The Two Giants: Narcissism, Dissociation, and Occult Practices

By Dr. John White

In the magnificent body of Christian ascetic texts known as the Philokalia, drawn from the lives of the ancient Desert Fathers, there is a famous passage where Abba Mark addresses a novice. His exhortation draws from the book of Judith (2:4), where Abba Mark imagines three mighty giants at the head of Holofernes army, who must be overthrown if the rest of the army is to be defeated. This, he suggests, is a metaphor for three vices we each carry in our souls – ignorance, forgetfulness, and laziness – which, if not defeated, will permit the other members of the army, a metaphor for the other vices of the soul, to survive and to keep fighting against the higher aims of the ascetic. These cardinal vices, as we might call them, Abba Mark says, can only be defeated through prayer and through courageously entering into battle with them in our own souls. This is a life-or-death struggle for the ascetic because, if the giants are left alive, the other lesser vices will also continue to live, and thus the entire army of vices will then torment the life of the ascetic until the battle is engaged and ultimately won.

Whatever one thinks about ancient Christian asceticism in general or about the particular vices of ignorance, forgetfulness, and laziness which Abba Mark quite rightly underlines, the metaphor of the giants in Holofernes army it itself valuable beyond his use of it. Among occult practitioners, I suggest, there are two giants which act in a way similar to what Abba Mark suggests. In our day and age, we rarely interpret the battles and challenges going on in our own psyches in moral terms like “virtue and vice” – something which we avoid to our detriment, truth be told – but the two giants I speak of can equally be analyzed in terms intelligible to our more contemporary and psychologically oriented approach. The two “giants” I speak of are narcissism and dissociation.

Understanding psychopathology

Psychological terminology is somewhat different from the terminology of other disciplines in that it tends to show up more in popular discourse, thereby losing its original technical meaning. To the person unaware of this fact, it can be quite disconcerting to find out how many contemporary terms of derision were originally technical terms in psychology that were intended to be descriptive and not derogatory, such as “moron,” “idiot,” “mongoloid,” “retard,” and many others. While there may be good reasons to think that the original meaning of these terms also included the unconscious biases of the time and so were potentially problematic in other ways does not undermine the fact that the intention was to formulate a neutral terminology. Indeed, when all is said and done, it is quite likely that, in the future, the terms we now consider entirely neutral will also be considered biased based on the ever-changing values of civilization, since that appears to be the way of all psychological terminology.

Psychopathology is itself one of those terms which can be read as derogatory, though it was intended to be descriptive, merely denoting some aspect of psychological unhealth in a person, defined through its relative deviation from what counts as a healthy norm. Understood that way, that someone suffers from some sort of psychopathology says little more than that they are human, because no human being is without some level of deviation from an ideal of perfect mental health. Yet this understanding of psychopathology does highlight an aspect of the person’s psyche which is either underdeveloped given their general level of age and maturity or, worse, is in some measure malformed due to any number of reasons, according to the norm of a fully mentally healthy adult person.

Based on the tradition in which I work, that of Jungian psychoanalysis, we might say (in non-technical terms) that psychopathology consists in a combination of internal psychic imbalance, born in part from a lack of consciousness of these imbalances or at least of their seriousness, along with a correlating tendency toward maladaption to the external world. In practice, these consist in acting without reference to or even in a way inimical to one’s own authentic flourishing as well as without reference to, or to the potential harm of, others. In this case, “others” can mean not only other individual humans but can in principle mean any “other” which can be harmed, such as human communities, animals, nature, etc. It is safe to say that, according to this description, we are all pathological to some extent and that there is always room for improvement in our mental health. In fact, in most cases of basically neurotic issues, the pathological attitude and/or behavior is experienced as the best solution a person has for a situation, in consequence of the limitations of their understanding and capacity for self-knowledge. However, these problems become more pronounced to the extent that that person does not try to extend beyond the limitations of their understanding and capacity for self-knowledge. This is especially so with esoteric practitioners, if for no other reason because to “Know Thyself” is arguably the key principle of esoteric practice.

As I have suggested above, there are two forms of psychopathology that seem to me frequently to pose problems in esoteric circles, narcissism and dissociation. Nor do they arise by accident: in different respects, each of these pathologies, I will suggest, are dysfunctional aspects of potentially appropriate and healthy mental attitudes. What becomes pathological is not the existence of narcissism or dissociative tendencies in the practitioner, but that the practitioner becomes internally imbalanced and externally maladaptive by misapplications of these mental states. Let’s look at each separately and try to draw some practical conclusions.

