In my "Violence and Lunacy" post,  I talked about the fact that humans have a psychological preconfiguration to be enamored with blood.  Let’s consider this fact: the entire time our psyche was evolving, we had experiences with blood.  This is probably why so many religions use blood in their rituals. If you think about it, it makes sense that our primitive mind (The Self) would have a potent relationship with blood.  We see blood, and it does something to us internally.  This intense, internal reaction is jarring, it defies any kind of logical explanation, and transcends culture.  Our psyche didn’t evolve alongside Gatorade.  Seeing a cup of Gatorade isn’t nearly as intense as seeing a cup of blood.  When I talk about “archetypal power”, this is a good dynamic that I think illustrates what I am talking about.  Blood’s interaction with internal psyche has a lot of archetypal power.  That internal intensity when we see blood is a good frame of reference in terms of understanding the archetypal. The various functions blood has served in terms of religious rituals are wonderfully outlined in Edward Edinger’s “Ego and Archetype.”  Since this reaction to blood takes place across all of humanity, its jarring nature is transpersonal is rather than personal.  When Jungians talk about archetypes, they are talking about the transpersonal preconfigurations in the psyche that arouse the primitive libido. 
     Here is a quote from Edinger’s “Ego and Archetype” that best explains how blood resonates with the primitive Psyche. 

"Since primitive times blood has carried numinous implications. The blood was considered to be the seat of life or soul. Because the liver was thought to be a mass of clotted blood, the soul was located in that organ.  Since life ebbed away as one bled to death, the equation of blood and life was natural and inevitable."
 
Edinger, Edward F.. Ego and Archetype (C. G. Jung Foundation Books Series) (Kindle Locations 3942-3945). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
 
“Numinous” means that something has a spiritual quality.  The archetypal pull of blood is numinous.      
 
Because blood was a divine fluid it was a crime to spill it except in a sacrificial ritual dedicated to the gods. Hence blood was associated with murder and with the guilt and vengeance which follow it. Blood was thought of as an autonomous entity which can call for its own revenge as when the blood of Abel cries from the ground (Genesis 4:10). According to primitive thinking (i.e., unconscious thinking) it is not that it is morally wrong to take the life of another but rather that it is highly dangerous to interfere with such a potent substance as blood.
 
Edinger, Edward F.. Ego and Archetype (C. G. Jung Foundation Books Series) (Kindle Locations 3952-3956). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

      My conscious mind thought blood is simply symbolic of murder, carnage and pain.  The with my new Neo-Jungian lens, the transpersonal subconscious (which also resides in me) knows blood to have the numinous quality of a celestial currency that serves to regulate archetypal, transpersonal, libidinal energies.  If I consciously think of it this way, my subconscious aligns with the conscious, and I have successfully tapped into my creative drive.  Situations became bloody when people were unable to regulate archetypal energies nonviolently.  My conscious self wanted to reject this fascination, but my primitive self was drawn to this because blood represents the magical aspect of archetypal regulation.
     This requires a person to have the capacity to embrace their irrationality on a level that is too much for some.  As an artist, it means that when I was creating this spread, the archetypal potency of blood imagery, and its context in my story stimulated my primitive consciousness to give me a powerful drive.  This spread communicates the intensity of this libidinal drive through detail, shape, and color.  The bright red of the blood gives it a magical, divine sensibility that my Neo-Jungian lens can see. 
            When the outer world shares aspects of one’s internal world and the ego can recognize it, a regulated euphoric libidinal drive begins to pump.  The Neo-Jungian lens provides a framework of identifying what is archetypally significant, how it resonates internally, and when this is actualized as a creation of art, our creative libido comes out to play.  This was just my first introduction to this experience.
            So what? Does this mean you just have to think about blood a lot, and put it in everything to be inspired?  Well, I could do that but I don’t ONLY want to make that kind of work.  I created this spread, had this experience, and later discovered Edinger’s writings about blood.  Edinger’s words contextualized this experience for me.  The understanding I gained was as follows:  When I relate to my experiences of the outerworld archetypally, I can more easily access my creative libido.

