DO YOU KNOW YOUR DEMONS?

DO YOU KNOW YOUR DEMONS?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
The Peripatetic Philosopher

© March 2006

Metaphorically, we all have “rocks in our heads,” and “snakes in our secret gardens.” Our snakes, sunning themselves on these rocks, symbolize our fantasies and wicked thoughts. To deny their presence is to throw our lives off balance, out of control, as if suddenly pierced by their deadly venom. What we do is one thing; what we think is quite another. No one is absolutely good or absolutely evil, but a combination of both. If we ignore one at the expense of the other, we are bound for trouble. To respect our wickedness gives us an advantage. Others less self-accepting may stumble on their snakes at any time, whereas we, ever alert, gingerly step around ours. We can even use them, on occasion, as creative people do, to stimulate our visionary powers. Fantasies are an important source of energy, not so much to be acted on as to add dimension to our vision, to widen our horizons.


THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), p. 321.***


Everyone has his or her demons. They occupy their soul as James Hillman tells us in his book, THE SOUL’S CODE (1996). To understand these demons is to understand ourselves, and in understanding ourselves, we are then in a position to understand others.

This is a problem that is as eternal as the story of man. Now, should you be one that insists you are not haunted by your demons, I suggest that you don’t know yourself, and are in open season to be exploited by others.

The second thing I would suggest is that these demons of the soul that take residence early in our life are there throughout it. As a consequence, our behavior changes very little over the course of our life from those initial psychic footprints on the soul. It behooves us therefore to understand and deal with it openly, confidently, honestly, empathetically, and understandably.

It is not wrong to have demons, as significant others foist many of these upon us. They do this when we are mere protoplasm, or essentially an amorphous being. They push, jostle, shape, ply, and pressure us into the individual we ultimately become.

The Nobel Laureate Eugene O’Neil (1888 – 1953), who has been called America’s Shakespeare, had a tumultuous life and a fragmented education. For six years, he went to sea, lived the life of the tramp at docksides, and made an attempt at suicide. After a spell in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, he began writing plays as a means of making sense of his disturbed emotions having come from a volatile theatrical family. To this day, The Ice Man Cometh (1946) and Long Days Journey Into Night (published posthumously in 1956) are considered classics in American literature. His plays were autobiographical and cathartic in their presentation to the world. He put in his will that Long Days Journey Into Night should never be published, but his wife published it after his death, receiving his fourth Pulitzer Prize for which we are the benefactors.

This play is the story of a family: a mother, father, and two sons. The father had the potential to be the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day, but sold out to comfort, security and public adulation. This found him committed to the singular role of the Count of Monte Crisco instead of venturing into more challenging classical roles made famous by Edwin Booth. To his dying day he regretted his sellout, punishing his family through the years for it.

His mother lost her favorite son and became a morphine addict after his death and drifted into insanity. His older brother became an alcoholic and never realized his potential. Eugene O’Neil shuttled off to boarding school at an early age, lost his faith in Roman Catholicism at age fourteen, and drifted first as a college dropout, then as a sailor and roustabout, becoming a drunkard until he finally found his moorings in the word.

He wrote many stunning plays receiving Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922) and Strange Interlude (1928), and posthumously for Long Days Journey Into Night (1956). Not only was he the first American dramatist to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1936), it was awarded years before his greatest works.

The Ice Man Cometh (1946) is about a favorite bar on the waterfront that he frequented as a roustabout at a low point of his life; and Long Days Journey Into Night (1956) was of his family as crucible of his torment and creativity. O’Neil, rather than denying his gifts, used his demons to find his way in art. That said he was never a happy man, never a comfortable man, but he was a hard working man, and used his art to express his soul, and release his demons, and thus gave the world a window into its own.

There is another person I have in mind who is not a bad man, more a good man, but a man not only failing to have his demons in control to soar to self-realization, but is invariably crippled by them in perpetual self-defeat. He is that great American contemporary prototype, the entrepreneur.

Last year, he netted over two million dollars in income. This year he is so far in debt that he may lose everything. The difference is that when he lost it before he did not have a family, no loving wife, no loving son and daughter, no nuclear core of depth and breadth and consequence. He is seemingly strapped to demons he does not know and does not understand, demons he continues to ignore to his continuing regret.

Now, what are his demons?

Only he could answer that with any certainty. I sense knowing the man that his brother was his parent’s favorite, and that he constantly did everything in his power to win their affection, recognition, approval, and acceptance. His brother was a self- indulgent, narcissistic dilettante who could do no wrong. He was always considered above the fray, always provided excuses for his failures and excesses, which ultimately took him down to his parents’ eternal sorrow, dying at a young age.

The family was somewhat affluent, but he was treated as hired help rather than given the freedom to play athletics that he was gifted to perform, and the time to develop the insouciant social graces of adolescent youth. He worked at his father’s auto dealership after school and on weekends washing cars, doing as many as twenty in a day.

Physical labor became a palliative. To this day he is more comfortable in hard physical activity than in either intellectual problem solving or social interaction.

He was dyslexic at a time when parents thought it was indicative of retardation. Far from being slow, he graduated from a major university, became a police officer, went on to earn his master’s degree in criminal justice, taught as a professor in that university’s program, went on to earn his law degree, and then doctorate in jurisprudence, becoming a lawyer in a small firm.

