the boy in a pseudo-incestuous
and co-dependent partner relation where he be-
comes the ersatz for the partner the mother denies
herself to find.
The fact that such a relation remains platonic is in-

significant compared to the impossibility for the boy
to truly build autonomy. In this constellation, what
happens is that the boys striving for autonomy either
faces explicit demands of the mother to stay close to
her, or is charged with guilt and a growing rationaliza-
tion of the situation that will be expressed by the boy
in the wish to protect the mother, to save the mother
from any harm she suffered previously with men.
Typically in this entanglement situation, the

mother tells her son in all length and width the misfor-
tunes she suffered in her love life, thereby invoking in
him a self-defeating judgment about himself, his own
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
maleness. This negative judgment of the male can be

coarsely expressed in the slogan all men are swines.
In my own case of codependence with my mother,

all this was aggravated further through the fact that
my mother put me in homes where I was cruelly mis-
treated, without caring too much about the violence
inflicted upon me on a daily basis. This resulted in a
particularly strong contradiction between the life I was
leading during the week, in the home, and the life I
was supposed to live with her, during the weekend; it
gave her a basis for justifying her over-protectiveness,
and the home sweet home philosophy she spun
around it. I had to be compensated, she reasoned, for
the bad home in having a nice weekend with her
and she would, as always, be very generous to me,
and it was this so-called generosity that she always
forwarded as a shield in situations of conflict, when I
namely wanted greater autonomy.
I was of course not unconscious of this sordid en-

tanglement, and here I certainly differed from other
youngsters in that I was actually so conscious about it
that I actively wished to break out of it and repeatedly
thought of running away from home. I was often furi-
303
THE EGO MATTER
ous against my mother and had a strong sense of the

injustice she was doing to me, but I could not express
this anger other than by thinking of myself as being a
bad boy.
Later on in life, when I was already married, actu-

ally not so much later, as I married young, I re-
proached my mother to have overprotected me in a
way to keep me away from life, thereby invalidating
my striving for autonomy, and my quest to make love
experiences with girls outside home and school. Her
answer in that and other very similar situations was
one of viciously attacking me as an ungrateful nerd
who was just like his father and uncles, while she had
sacrificed herself always so that I could have a de-
cent life because if I had been under the tutelary
authority of my father, I would have run the streets to
find food. That she regretted the bad experiences I
made in the homes but that she had always been
much more generous than any other parent, for
compensating me a little for the hurt suffered in those
homes.
When I asked her, at age eighteen, to study in

Paris, she replied she was not going to finance my in-
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OEDIPAL CULTURE
terest for luxury and that if I wanted to study there, I

should find my money in the street. I stayed and
studied in my home town. Similarly for the subject to
study. I preferred to become a musical teacher or re-
cording engineer, but she insisted law was the best
for me to study. I gave in while I knew that I had a
passion for music, and for children, and would have to
force myself onto law. Which I did for the next twenty
years.
Typically, emotional abuse does not imply a sexual

interaction between parent and child. In the contrary
will the mother carefully avoid touching the boy, and
its this avoidance of touch much more than anything
that rings the alarm bell in the boys unconscious. Why
does my mother never touch me, he reasons? And
correctly so. Why do these mothers never touch their
sons, I thus ask again, as the answer is in the ques-
tion? Emotional abuse is so much ingrained in patriar-
chal culture, and the role of the mother-saving Oedi-
pal Hero is so common in our culture that most peo-
ple never even once reflect about the perversity of
such a family constellation!
305
THE EGO MATTER
Easy body touch is not something fostered in this

kind of milieu; in the contrary. It is something fostered
in healthy families, where parents have a functional
love and sex life. It is the conflict between the never-
talked-about and repressed, and the prudishness that
results from this repression, on one hand, and the
open or implicit possessiveness of the symbiotoholic
parent, on the other, that triggers in the child an un-
conscious sexual response for the parent. The for
most people uncomfortable truth is that if the incest
had been acted out sexually, the psychic tension at
the root of the co-dependence would not pent up
and no Oedipal fixation would result from it.
Men have given open testimonials on television

who had consenting intercourse with their mothers,
and the astonishing result was that they had the most
fulfilling sex life with adult females later on in life; of-
ten in these constellations the future wife will have an
excellent relationship with the first woman the boy
enjoyed sexually, his mother. It is emotional incest, not
sexual incest that really creates havoc in a boys psy-
che because his biological male identity is gravely
impaired through the exclusiveness of his relation with
mother; and guilt and shame is the result of it be-
306
OEDIPAL CULTURE
cause the boy knows that he should rather look

