The Psychology of Pinocchio | EP 254

I'm going to show you something from Pinocchio now. This is an initiation ritual; it's a journey to the depths. So, it's a journey to the underworld. It's the consequence of a collapse in previous personality and the disintegration of that previous personality into a chaotic state prior to rebirth.

Now what happens in Pinocchio, which by the way was released at about the same time that World War II was brewing, and which also contains one of the best representations of the individual motivations for fascism that I've ever seen anywhere, that's the scenes that are associated with Pleasure Island. Remember, all the puppet is trying to become a real boy, right? So he's a marionette to begin with; something else is pulling his strings. Well for Jung, that's your habitual state of being; something else is pulling your strings. Even the idea that you're autonomous is the consequence of something else pulling your strings.

For Jung, what you needed to do is find out exactly who and what is pulling your strings and decide if that's the direction in which you want to go. And that's really what happens to Pinocchio because we're going to watch Pinocchio—a part of it. In the Pinocchio story he starts out as a marionette. Now, he's a marionette made by a good father because Geppetto is a good father; he's a good craftsman and so on.

So, he's a marionette with a benevolent puppeteer. But as soon as he develops some autonomy, then he becomes prey to forces that are elements of the demonic archetype. In fact, the worst bad guy in the entire movie turns into Satan himself at one point in the movie. He basically has horns and a bright red face, and he manifests himself as so terrifying that the coyote, wolf, fox, and the cat that are trying to corrupt Pinocchio are terrified.

Because they get a look at who's pulling their strings, it's enough to terrify them. Pinocchio goes through a series of temptations of various sorts, including a Freudian temptation. The Freudian temptation is to remain weak and sickly instead of becoming a real person. So, it's an eatable problem. Another problem that faces Pinocchio is that he’s offered false celebrity as a way of solving his life's problems.

So, he's offered the opportunity to become an actor, and what that means is a deceitful fake who’s constructed a persona that makes him appear far more valuable than he really is. The movie outlines two pathological modes of movement towards maturity—one being a phony and the other taking the easy way out and hyper-valuing all your pathology so that you become dependent.

So anyways, another mode of pathological development is offered to Pinocchio, which is to do nothing but engage in short-term impulsive and destructive play, and that’s on Treasure Island. But when he goes to Pleasure Island, he finds that it's actually ruled by demonic forces with faceless entities who are transforming all the pleasure-seeking marionettes into braying donkeys who are slaves.

It's like Pinocchio escapes from that, and he does it basically by jumping into the unknown, and that's where we're going to start our exposure to his initiation. Okay, so now you can imagine what's happened. He was on Pleasure Island, and everything went to hell fundamentally, so he jumped into the water to escape from that, and that's equivalent to plunging into chaos.

Chaos was an escape from pathological tyranny, and now he's tried to go home. This is the psyche in its search for maturation, running into an obstacle which is the tyrannical element of the great father that it cannot cope with, and it trots home—runs home. It's a defeat.

A typical part of a hero's story is the initial defeat of the hero when he encounters usually either the terrible great father or the terrible great mother. This is a retrogressive—Jung would call this retrogressive restoration of the persona. It's sort of like, maybe you're a well-adapted adolescent, and you live at home and you're a happy adolescent, and everything's good at home, and then you go out to try to be an adult and you fail.

When you come back home, you try to act like a happy adolescent again, but you're not. What you are in fact is an unhappy adult. And if you move back to the happy adolescent mode of being, then it's false and pathological—you can't go home again. Another typical motif in literature now.

The cricket—I can't tell you everything about this story; I can tell you a couple of strange things about it. One is that the cricket is Jiminy Cricket, right? And the initials of Jiminy Cricket are JC. Jiminy Cricket was a common Southern American mild form of cursing; it's the equivalent of Jesus Christ. And so, you might think—and of course, the cricket is Pinocchio's conscience.

So, then you might ask yourself, why in the world would a mildly pejorative term for Jesus Christ be applied to a cricket who's guiding a puppet into the water to rescue his father from a whale? Why would any of that happen? And the answer to that is, you know why, but you can't say why. You can't say why you know or what it is that you know, but the mere fact that it makes sense—and it does—is an indication from a Jungian perspective that you're operating at an archetypal level.

You understand this. I could say here's an example of why the cricket is a bug: well, things bug you, right? We say that things bug me. Well, you should do something about the things that bug you because that's your conscience calling to you; it's destiny in some sense manifesting itself as an unconscious impulse that really bugs me means, if you can, you should do something about it.