As a lawyer, he discovered that he was not a nine to five person, didn’t like to be confined to a schedule, prisoner of the clock, to the authority of a boss and performance measuring indices, or, indeed, to the billing of long hours to ingratiate himself to his law partners. Trained as an advocate, he failed to find legal work satisfying. He desired his freedom to come and go as he pleased, and to do as he willed.

When his parents died, he received a generous inheritance. Part of it he invested in a automotive salvage business, and part of it he used to promote his dream to own and drive race cars on the amateur circuit.

One manifestation of his demons was that, as blind as he was to his own talent, he appeared even blinder to see such talent exaggerated in others. This made him vulnerable to the con.

That said one of the wisest moves he ever made was acquiring a partner in the salvage business, a person who had no money to invest, but knew the business. It turned out this was the only instance when a partner did not exploit him. The opportunity was always there because he had little interest in learning the business, working the business, or being in anyway engaged in the business other than as a venture capitalist. This predilection would prove his undoing.

He would continue to practice law without joy moving from one law firm to another, eventually establishing his own, while showing no enthusiasm for developing the business. Instead, his sights were always on a new opportunity, where he could identify a promising venture, then find the expertise to run it, retreating into the woodwork, as he had with the salvage business. The opportunity came in the Internet pharmacy business, especially for clients on pain medications who were interested in expeditious delivery of these medications with little concern of the cost involved. The business boomed.

He acquired wealth he didn’t dream of, but now moths were attracted to the beaming light of his demons and he was unable to escape the glass encasement, vulnerable to the con in all its devious personalities.

First it was a partner who had unsavory ways that made him uncomfortable. He allowed the partner to buy him out, gave him the building he had purchased on his own, and is still waiting to receive his due from the buy out. Prior to that he acquired a partner for marketing he didn’t need, and who never delivered, and whom he set up in his own pharmacy business, a person who now fails to return his telephone calls.

He built an estate of his own design in which he acted as prime contractor, giving struggling subcontractors business, many of whom not only failed to deliver, but did shoddy work. An inclination was revealed here to do business on the cheap, and to stay away from licensed and established contractors. It also exposed a vulnerability to hard luck stories of people who conned him into giving them loans with no intention of repaying him.

How could a person go from being a multimillionaire in 2005 to nearly destitute in 2006?

It was a tapestry of his demons playing havoc on his soul, not in the minor leagues as it had always been before, but now in the major leagues where you win or lose with catastrophic finality. With a blissful vision of irresponsibility, he decided that he would partner with a garage mechanic to manufacture high-end super fast automobiles and sell them to Hollywood types at a major profit.

Once again, he failed to contact an established manufacturer with a history of success in this high-end field. Instead, his new partner had no money and operated out of a job shop. This meant that he had to purchase six of these automobiles sight-unseen before they were constructed with most of his 2005 income as the venture capital. Two of them have been constructed, one delivered, failing speed test after speed test, blowing engines, until today the partner is bankrupt with little chance of any recovery of the venture capital much less return on the investment.

The demons reign supreme. He got lucky with his partner in the salvage business, to be sure, but never again. Thereafter, he thought they had special knowledge, marketing acumen, and connections, and were honest men. Instead, they were con men with similar ephemeral dreams, but not the cash to support them. They took from him until he had nothing more to give, and then like the moths disappeared out of the light of his demons as if they never existed.

You might wonder how an attorney trained in law could allow so many people to deceive him, and yet do nothing. Like the playwright O’Neil, the state of the demons is revealed when he was putty in the hands of his parents. O’Neil used these demons to create his art, while he has been caged by them.

His non-confrontational timidity is incongruous with his handsome countenance, powerfully built physique, and quiet retiring disposition, but engaging personality. His mother was always telling him how bright she was, that she had a genius IQ, while reminding him that he was less gifted by comparison, which he was not. His father, who was kinder to him, but was under his mother’s dominance, often treated him as if hired help. His father’s affection was parceled out by the odd manual laboring jobs he did for him. Consequently, he came to equate manual labor with affection, while retreating from any intellectual comparison as the anathema of rejection.

Remarkably, he has not wandered into drugs, alcoholism, or profligate behavior as his brother had, but has been a devoted if secretive husband – his wife is never party to his misadventures until after the fact -- and a dutiful and loving parent. His family means everything to him. Yet, his demons attack him in subtle psychosomatic ways racking his body with back pain as if to level him for denial of their existence.

His demons have him living in a zone where he cannot say no, he will not say no, while he insists in thinking that people that say no, and don’t want to assume other people’s problems, are uncaring when it is quite the reverse of this.

The sad thing is that I see this person often and have been trained to help him. Rather than deal with his demons, he instead reads these stupid self-help books and watches these stupid self-help television programs in an effort to escape them. The self-help industry delights in trauma and exploits it with one fad after another. Meanwhile, these demons reign in control because now they are monsters. They will not let up until he dies. Demons are like “rocks in our heads” and “snakes in our secret garden.” To deny them is to live in peril for they will not disappear.

* * * * *

***James R. Fisher, Jr., THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, The Delta Group Florida, Tampa, Florida, 1996. The book is available from this website, Amazon.com or electronically from any bookseller.