Narcissism

The term “narcissism” has entered everyday speech, mostly due to the term being consistently used to describe former president Trump, including by his psychologist relative, Mary Trump. For our purposes, there is no reason to participate in that discussion. I mention it in passing nonetheless because the increased popularity of the term “narcissism” has had the predictable consequence that it is used with less and less care and has become just as much a derogatory term as the other originally descriptive psychological terms of the past, mentioned above.

Psychological pathologies are, as a rule, best understood through the opposite, non-pathological condition. What was once typically described as “healthy” (as opposed to “unhealthy”) narcissism is now usually called “self-esteem.” In practice, self-esteem indicates that you live and act from an inner experience of being a worthwhile, valuable person. If you have a robust experience of yourself as being valuable and worthwhile, you will also tend to do what is in your own best interests without aiming to harm others and will be assertive about your rights and legitimate desires, but without needing to bring others down. This will be so because genuine self-esteem includes a sense of inner fullness and vitality and, when you feel that inner fullness and vitality, you don’t compare yourself to others or feel that their wins are your losses, because of the deep satisfaction you have with who you are.

Unhealthy narcissism, in contrast, usually includes some level of comparison to others and tends to arise from a kind of inner scarcity rather than an inner sense of fullness. Unhealthy narcissism can happen in two directions: either from undervaluing yourself to the point of frequently giving up your rights or legitimate desires without adequate reason or, in the opposite case, from overvaluing yourself, to the point that you insist that your own being and personal interests are somehow more valid and important than someone else’s, simply because they are yours. In fact, it can be difficult to discern which is the case with some people because the overbearing narcissist is often a person who is compensating for their undervaluing of themselves. Similarly, seemingly kind and giving people are sometimes trying to hide their undervaluation of themselves and trying to compensate for lack of self-esteem through such giving. Unfortunately, our virtues are often just as filled with complexes as our vices are and serving others, though certainly a virtue if done with the right intention, in the right manner, and with the right measure, will not, in the end, give us self-esteem, something which only we can give to ourselves. On the opposite side of the spectrum, some people who seem kind and nice can simply be using such apparent traits to manipulate, another characteristic common of certain types of pathological narcissism.

Why is this important for esoteric practice, you might ask? It is because narcissistic needs and impulses are typically part and parcel of why people take up esoteric practices. In other words, it is often because a person feels disempowered by life or underdeveloped in some way or under attack from someone or because it feels like life hasn’t dealt a person the sort of hand that they know how to deal with, that they turn to esoteric practices.

Classical esotericism, especially in its traditional Hermetic and initiatic form, is a spirituality that’s quite different from many others and in a couple of ways. For one, it has an active component, in that the magician not only aims at definite purposes but acts toward those purposes, as if they have already been attained. Unlike traditions where one simply waits on God, for example, Hermetic practitioners are called to be agents in their lives, i.e., to mold a life conducive their life purposes through both magic and action. As Denning and Phillips put it in the first volume of their masterpiece, The Magical Philosophy:

“These then are the responsibilities of the Adept. First, he must shape his work in the world, and likewise he must shape his world according to that work. Second, although this obligation cannot be changed as long as he remains incarnate, it must be suffused with compassion lest he needlessly destroy the work of others. Here, too, a law applies which has been previously stated: he is not to destroy, unless he can replace with a better thing which shall be acceptable to the subjects of change. Third, he shall look with ever-increased perception into that inward mirror of his True Will, until he reveals therein the Divine Spark which illuminates it.” (The Foundations of High Magick, p. 93)

While this passage does not use the word “narcissism,” implicitly it picks out the central areas where narcissism become an issue: power and its right use is a central issue for the Adept, because classical esoteric and Hermetic practices increase power and native abilities beyond the norm. But it is precisely here where occult practices and narcissism intersect. For any of the classical narcissistic conditions – technically called histrionic, borderline, and narcissistic conditions – all revolve around the issue of power and its use. Hence the point in the quotation above which highlights that the Adept is not to destroy unless he can replace what he destroys with something better and something at least as satisfactory for all involved. Probably most of us know something of these experiences with power, such as temptations to use magical power to limit or even to harm others for some unethical reasons or, for example, to purposely gain advantages at the expense of others, even though there is no necessity to do so. Lord Acton’s famous saying that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” perhaps is most applicable to an initiate.

