The Queen of Wonderland project involves a rather
unique approach to understanding the complex issues surrounding the bedevilling
problems adolescents face when they try to adapt to our artificial
technological culture. Anthropologists have repeatedly pointed out that,
despite the lack of modern medicine and conveniences, problems like major depression
and autism are almost completely unknown in cultures where television does not
exist, e.g., in the Amish community. Yet depression, along with a host of
related disorders, is rife in our culture.
Although an individual's ego happily adapts to modern technological culture, there is a factor in our psychic background that doesn't. The psyche has its own rules: hardwired genetic rules. Trying to analyse and explain why depression and self-harming behaviour are so rampant in modern technological culture is not an easy task. The end results always appear to most people like psychobabble even when explained in plain language. This is because understanding what self-harm is about conflicts with what we are taught to believe, i.e., it appears as something alien or taboo. As a result, most people are content with simplistic explanations, the sort of stuff that explains nothing in fact.
This desire for uncomplicated simplification is the factor that inspired an Italian fashion designer to put up an appalling image of a nude anorectic model on billboards as an attempt to make adolescent girls conscious of the dangers of becoming anorectic. Yet, the problem of anorexia nervosa is increasing rather than decreasing among children. Fashion, in itself, is not the cause of anorexia nervosa as the authorities claim. A fashion designer's obsession with the thin figure in fashion is the result of the same kind of inspiration that is behind anorexia nervosa itself. There is another, i.e., a "setting-the-trap," factor involved in order for an adolescent to become triggered into developing anorexia nervosa. You can't set off a trap if you don't wind up the mechanism first. It is this setting-the-trap factor that sociologists, and conventional psychologists pretend to know nothing about. So they focus upon the triggering factor. Anything can trigger a trap. A dead branch can fall off a tree and land on the trap and set it off. Hence, the leitmotif, "many things contribute to the cause of self-harming behaviour," i.e., setting the trap off. What sets the trap off is largely irrelevant. But our leading authorities don't seem to get that simple fact. What is important is who or what set the trap in the children’s playground.
Because of the difficulties in explaining the setting-the-trap factor behind self-harming behaviour in a way that is understandable, I have chosen to analyse the themes and metaphors in modern stories of the Gothic variety to illustrate what is going on inside of an individual's psychic background who is plagued with unwanted feelings and compulsions. Typically, the Gothic heroine's struggles with homicidal demons and bloodsucking vampires represent metaphors for the heroine's underlying struggles with the problems she experiences while adapting herself to modernism.
Being able to see and understand the metaphorical meaning in some of these themes requires a rather unusual ability that even the most highly trained professional analysts seem to lack because this kind of understanding is a cultural taboo. The theme that I like to use to illustrate this point is the so-called missing father in the Snow White fairytale. If you check the Internet for analyses of the Snow White tale, you will find that the consensus suggests that the father is missing. The father is missing only because modern analysts are trained to think in terms of the missing father. In actuality, the father is not missing from the Snow White tale. Typically, fathers are completely mystified by the mother-daughter conflict, so the father's role is mostly parenthetical to the actual conflict. But he is present nonetheless. The father appears as the mirror and the huntsman.
It is a regular occurrence for a wife to look her husband in the eyes, the mirror to the soul that always tells the truth, and ask if he still loves her. When he tells his wife that he loves her only, his eyes betray the actual truth; that he finds the daughter to be more lovely than his wife. The huntsman motif is a bit more complicated, so it will be only explained in the text of The Queen of Wonderland because it requires a reference to a psychiatric textbook to render the explanation credible.
In the Black Swan movie the father is truly missing and the daughter is at the mercy of the mother and the sorcerer. The storyline for the Black Swan movie was obviously cooked up out of psychiatric textbook cases, so its themes are something that any analyst can easily sink his teeth into. But there are some questionable seasoning ingredients that got thrown into the pot that were not in the textbook recipe, so no analysis of the movie is going to say anything about them. The Black Swan movie involves a Gothic style, so some of the themes parallel those that occur in self-harming behaviour. Because of this relationship, I am connecting some of themes that occur in the Black Swan movie with the themes that occur in other Gothic fantasies in my analysis for The Queen of Wonderland book.
The most serious omission the producers of the Black Swan movie made was not covering those drab concrete block walls with fake antique brick wallpaper as a way to impart the film with an atmosphere that accords with its Gothic style. And they really should have consulted with Dr. Lecter on how to prepare the swan for a Gothic banquet.