Because, you think about it, man, there are a lot of things out there that might bug you, but lots of them don't. But some of them do. Well, why do those bug you and not the other things? Well, that's a complicated question, but one potential answer to it is that there's a part of your psyche that's oriented towards further development. Jung would call that the self, and that's like the totality of everything that you could be.

It's a strange sort of entity in some sense because it's partly potential and it's potential that expands across time. But the way that your potential totality calls to you in the present is by placing things in front of you that are your problem, and they announce themselves as your problem, and they do that by bothering you.

So then, if you pick up the task of fixing the things that bother you, then you find the pathway to the further expansion of your personality. And that’s what's happening with Pinocchio. Now, one of the things that's really interesting about the Pinocchio movie that makes it incredibly sophisticated is that despite the fact that the cricket is an avatar of Christ, so to speak, the cricket has things to learn just like Pinocchio.

And so, that's very cool because it's so cool; it’s so sophisticated because it means that you do have a conscience that guides you, but until you establish a dialogue with it, both you and the conscience are immature. You have to establish a conscious dialogue with it and then interact together in a manner that propels your development across time, and that'll stop you from being a marionette of forces that would make you a braying donkey who does nothing but slave away in salt mines.

So, okay, Pinocchio goes home; that doesn't work, and that's where we're going to start here. Okay, so what's happened there? Well, many, many things at multiple levels of reality simultaneously. And that's the characteristic of an archetypal story. So, on one level, Pinocchio's too old to go home; he can't go home to his father because in some sense he’s already transcended his father.

So, there are things for example that your father can't help you with. The reason for that is that he doesn't know any more about the situation than you do, and he can't. And so that's where his knowledge limits out. So that would be sort of on the personal level. On the transpersonal level, which would be the deeper, deeper archetypal level, what's happening to Pinocchio is exactly what Nietzsche described at the end of the 19th century.

Because remember, Geppetto is his creator, and now he's dead; he's gone. Pinocchio is bereft of placement, so to speak; his soul has been corrupted, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. When he returns to his family home, or when he returns to his tradition, what he finds is nothing.

Okay, so then what happens? Well, this is another thing that you’ll swallow with just no problem whatsoever. Well, this dove comes along, that's sort of golden and glowing and drops a note right in front of him. Now, you may remember, and perhaps you don’t, but the star from which the dove comes is a representation of the blue fairy.

The blue fairy is the positive element of the unknown in the Pinocchio movie. So what it basically is saying is that when you're despairing because your father has died, and your tradition has nothing to offer, that the positive element of the unknown may provide you with a message about where to go if you pay enough attention. That would be an intuition or it would be the automatic attraction of your interest to a new thing by forces that you do not understand.

One of the real ways of coming to grips with the idea of the act of the unconscious is to understand that you cannot control what you're interested in. So then you might ask, well if it's not you, what is it? And if you think about that problem long enough, you'll start to understand what Jung was talking about because that is the way that you can understand in your own life that the things that direct you as a being are not things that you consciously choose.

In fact, they're not even things that you can consciously choose. They're directed by other forces. So anyways, the dove drops a message in front of Pinocchio, and it's the cricket that reads it. So it's the same idea as what bugs you, so to speak; the cricket is the interpreter.

Okay, so now what have we found out? Well, we found out that God the Father and God the Father, the Creator, are not in fact dead, which is what Nietzsche pronounced, but alive in some weird way in this horrible creature at the bottom of the ocean. So what does Pinocchio decide to do? He decides to go find him.

That's actually what you’re doing at university, by the way. For all the chaos that you experience when you come to university and all the uncertainty and all the doubt, what you’re trying to do is to resurrect your dead father from the bottom of the ocean. And if you do that, you won't be a marionette; and if you don't, you will be.

Now, this is very interesting because the conscience here plays a very dichotomous role. So on the one hand, Pinocchio is often ahead of his conscience, so to speak, so he's taking the leading role, and the dialogue is kind of choppy, and neither of them know exactly what they're doing. But in this situation, it's very paradoxical because you can see Pinocchio’s being half turned into a braying jackass at this point. Something you might well consider when you remember your adolescence.

At this point, the cricket, his conscience does two things: it warns him how horrible this is going to be and how utterly dangerous it is, and then at the same time, it helps him prepare and goes along with him, and so it's quite comical. So, watch what happens here.

Okay, so I've cut this a little bit, but what happens in the movie is that he goes to the bottom of the ocean, and he starts to ask about Monstro. As soon as he asks any of the fish down there—the denizens of the sub-oceanic world—where Monstro is, they just run away. So Monstro is he who cannot be named.