​I realized that the Neo-Jungian model that Robert Moore studied provides me with a very efficient means of developing an axis to tap into these psychological energies.  To develop an ego-Self axis is to develop an efficient communion with the enormous powers of the transpersonal, archetypal Self.
            My therapist suggested that I read Robert Moore’s “Facing the Dragon: Confronting Spiritual Grandiosity.”  In reading this, I started to understand the significance of the archetypal.  Its not just some neat thing to study to feel inspired.  These are not neutral forces in the psyche, they are imperialistic.  In “Facing the Dragon” Moore points out a dynamic that is inescapable: For the sake of keeping our ego’s comfortable, we deny its futility to the archetypal; consequently, we are possessed by imperialistic archetypal forces within the transpersonal, archetypal Self.  This will cause us to destroy ourselves and eventually destroy the planet. 
            Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette put out a series of books called “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover.”  These books are geared towards men to help us mature.  The bigger picture though, is that these books provide a potent archetypal frame of reference for understanding how our inner world relates to our outer world.  How consciously relating to the archetypal significance allows for one to maximize their human potential.  This series also provides the information necessary to build the ego-Self axis to channel our creative libido.  In short, to access the creative drive, we must develop a way of relating to ourselves and to the world archetypally.
            After I started practicing the information Moore writes about and lectures about (see is-publications.com), I began having intense spiritual experiences.  The first one was a bit much.  It felt like I was skydiving while my spine started having a really intense tingling.  I felt like I was about to leave my body.  I was driving while this happened, so I had to pull over.  I didn’t begin believing things that are untrue, but I started having experiences that are life affirming in ways I never could have anticipated.  Since I have done this work, I have been able to cultivate ecstasy everyday.  I can feel a tingly euphoria everyday running up and down my spine and into the base of my head.  I feel really good.  I can tap into energies and work in communion with them instead of having to wait for them and ride like a wave.  I set out to determine away to tap into my creative libido and I was successful in my quest.  I also found something that was much more important: what I found was life affirming ecstasy.  

​     Josiah slaves a way at mediocre illustrations to please art directors and advertisers (subconsciously, they represent the gods of meritocracy).  He has no libido, and cannot actualize his creative potential.  He doesn’t know it, but he is sacrificing his creative libido to the god’s of meritocracy.  Falsely, he thinks that the satisfaction of career success will be fuel for his libido.  He works frantically, neglecting Bruno, so he can bob and weave the experience of The Void.  He creates different justifications and reasons, but underneath all that he is driven by his primitive, compulsive worshipping of meritocracy.  In denying the existence of The Void, and his vulnerability to it, Josiah is possessed to avoid it.  His subconscious denial leads to compulsive workaholism.  As is always the case with archetypal possession, this compulsive workaholism aggressively manifests the Void he is trying to avoid.  He hates his career, he is isolated and he neglects Bruno.  

     While Bruno sort of accepts Josiah is his superior, he has greater awareness The Void.  He understands its dynamics and its enormity.
     I believe that when we experience The Void, the sense that its on a spectrum with varying intensity is an illusion.  I believe that The Void is completely engulfing.  In order to protect us, our conscious mind throws most of our sense of the Void below the repression barrier.  It seems like a its on a spectrum because our repression barrier hides the enormity of The Void, and consequently we cannot directly observe our own engulfment.  We often times have to indirectly look at symptoms to come to this conclusion.
     It is really easy to judge both the repression barrier and conscious mind as bad because they have such a large role in obscuring self-awareness.  I believe that if the conscious mind does not have proper structure, it cannot consciously acknowledge and give appropriate appreciation for our primitive wiring.  For example, if the conscious mind isn’t “built” right, it cannot regularly and consciously appreciate The Void without being sucked right into it. 
   Bruno and Josiah are two examples of people (or cats with human minds) with inadequate structure to their consciousness.  They have opposite responses to their inadequate structure.  Josiah will get sucked into The Void, so he represses, dissociates and devolves into a joyless subconscious worshipper of meritocracy.  Bruno on the other hand, has awareness to appreciate The Void, but gets sucked right in.  At this point, his entire life’s purpose is to avoid experiencing The Void.  Since he is engulfed, he will bounce between primitive compulsions and will aggressively do whatever he must in order to eliminate his experience The Void.  