Unmanaged narcissism may be the most detrimental psychological problem for magical groups. This is because imbalances in self-esteem lead either to too much self-importance or not enough assertiveness on the parts of members, and often to a troubling combination of each, since self-important people need such non-assertive people to dominate and thus feel good about themselves. Thus, the combination can especially be deadly for groups. In the end, if the imbalances are too great, real cooperation and an atmosphere in which all can contribute their best selves to the project is inhibited and often becomes impossible. (“The C-Word,” https://voxhermes.wordpress.com/2018/07/23/the-c-word/)

For this reason, we need to recognize that the Guardian of the Threshold invariably includes our own unprocessed and/or unmanaged narcissistic tendencies, which in some way deviate from healthy narcissism or, in other words, from healthy self-esteem. This point underlines the importance of developing healthy self-esteem if one intends to be an esoteric practitioner, all the more so if one is not working in traditions in which self-development is a key point of the practice. It also suggests that depth-oriented psychotherapies can be extremely helpful for the practitioner, so that the chaff of unhealthy narcissism can be separated from the wheat of healthy narcissism.

Dissociation

Dissociation is a condition of being in some measure disengaged from reality, from one’s own body, and/or from others. In perhaps its most extreme form, it can exist as what used to be called “multiple personalities” or now called DID, i.e., dissociative identity disorder. That the psyche has a robust dissociative capacity is not news and some of the precursors to psychoanalysis, such as Pierre Janet and Jean-Martin Charcot, as well as Carl Jung himself, all emphasized the dissociative aspect of the psyche in both its healthy and unhealthy functioning.

The fact that human beings can dissociate is an important contributor to human creativity. The reason for this is that if human beings could not take a step back from reality and re-imagine it or imagine possibilities which are not yet realities, virtually all change based on human agency would be impossible. Some level of dissociation is thus key to magical work as well, where one attempts to realize both one’s own greater capacities and greater effects in the world based on those capacities through imagining what those capacities and effects could be. Virtually all use of creative imagination is in part a function of the dissociability of the psyche. As a rule of thumb, conscious dissociation in the service of imagination is not in itself problematic, but unconscious dissociation to the point that one loses a sense of reality or important pieces of reality, both one’s own reality and the reality of one’s environment, is psychologically far more ambiguous.

Dissociative conditions, therefore, especially when they are unconscious, can in some cases be deeply pathological. Simple daydreaming is a form of dissociation and usually harmless but depersonalization, where one loses one’s sense of being an embodied person, for example, is a far more serious dissociative condition and often far from harmless. Serious unconscious dissociative habits can undermine a sense of identity, of continuity of relationship with one’s own thoughts, feelings, and volitions, and continuity with outer reality.

Consequently, though the dissociative capacities of the psyche are essential to magical work, especially in allowing for a robust use of imagination by which to formulate, e.g., purposes, ritual acts, and a better life as a whole, dissociation can itself become a more serious problem for practitioners, when one takes it up at the wrong time or develops unconscious dissociative habits. Some of these habits are by no means exclusive to practitioners. For example, it is not unusual for people to dissociate as a way of mentally escaping from unpleasant realities, avoiding difficult conversations, dodging responsibilities, or evading difficult thought processes. But though that is true of people generally, it is potentially more problematic for esoteric practitioners, who are meant to be masters of their inner kingdom, their psyches, and who recognize that the outer world they live in is largely a function of the stuff of which their mind is made.

But there are also forms of dissociation which appear more characteristic of esoteric practitioners than of the larger population. For example, though one uses imagination to formulate a goal when one is a practitioner, it is easy to over-literalize the image of the goal and thereby miss its realization. After all, the image is not necessarily the goal per se but merely represents the goal. In practice, the image is a representation of a certain set of values one is trying to realize in the goal, rather than a literal picture of the goal. It is no rarity for a practitioner to hold onto the literal image, dissociating from the realities in front of them, and thereby failing to recognize that the very thing they were trying to realize or manifest is already present – it is just present in a different form than expected. A different version of the same occurs when, in the process of realization, certain reality factors suggest that one should modify the image of the purpose one has in mind so that it is more suited to the values at stake, but one ignores those factors by continuing to literalize the image.