Right? I'm sure you've encountered that in your reading before, right? That’s the hallmark in the Harry Potter series, right? See, now you’ve done it. Yeah, so this represents something so terrible that it can't even be talked about.

Okay, so what happens is Pinocchio ends up not only at the bottom of the ocean but he has to go to the deepest part of the bottom of the ocean where the most terrible thing rests. And so we’re cutting to the point where he does that. So now you might ask, how did Geppetto get in the whale? And the answer to that is it's never really made that clear in the movie.

But I can tell you some things about that. If you conceptualize your historical tradition as a personality, like a body of laws and customs, say, it’s not alive; it's dead, right? Because it’s composed of the past, and because it’s dead, it can't come up with anything new. So if it encounters something new, it’s stopped.

And that's what's happened to Geppetto: he’s engulfed by this entity that represents the absolute unknown, and he cannot figure out how to get out. The reason for that is none of the things he knows—so none of the things that history has produced as a body of knowledge—are sufficient to deal with the fundamental problem.

That doesn't mean they're useless; it just means that just like the puppet is lost without the father, the father is also lost without the puppet. And that's the relationship between you and history: your history. When you study history, you think, well, you're studying a record of events in the past, and that's not right.

What you’re studying is the circumstances that gave rise to you as a being. Unless you understand your history in every way you possibly can, then you’re an incomplete creature. You don’t know enough to move forward in the same way your culture, being composed of dead fathers, so to speak, can’t progress without you because you’re its eyes.

There's an Egyptian story that features the god Horus, who I've talked to you about before, who actually resurrects his father from the dead by giving him an eye. So, Geppetto can’t figure out how to get out of this whale without help.

Alright, now something very sophisticated happens here, and I have to explain it to you at multiple levels at the same time. So now Geppetto is hungry, and when the whale opens its mouth, a lot of fish come in. Now one of the things I want you to think about—you can just put this in the back of your mind—is that one of the oldest symbolic representations of Christ is a fish, and all of his followers were fishermen.

So, there’s this weird relationship between the messianic figure who’s at the base of it, at least at the base of Christian culture, and the idea of things that are pulled up from the depths. Now, here’s what happens in this part of the movie; it’s so amazing. So Geppetto is looking for fish, and the reason for that is he doesn't think he can get out of the whale, and so he might as well have some fish while he's in there.

And so, he’s given up on getting out. Now what happens is that the whale swallows Pinocchio as if he’s a fish. So, Pinocchio is put into the same category as fish, and it happens to Geppetto a couple of times; he mistakes Pinocchio for a fish—you'll see.

So what that means in some sense is that Geppetto can't distinguish between the fish that will feed you for the day and whatever it is that Pinocchio represents. So you could think about Pinocchio as a fisherman instead of as a fish. And so you can think about it this way: here’s an old saying—if you give a man a fish, you feed him for one day, but if you teach him to fish, you feed him forever.

And so the idea is, it's better to develop the skill to acquire something than it is to have the thing. Now what Pinocchio represents is he’s like a meta fish. I know this is a strange way of thinking about it. Geppetto's problem isn't that he’s hungry; his problem is that he can't get out of the whale.

And so, what he's fishing for isn't something to eat; it's something that will help him get out of the whale. But he can't recognize the difference between the proximate solution, which is so that he’ll just no longer be hungry, and the much broader problem.

So what happens is the whale swallows a bunch of fish, and Pinocchio's in there, and Geppetto is fishing away, and he catches Pinocchio. Pinocchio announces himself, and Geppetto tells him to be quiet because he’s interfering with him fishing; then, when he turns to hug Pinocchio because he wakes up, he actually hugs a fish and then he discards the fish.

So then he figures out that Pinocchio’s there. Then Geppetto decides that, well, they're going to have to live inside the whale, and it’s another idea of his blindness at this point because he’s composed of the dead past, so to speak.

What Pinocchio does is start to destroy the ship itself, which is what they're floating in the whale, to start a fire. And the fire makes the whale mad enough to spit them out, and the whale then transforms itself into a dragon and tries to kill them because it's a fire-breathing entity at that point.

Part of the understory is: it's better to figure out how to fish than to fish, or that more profoundly, it's better to figure out how to do something than to merely benefit from the thing itself. Pinocchio represents that which can do new things, so he’s a hero, and he’s willing to destroy part of the current order—that's the ship—in order to produce a new strategy that will actually free them from the whale.