     When men interact with other men who are psychologically configured like Bruno, it scares us.  We instinctually understand that his behavior and the mannerisms motivated by fear of The Void, and we understand the deep libidinal drive behind it.  Men that behave like Bruno are a visceral reminder of the psychological space a man occupies before he actualizes his worst potentials.  (This actually plays a large role in misogyny.  If I get requests, I can make some posts about that.)  We know the drive to escape it at the expense of innocent people.  The Void has no boundaries.
        I am terrified of The Void and I have a history of becoming easily engulfed in it’s archetypal pull.  I have experienced extreme dissociation and addiction. In an attempt to avoid its pull, my consciousness sacrificed my capacity experience interconnected warmth (I will call this Love with a capital “L” to signify that its within an archetypal context.  Love here is euphoric interconnected warmth, not necessarily connection with another person).  My consciousness was so traumatized by its experiences of The Void, that it created a fantasy to help me cope.  This fantasy was that I can live happily without a capacity to experience the Love that preempts The Void.  After all, I knew that to the extent I was engulfed in Love, the separation would later engulf me in The Void.  The union between these seemed inextricable. Love rendered me vulnerable to The Void to such an extent that I couldn’t function if I acknowledged this.  The sense of helplessness was paralyzing. Consequently, my conscious mind shut down a sense that I could freely indulge in Love.  I could feel the psychic reality that I am capable of experiencing Love; however, I couldn’t own that capacity and I projected it onto drugs and other indulgent behaviors.  Active addiction became my means of feeling interconnected warmth.  Alas, when I was possessed by fear of The Void, my life became a Void.   Such is the nature of archetypal possession.  

​     On page 10, Bruno understands that they will destroy and kill Josiah by waterboarding him to death… With pee.  I touched upon the transpersonal, archetypal nature behind blood, but I have not done this with pee.  The reason I decided to use pee is simple.  Pee is funny.  Glowing pee is even funnier than normal pee.  I think pee is also funny because pee is gross.  How can I derive from laughter from something as disgusting as pee?  I don’t know!  Honestly, I think some dark secrets of the psyche should remain a mystery.  Otherwise, life has no magic!
    If Bruno loses Josiah, he falls into The Void.  His libido that manifests to prevent this is cosmic in its force.  I remembered my fear of The Void, and all of the horrible things I did to avoid it.  I thought of the people I hurt and the libido behind my sadistic potentials.  I thought of how powerful my sadistic drive was when I would act out on it compulsively.  Bruno is overwhelmed by his fear of The Void.  He is also overwhelmed by physical attacks against him on pages 11 and 12.  

​     He is engulfed in both, and both represent bleakness, pain, and death. These men intend on killing him, much like The Void.  Bruno is in a situation where the physical reality around him is imitating the reality within him.  His outer reality symbolically resonates with his inner reality.  Consequently, his primitive subconscious has a libidinal eruption to work out his internal dilemma on the external world.  The libido behind behind his internal neurosis finally comes into alignment with his urgent need to fight back.  When the outer reality imitates the inner reality result is a manifestation of fantastic violence displayed in the bloody spread on pages 13 and 14.  

​     Technically, Bruno is not committing the atrocity.  He works in communion with the Chainsaw Man.  He had to trick the Chainsaw Man in order to utilize his power.  Now Bruno just has to sit back and watch the carnage unfold.  This dynamic is symbolic of the internal process I underwent to channel my primitive drive to endure the tedium necessary to complete this double page spread.
     Bruno represents my conscious mind. The Chainsaw Man is not very smart, but very powerful.  He represents the subconscious, primitive mind.  Bruno is not very powerful, but he makes the decisions.  Bruno does a mind trick on Chainsaw Man which unleashes his destructive power.  To put this more directly, in order for me to tap into the psychological power to complete this spread, I had to trick my primitive mind.  I could not try to overpower my subconscious into working into communion with me, otherwise it attacks me in the form of possession.  This was my great revelation.  Instead, I realized I could develop an axis for my conscious mind to tap into the generative powers of the subconscious mind.  

    Josiah is supposed to be a character that is “normal.”  By normal, I mean he is repressed in the same exact way most Americans are.  Josiah is secretly intimidated by Bruno’s lack of boundaries.  I wanted to explore a typical narcissistic dilemma.  While Josiah enjoys feeling superior to this smaller creature who can’t regulate his own feelings, he is also terrified of him.  Men instinctually and intensely feel that a lack of emotional boundaries can lead to uncontrolled death and destruction.  Ultimately, the fear he feels towards Bruno is a fear he experiences with other men (but to a lesser extent).  