around for a girl of his age or even an older woman,
and that its time to leave his mother and the nest be-
hind.
I see in this ungainly attitude of narcissistic moth-

ers toward their sons the real core of the problem of
emotional abuse because it creates a flagrant contra-
diction. When the boy wants to go out and look for
friends or a girlfriend, the mother will tend to keep
him away from life, arguing he was still too young and
unexperienced to just go on his own, that there are
dangers involved in such a quest, or perverse strang-
ers waiting to get him around the corner. But when it
goes to care for mother because she is sick, de-
pressed, or had a bad day, then boy is big enough to
play the gigolo, and to be around mother, and at her
feet for any service she may need, and boy is big
enough then to understand when mother talks about
her past and her bad experiences with men. This
contradiction creates rage in the boy because he sees
that the mother just uses him for her purposes and
plays power games with him.
307
THE EGO MATTER
From a bioenergetic point of view, it has to be

seen that the Oedipal conflict is traumatic for the
child because of the denial of sexual fulfillment it im-
plies, while it triggers so much longing in the child. Its
a real torture for the child, a real trauma, and it has
been admitted by psychoanalyst Franoise Dolto that
in most cases children lose their pre-Oedipal memory,
which only confirms my assumption that the Oedipal
construct in Western culture brings real trauma to the
child as it results in amnesia. In her book La Cause des
Enfants (1985), Dolto writes:
Memory in adults erases all that belongs to the

pre-oedipal period. That is why our society has
so much difficulty to accept infantile sexuality. In
past centuries there were the nurses who knew
it. Parents, however, ignored it. (Id., 47)
Freud namely found that amnesia, the loss of

memory subsequent to the trauma-triggering situa-
tion is in most cases the indicator for trauma having
occurred. Hence, Freud concluded, when we find
childhood amnesia in a patient, this can be taken as
direct evidence for the etiology of trauma to be af-
firmed for that situation in question. This is in my view
the reason for the strong aggressiveness toward the
308
OEDIPAL CULTURE
parent of the same sex, in the Oedipal situation. Its a

visceral reaction of the biosystem that comes from
sensual and sexual deprivation and that is caused by
the exclusiveness of the parent-child relation in gen-
eral, and parental and societal prohibition of children
having sex with peers, in particular.
Children need and want a sex life, much like

adults, while the sexual acts children perform or at-
tempt to perform may be of a lesser complete nature,
but this difference does not alter the psychosexual
importance of childhood sexuality.
When, as in our culture, children are prohibited

from engaging in sexually explicit and healthy peer
relations, or relations with adults other than their par-
ents, they will be trapped, if they want or not, in a
gerontophilic attraction toward their parents.
This cultural setup that is obviously against nature,

results in the triangular relationship between parents
and one or two children that is so typical for the mod-
ern urban family. In this strongly exclusive and triangu-
lar relationship, the child is coerced into an ambigu-
ous love-hate relation with their parents; what fuels
the childs aggressiveness toward the parent of the
309
THE EGO MATTER
same sex is not, as Freud supposed, a situation of ri-

valry for the single available sex partner, often coined
colloquially as two men desire one woman or two
girls desire one man, but more generally a rage to
have been denied the vast realm of potential sex
partners of same or different age, outside of the fam-
ily!
And the aggressiveness, therefore, of the child is

not exclusively directed against the parent of the
same sex, but against both parents, while it has to be
noted that the childs organism will not allow the child
to gain consciousness of this rage because of mere
survival reasons. The childs cognitive apparatus will
build in a justification factor that leads to the childs
reasoning on the lines of :
Well, I am supposed to love my parents, and be

exclusively loved by my parents, as society does not
allow me to love other people, and does not allow
other people to love me in the same way as my par-
ents love me. Society says its dangerous for me, as
other people may want to abduct and kill me as they
cannot love me in the same pure manner as my par-
ents do.
310
OEDIPAL CULTURE
Here is where the whole system of lies and be-

trayal starts to distort the perception and cognitive
grasp of love by the consumer child, in this bias that
society puts up, and that it strongly fuels through its
abysmally violent anti-pedophilia debate! And what it
leads to is that because children cannot for survival
reasons express the rage against their parents and
society, they will turn this rage against themselves,
and become narcissistic and auto-destructive, if not
schizophrenic!
Even children who do not develop a pathology will

remain with strong guilt feelings, often all their life
through, regarding sexuality and all forms of erotic
love.
I guess Freuds reasoning here is true insofar as