Now he wants to get his father out of there too, so that's what happens in the next five minutes, I would say. Okay, so now there's a shock here because essentially, in some sense, the entity that's going to provide the solution to this very complex problem has arrived on the scene, but it's quite damaged.

First of all, it's been speaking improperly, right? So that’s an adolescent representation; it braids a lot of nonsense and it's been corrupted in a variety of ways. And so, you know, to some degree what that means is that as you mature and you're moving away from your mere marionette status, your interaction with society, like Rousseau said, corrupts you in all sorts of ways.

I mean, you're participating in that corruption, but it still happens. The truth of the matter is, it doesn't matter if you've been corrupted to some degree as long as you haven't absolutely sacrificed your capacity for true speech and vision.

So, you know, that's a pretty hopeful message because Pinocchio is by no means a perfect entity, but he might be good enough. See, that's also an indication there of why people are often unwilling to form a representation with, so to speak, form a relationship with the archetype of the great father because to some degree, the archetype is a figure of perfection and the individual in relationship to that archetype is always pathologically flawed.

The embarrassment of that realization—which is exactly what's happening to Pinocchio right now—is often enough to stop people from doing it. So, what that would say to say what that means in some sense is that in order for you to mature in the fullest possible manner, you have to understand the manner in which you're deeply flawed in relationship to your potential as it might be historically determined.

And that's a very bitter thing to do; you know, it's much easier—and people do this all the time—to engage in half-witted, formulaic ideological criticisms of the system as a whole. It’s like, you know, the probability that the system is more flawed than you is pretty damn low. So, you might want to start with, you know, getting rid of your donkey ears and your tail and stop bringing nonsense before you judge the entire, you know, historical process by which human beings have come into being.

So, anyways, that's kind of what that means. Okay, so this is very interesting too because Pinocchio ends up being a master of fire. Well, you can think about that—as there is a book written a while back by a primatologist who also wrote Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham—and he talked about the origin of fire.

As far as Wrangham is concerned, we invented fire about two million years ago, and that enabled us to cook food, and that enabled us to swap intestinal length for brain. So, if you look at a chimpanzee, you know chimpanzees are like the ultimate in couch potatoes, right? They're about this high, and they're shaped like this; they have this huge barrel body.

The reason they have that is because they eat leaves, and so they have to spend like eight hours a day eating leaves. They will eat meat if they can get it, but they have to spend like eight hours a day eating leaves and just chewing them over and over because, like leaves, A, they don't want to be eaten, so they're pretty tough and inedible and, B, they don't have any nutritive quality to speak of.

So, the chimpanzee has to spend all its time chewing, which is rather a mindless endeavor all things considered. Whereas human beings, two million years ago or thereabouts, invented fire, and as a consequence of that we could cook meat, and meat is incredibly energy-rich.

And so, it’s easy to digest once it’s cooked, and so the consequence of the invention of fire was that we’re the way we are today: we could have a brain instead of a gut. And so the idea that Pinocchio's mastery of fire—it’s something more than merely a means of cooking; that's how it started out, right?

But you can think of our entire technological capacity as stemming from the mastery of fire. Now, the other thing you can think of—and this is very much worth considering—is that Pinocchio masters fire, and that turns the whale into a dragon.

So, the idea there too is that—and this is an old idea—is that our technological prowess is something that makes nature itself angry. And of course, you might say, "Well, do you believe this?" And the answer to that is, well, how many of you have environmentalist leanings? And that's exactly the story that you're following because you're still wondering about whether or not mastery of fire was in some way against the natural order and then it will end up in all of our deaths.

You know, that's a reasonable thing to worry about, but not mastering it was going to end up pretty badly too. So what happens is that in the midst of this complete chaos, Pinocchio has a choice, and the choice is: he can either save himself, which is a very, very selfish choice and reduces him to a-ahistorical individual because he has no relationship left with his father, or he can put himself at great risk and rescue his father.

You know, finish the process, stop his father from drowning, and complete. Okay, so Pinocchio dies, and then his father brings him home. So because he’s rescued his father, the benevolent spirit of nature appears, resurrects him, and turns him into a real human being.

So, it’s pretty funny as far as I’m concerned that the answer to Nietzsche’s Greek question manifested itself in the mid-1930s in the form of an animated children’s movie. So, you know, and that’s an example— that’s an example of a number of things; it’s an example of how archetypes work.

It’s also an example of how artists are on the edge of discovery all the time, and they discover things they don't even understand. So we’ll see you next Tuesday.