A further form of dissociation often happens in magical organizations when, for example, an organization will do ritual work for some purpose but never think also to plan and organize resources toward the future that would accommodate that purpose. I myself have met practitioners who seem to think that, say, meditation or ritual acts or other spiritual practices are sufficient for goals. Yet the realization of such goals requires more than the spiritual practices: it requires some level of planning and acting in the material world both to build a channel, as it were, to mediate the energies being drawn down from above, and also so that the party doing the ritual is best prepared to receive what they are after. It is a basically dissociative attitude to call down the “life of heaven,” as the Renaissance magicians called it, without reference either to how one mediates that energy and without preparing as best as one can for its reception in material reality. (“The Esoteric Value of Planning,” https://voxhermes.wordpress.com/2023/04/06/the-esoteric-value-of-planning/)

At a deeper level, esoteric practitioners can dissociate by ignoring certain principles they hold to be true, in favor of other principles more conducive to what they want. For example, suppose I accept the ancient idea of the transmigration of souls or, in other words, reincarnation. Wouldn’t it naturally follow from my conviction of the reality of reincarnation that my magical work would always in some measure aim for bettering the world I live in, in the hopes that that improvement also contributes to making a better tomorrow – especially given the fact that I am likely to return in any number of those tomorrows? One form of dissociation is ignoring the time factor of manifestation in the material world – in this case, the time factor being the future – as well as the cause-and-effect relationship we usually call karma. One important reason why our magical work should always also keep in mind its potential long-term consequences is that we ourselves and those whom we love are going have to live with the consequences of our decisions through the ages. This form of dissociation from known principles is all too common and will always tend to have ongoing negative effects. (“Predictions for 2022 to 2023 and beyond,” https://voxhermes.wordpress.com/2022/12/15/predictions-for-2023-to-2024-and-beyond/)

“Courageously entering into battle”

Abba Mark told the novice that he must overcome the three giants of ignorance, forgetfulness, and laziness. While those are vices according to the Philokalia, it is interesting to note that they correlate in some measure to the two giants I posed as psychological conditions, narcissism and dissociation. Ignorance and forgetfulness are often forms of dissociation and laziness is, minimally, the inertia of a petty narcissism where one refuses to affirm one’s capacity to overcome limits that are within one’s power to overcome.

But whether we see them as vices or psychopathologies – in practice, they are in certain cases both – the consequences are the same, in that one’s definite magical purpose is to some extent left in question, not due to the failure of magic but to the failure to cultivate one’s best inner life and simultaneously cultivating one’s outer life. Healthy narcissism or self-esteem requires that I at least try to be my best self and especially be my best self in my magical working, not giving in to the various visions of grandiosity or false humilities that often go with narcissism. It also means that, if anything, I try to focus on the good of others and of the world in general at least a little bit more than I focus on myself, to counteract narcissism that might still be unconscious within me. The old principle that I should give at least 51% to others is a rule of thumb worth following. The reality of dissociation is that I must be careful to use it at the service of my magical or creative imagination and not leave it to its own devices, where it leads minimally to habits that can control my life and, maximally, can lead to forgetting the basic esoteric principles I live by, resulting in fewer good effects from my magical work.

In practice, though narcissistic and dissociative conditions are two different things, they can easily merge when I ignore the needs of others and of the world, giving into my own narcissistic selfishness as well as dissociative indifference. Parallel to what Abba Mark said, if I am honest with myself, I will see that I am in a life-or-death struggle with these two giants and that I will want to “slay” them if I hope to be as successful a magician as I can be while also adding value to the world. Yet I will also keep in mind that unhealthy narcissism and dissociation really are giants – which is to say that they are not easy to overcome – and so it is often most prudent to enlist the aid of depth-oriented forms of psychotherapy, such as psychosynthesis, psychoanalysis, or related forms of therapy, to aid in the battle.

John R. White, PhD, LPC (Pittsburgh PA) is a Jungian psychoanalyst and Coordinator of the C. G. Jung Institute Analyst Training Program of Pittsburgh. He was a philosophy professor for twenty years, prior to becoming a psychoanalyst. His research interests include many aspects of psychoanalytic practice, Christian mysticism, the history and practices of New Thought, alchemy, and various links among psychology, parapsychology, philosophy, and esotericism. He is an initiate into several esoteric traditions and serves on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Hermetic Studies. He is author of Adaptation and Psychotherapy: Langs and Analytical Psychology (Rowman & Littlefield 2023) and co-editor of Jungian Analysis in a World of Fire (Routledge, 2024).