The good doctor Hannibal Lecter also appears in The Queen of Wonderland, but not as a human being. Most people make the mistake of interpreting Dr. Lecter as a human being, when he represents a spectral factor in the heroine's psychic background. That is, he is a modern representation of the God of the Underworld, Hades.
Although an individual's ego happily adapts to modern technological culture, there is a factor in our psychic background that doesn't. The psyche has its own rules: hardwired genetic rules. Trying to analyse and explain why depression and self-harming behaviour are so rampant in modern technological culture is not an easy task. The end results always appear to most people like psychobabble even when explained in plain language. This is because understanding what self-harm is about conflicts with what we are taught to believe, i.e., it appears as something alien or taboo. As a result, most people are content with simplistic explanations, the sort of stuff that explains nothing in fact.
This desire for uncomplicated simplification is the factor that inspired an Italian fashion designer to put up an appalling image of a nude anorectic model on billboards as an attempt to make adolescent girls conscious of the dangers of becoming anorectic. Yet, the problem of anorexia nervosa is increasing rather than decreasing among children. Fashion, in itself, is not the cause of anorexia nervosa as the authorities claim. A fashion designer's obsession with the thin figure in fashion is the result of the same kind of inspiration that is behind anorexia nervosa itself. There is another, i.e., a "setting-the-trap," factor involved in order for an adolescent to become triggered into developing anorexia nervosa. You can't set off a trap if you don't wind up the mechanism first. It is this setting-the-trap factor that sociologists, and conventional psychologists pretend to know nothing about. So they focus upon the triggering factor. Anything can trigger a trap. A dead branch can fall off a tree and land on the trap and set it off. Hence, the leitmotif, "many things contribute to the cause of self-harming behaviour," i.e., setting the trap off. What sets the trap off is largely irrelevant. But our leading authorities don't seem to get that simple fact. What is important is who or what set the trap in the children’s playground.
Because of the difficulties in explaining the setting-the-trap factor behind self-harming behaviour in a way that is understandable, I have chosen to analyse the themes and metaphors in modern stories of the Gothic variety to illustrate what is going on inside of an individual's psychic background who is plagued with unwanted feelings and compulsions. Typically, the Gothic heroine's struggles with homicidal demons and bloodsucking vampires represent metaphors for the heroine's underlying struggles with the problems she experiences while adapting herself to modernism.
Being able to see and understand the metaphorical meaning in some of these themes requires a rather unusual ability that even the most highly trained professional analysts seem to lack because this kind of understanding is a cultural taboo. The theme that I like to use to illustrate this point is the so-called missing father in the Snow White fairytale. If you check the Internet for analyses of the Snow White tale, you will find that the consensus suggests that the father is missing. The father is missing only because modern analysts are trained to think in terms of the missing father. In actuality, the father is not missing from the Snow White tale. Typically, fathers are completely mystified by the mother-daughter conflict, so the father's role is mostly parenthetical to the actual conflict. But he is present nonetheless. The father appears as the mirror and the huntsman.
It is a regular occurrence for a wife to look her husband in the eyes, the mirror to the soul that always tells the truth, and ask if he still loves her. When he tells his wife that he loves her only, his eyes betray the actual truth; that he finds the daughter to be more lovely than his wife. The huntsman motif is a bit more complicated, so it will be only explained in the text of The Queen of Wonderland because it requires a reference to a psychiatric textbook to render the explanation credible.
In the Black Swan movie the father is truly missing and the daughter is at the mercy of the mother and the sorcerer. The storyline for the Black Swan movie was obviously cooked up out of psychiatric textbook cases, so its themes are something that any analyst can easily sink his teeth into. But there are some questionable seasoning ingredients that got thrown into the pot that were not in the textbook recipe, so no analysis of the movie is going to say anything about them. The Black Swan movie involves a Gothic style, so some of the themes parallel those that occur in self-harming behaviour. Because of this relationship, I am connecting some of themes that occur in the Black Swan movie with the themes that occur in other Gothic fantasies in my analysis for The Queen of Wonderland book.
The most serious omission the producers of the Black Swan movie made was not covering those drab concrete block walls with fake antique brick wallpaper as a way to impart the film with an atmosphere that accords with its Gothic style. And they really should have consulted with Dr. Lecter on how to prepare the swan for a Gothic banquet.
The good doctor Hannibal Lecter also appears in The Queen of Wonderland, but not as a human being. Most people make the mistake of interpreting Dr. Lecter as a human being, when he represents a spectral factor in the heroine's psychic background. That is, he is a modern representation of the God of the Underworld, Hades.
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