​Allow me to explain…

     So, I have an assumption about a male fear of intimacy towards other men.  I think that its important to honor the depth and potency of this fear.

     I grew up with my dad working and my mother at home.  My emotional world was centered in my mother.  She was the ultimate authority figure that I had to try to emotionally identify.  Like with all children, this identification is archetypally intertwined with a sense of survival.  I knew that when I got older, I was going to grow into a different “thing” than her.  Did I understand the fluidity of gender identity? No. Did I understand that men and women develop the same potentials? No.  I just knew men were different than women, and that I was going to be different than her in a general sense that I had no nuanced understanding of.  There is a lot of specificity to this and how it relates to misogyny, but manifestations of misogyny have a lot of vicissitudes and I believe that topic deserves its own, separate blog post.

     So when we realize as boys that we will grow into different “things” (men instead of women) than our mothers, something kicks off subconsciously to assist our separation: a bleak detachment.  To clearly communicate this, I must explain my set of assumptions about our psychological circuitry.  I think that when we are in the womb, we cannot distinguish ourselves from our mothers.  We don’t know there is a world outside the womb.  The womb is our world, and we feel an oceanic connection with it.  Consequently, we all have the circuitry to feel oceanic interconnectedness with the world.  Many different kinds of people have been able to trigger these experiences.  Shamans, religious figures, and psychedelic enthusiasts.  This is a potential in all humans.  Some people call acute feelings of oceanic interconnectedness warmth “ego death.”  

  ​As children we feel this warmth and its pull is tremendous.  The sense that we are all interconnected is a psychological reality.  If you are ever around children for an extended period of time, you will see adults having to remind them.
“…not everybody is on the same page as you, not everybody is connected to what you are thinking.  We need to level with each other and work things out.  I need to know where you are at and you need to know where I am at.  Its not automatically the same.”
As children begin to develop a sense of being separate from other people, the warmth of that oceanic interconnectedness leaves.  Consequently, we experience something I will call “the Void.”  I capitalize the first letter to signify its transpersonal, archetypal context.  When one experiences The Void, life seems meaningless, bleak, and horrible as one realizes they lack access to a sense of oceanic interconnected warmth.  I suspect the circuitry behind The Void is the main culprit behind bad acid trips.  

     So how does this relate to a male fear of intimacy?  As I explained, because boys know we grow into men who will be different “things” than our mothers, the sense of separation we experience is enormous.  The enormity of this separation manifests emotionally as intense experiences of The Void.  At a young age, boys harshly learn the following lesson:  to the exact extent that we allow ourselves to be engulfed by our mother’s love, we will also experience the intense, life denying bleakness of The Void when we are separated.  Even though the Void is the exact opposite of the warm oceanic connectedness we feel towards our mothers, boys subconsciously associate the two things.  These opposites become closely associated together.  Boys develop a deep knowing connectedness inevitably gets interrupted by The Void.  

    These Void experiences highlight two needs that seem to oppose to each other:  our need to separate, and our desperate need for connection all at the same time.  It also makes us terrified of our own connection to our mothers.  After all, what’s the point of connected love if The Void’s sense of cold, nihilistic doom inevitably follows?  At this point, boys know that while our mother means well, we aren’t wired to receive all that love she has to give because we get engulfed in it, and when we separate, we get engulfed in The Void.  When you are a boy, every woman seems like your mother, so every woman gets associated with the engulfment-void process that I just outlined.  Without proper guidance, men will maintain this association and when will bear the consequences.  This is the underlying cause of why boys specifically need men to initiate them.  We know we need to feel connected, we know we need to separate, and we know that healthy older men have a nuanced understanding of internal emotional boundaries that we need to learn in order to do both.  We know we need this from older men, and feel lost when we haven’t received this. If we don’t learn this from older men, then anytime we feel connected to another person, a fear of The Void will rear its ugly head, and we will have no way to cope.  The way I experienced this was peculiar.  I remember being 28 and still feeling like a boy, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.  This was why… I never explicitly received this knowledge, and my deep knowing manifested as a sense of being underdeveloped.  I knew that I lacked the capacity for internal boundary setting, and would very easily get engulfed.  Engulfment would render me vulnerable to an extent that I was unable to bear.
 
Interestingly, Josiah has thrust his fear of The Void far below his repression barrier.  Bruno remains keenly aware of The Void.  As we see, he will avoid it at all costs.