when the parent of the opposite sex is present, the
child can project some of the aggressiveness upon
him or her. But here, contrary to Freud, I assume that
because of survival reasons, this acting-out of aggres-
siveness toward the parent of the same sex, for ex-
ample through straight talk, or by hitting the parent, is
such perilous an action for a child that this will be
done only when he or she can be sure of the support
311
THE EGO MATTER
and unconditional love of the parent of the opposite

sex.
This is a precarious situation for a child in any kind

of family, and I believe that generally Freuds reason-
ing here was quite theoretical. As a general rule, chil-
dren do keep true to respecting their parents even to
a point of self-denial, except a minority of children
who incarnate with a very strong ego and character. I
have indeed observed that the number of children of
the latter vintage is growing over the last decades,
but at the same time, the situation of the child in con-
sumer culture has become more and more tough, and
alienating, to a point that children are today as much
under state control and supervision as nuclear weap-
ons, foreign embassies, top secret material and spies.
This is a potential root for more domestic violence

because to enclose children in homes and schools
that function pretty much like prisons is not what a
caring state will do who loves their child citizens. We
are facing a major social and political pathology here,
if we can face it at all.
In my experience, most people in Western culture

blind these facts simply out of their consciousness in-
312
OEDIPAL CULTURE
terface, and this because of sheer fright of the conse-

quences of any vital action to the contrary.
Freuds cultural bias is notorious and I will not

need to write pages about that as it has not only been
analyzed in modern biographies and recent psycho-
analytic literature, but it was the true reason for the
clash between Freud and Reich, Freud and Jung,
Freud and Adler, Freud and Rank, Freud and Klein,
and Freud and Fromm.
The clashes were of course personally tinted, and

in each case, there was a personal drama behind the
scenes.
What is significant however, and common to all of

these deep relationships is that none of them was
solved peacefully; this already is a hint as to the unruly
nature of Freuds authoritarianism. And the material
speaks for itself, as we have really a large body of evi-
dence.
The clash between Reich and Freud was particu-

larly revealing, and Freuds cultural bias, for one time,
was explicit and coined into the dictum culture must
prevail. Freud rejected Reichs activism for child sex-
313
THE EGO MATTER
ual rights, despite the fact that it was he himself, who

had for the first time in Western social history openly
declared that the human child is sexual from birth.
Freud reasoned Reich with the argument that the psy-
chiatric profession had to accept the basic setup of
society including its denial of the sexual rights of the
child, and that the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst had
to cure the psychic malformations resulting from the
cultural distortion of the natural sexual function, but
not more. In other words, they had to restrain from
any social activism because otherwise, as Freud
thought, society would be thrown into chaos.
The Oedipal situation, as I coin in one term the

whole of the emotional, tactile, sensual and sexual
deprivation of the child in modern consumer culture,
is a real trauma. It creates havoc in the childs psyche
and one of the undesired results of this pathology is
that it leads to a link between sexual desire, aggres-
sive rage and fear, which can lead to sexual deviations
later in life. Typical for these deviations is namely that
the person can discharge sexually only if acts of sa-
dism are inflicted upon the mate, or conversely, the
masochistic suffering of acts of sadism is experienced
during the mating game.
314
OEDIPAL CULTURE
When adult males project their unconscious Oedi-

pal mother imago on little girls, they may experience
emotional and sexual attraction for them, but they
also may at times experience the same rage they felt
toward their mothers, but that they repressed. This
repressed rage, then, may become sexually charged.
This may, or not, depending on the level of con-
sciousness of the person, lead to a violent urge to
punish little girls by beating them up and/or by forc-
ing oral, anal or vaginal intercourse on them, or by
abducting them for this purpose. It has since long
been established by psychiatry that these urges, be
they acted out or not, have their origin in an unre-
solved Oedipus Complex.
The person will have greater control of this afflic-

tion if he does not fight it but tries to understand his
behavior, and his emotional confusion. And here we
see again the difference in behavior between the true
hero and the Oedipal Hero.
The true hero will first of all acknowledge the de-

sire, be it hard to accept, and hard to live with, and
cope with, even if the desire is so virulent that it can
315
THE EGO MATTER
never be acted out without really hurting and harming

the child physically, or emotionally.
This is, to repeat it, not the case with a pure sexual
attraction, as in that case a way can be found in most
circumstances to abreact sexually without actual
penetration, but only in the aggravating case that the
desire is charged with violence in such a way that
penetration is needed for coming off, and even
worse, that the child has to be beaten, made suffer
and cry and give signs of expressing the pain, typi-
cally by screaming, for the sadist being able to dis-
charge orgasmically. It goes without saying that for
any child, whatever their age, and even an adult, the
latter experience is not a particularly nice one, while a
tender sexual encounter with an adult without pene-
tration may go along with a child, even a completely
innocent boy or girl, if only there is no pain, no vio-
lence and no threat, and most importantly, no coer-
cion.
The problem is that most Oedipal Heroes in one

way or the other suffer from sexual sadism, as a sim-
ple result of the rage they repressed when they re-
peatedly wanted to build autonomy and were held
316
OEDIPAL CULTURE
back by their possessive and narcissistic mothers.

While society has developed in recent years quite a
permissive attitude toward sadomasochism when it
occurs between consenting adults, this form of sexu-
ality remains highly problematic when an adult traps a
child into his sadistic affliction, and perhaps by ex-
pecting the child to be masochistic by nature in or-
der to justify the offense.
Whatever one may think in this respect, it can

hardly be denied that our society must show more re-
sponsibility in working out future social and legal poli-
cies for preventing sexual violence against children.
The present situation is not satisfying, as it only fo-
cuses upon enforcing time and again criminal pun-
ishments, which has never been an effective social
policy; one may begin to look at how the situation of
the Oedipal Hero could be cognitively grasped and
understood, and how, as a result of these insights,
methods could be developed to help the afflicted
men to grow beyond their fixation.
In this endeavor, one focus should certainly be to

help the individual to accept to be loved, to be
touched, to be kissed and fondled, to begin contem-
317
THE EGO MATTER
plating himself in a mirror while experiencing feelings

of power, selflove, admiration and healthy self-pride.
An important element of the therapy would be to

dissolve the muscular and characterological armor,
and this by suggesting the person to experience sex-
ual intercourse with a young woman in a loving and
tender way, while the focus should be on enjoying the
hot and melting energy flow as it streams through the
body, once the armor has been dissolved.
My research showed that no coercion can help

with sexual sadism, but only tolerance, and again tol-
erance, and teaching the person actually to be toler-
ant with himself. Tolerance means patience first of all,
as any progress will be incremental, and rather slow in
the beginning. With dissolving the character armor,
the entire belief system of the Oedipal Hero will bit by
bit fall in ashes, and when the mind is enlarged, the
body will decrease in size, as a matter of inverse pro-
portionality.
I mean that any pattern of obsessive body-

building, obesity, heavy drinking or chain-smoking will
vanish by itself, once the armor begins to fall apart.
318
OEDIPAL CULTURE
On the other hand, I am not in the rings of those

who believe that curing the symptoms will do the job,
which is why I am firmly opposed to any kind of quick
fixes in this respect. Only a holistic, and inside-out
approach can do.
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The Ego Matter: About The Importance of Autonomy For Realizing Your True Self

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THE EGO MATTER

SCHOLARLY ARTICLES BY PETER FRITZ WALTER

THE LAW OF EVIDENCE

THE RESTRICTION OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE AND WELLNESS TECHNIQUES

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SHAMANISM

THE EGO MATTER

by Peter Fritz Walter

113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA

2015 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

This publication may be distributed, used for an adaptation or for

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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About Dr. Peter Fritz Walter

Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzer-

He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a

After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M.

He then took courses in psychology at theUniversity of Ge-

After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal

Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and

All of Pierres books are hand-crafted and self-published,

Chapter Three 113

Chapter Four 141

Chapter Five 197

Chapter Six 225

The Complete Oedipus Story 250

Etymologically the term of autonomy results from

Those of you who have an idea of numerology

See, for example, Michael Newton, Life Be-

We can thus maintain that autonomous is the per-

With autonomy we commonly associate freedom

Without autonomy, there is fusion, symbiosis and

What happens is that the necessary biological

A naturally raised child is typically more inde-

There is a natural striving for autonomy built into

For example, a toddler of eighteen months needs

Many adults believe that children grew through

In truth, these shifts dont exist in real life as all

While it is a good thing to have certain initiation

I arrive at a mark stone, I see the mark stone, I

What is important is that I constantly grow, that I

I do not belittle the important changes that take

But often we observe that especially those adoles-

There is no alternative to autonomy. To make

Building a Manifest Identity

What happens when you enter a relationship with-

But generally speaking, among young people to-

Why is this so? I will answer the question bit by bit

My core message is that we need a certain amount

Building autonomy also implies to get away with

I have encountered quite a few young men and

While generally being rather intelligent and sensi-

The root of the problem is that they suffer from a

Instead of accepting themselves, they crave for

Many of these young men and women, often

They try to do the impossible, that is, to be ac-

When I act my life out like an actor, I do not live my

And when I do not know who I am, how can I know

When you go around for identity shopping, you