The Queen of Wonderland

This little story is meant to represent the type of prelude that can occur in dreams and fantasies that have their beginnings a long time before any signs of fantasy – what psychiatrists call delusional – ideas begin to crop up in the individual herself. According to legends, the demon does not come into one’s inner chambers uninvited. There is always something about one’s personal experiences or personality that attracts the sort of spirits who have the potential to cause havoc.

Fantasies of this sort represent a vulnerable predisposition for developing a fantasy style of thinking if the normal development of the personality becomes thwarted. Fantasy thinking was the original form of thinking of primitive human beings before mankind developed consciousness. Some fantasies symbolically represent the transformation of the personality that involve an archetypal figure of the primordial mother or a tragic lover. The story on this page is a fantasy about the primordial mother archetype. The ancient Greek mythology about the fate of Persephone represents a fantasy involving the soul’s relationship to the primordial Mother, and a tragic romance with a dangerous lover. The demon lover may appear in a future addition to this story as he is wont to show up as the disembodied voice that an anorexic hears or silently perceives.

Use you imagination and create your own fantasized stories about Alice’s adventures. Keep in mind that Alice isn’t the person with anorexia or cutting, but her dream-personality, so let your imagination run wild.

Chapter Six

The Enchantment of the Wildflowers

by

Malcolm Timbers

copyright 2008 

The Old Woman Who Knows Everything

While her doctor was busy trying to devise some plausible explanation for Alice’s malady, the fairies already knew what had actually transpired: Alice had been enchanted by the Old Woman Who Knows Everything and now Alice has the secret desire to become the Queen of Everything herself. Although Alice began to act rather peculiar, she wasn’t the least bit crazy as her doctor might have suggested.

It all started one Sunday morning in late summer several years ago as a result of Alice’s refusal to put up with her mother’s constant nagging her father about this and that. Alice picked up her toy white rabbit and ran outside, slamming the screen door behind her.

At her mother’s command Alice’s older sister, Miriam, soon followed in pursuit of Alice who was wont to go off wandering whenever family fights broke out.

After asking several of the neighbourhood children if they had seen Alice going by, Miriam eventually caught up with Alice who was, by now, busy picking wildflowers in a large meadow on the edge of town.

“These pretty flowers should make mommy happy, so she won’t be so mean to daddy!” exclaimed Alice.

Not knowing what else to do, Miriam joined Alice in gathering wildflowers unmindful of where the flowers were leading the children. There was always one especially enchanting flower off in the distance whose loveliness always seemed to be jumping ahead of the girls. But as they neared the flower that seemed to radiate with a vibrant colour from a distance it always turned out to be just another ordinary wildflower whenever it came within their grasp.

Before the girls knew it, they had crossed the meadow and found themselves before a deep forest where an old woman was busy gathering flowers and wild herbs on the edge of the meadow.

Alice and Miriam greeted the old woman with the usual pleasantries, to which the old woman replied, “Alice, my dear, you look so pale. Come to my cottage and I will make a special tea for you that will put some colour back in you cheeks.”

Alice was taken aback because she could not remember ever having known the old woman. Yet, despite her sister’s nudges of protests about talking to strangers, Alice was curiously fascinated by the kindly old woman and her basket full of wildflowers and herbs. So Alice politely asked the old woman what her name was and how she knew Alice’s name.
The old woman replied, “Alice, my child, because I am so old, I know everyone in our town. My name is Hecate and I have lived in these woods for a very long time.”

“What will you do with all those things you’ve collected?” Inquired Alice.

“Every summer I collect herbs and wildflowers to prepare potions to treat the people who come to me seeking relief from their ailments,” explained Hecate.

“Oh! This sounds so exciting,” Alice exclaimed. “Let’s visit her cottage and see her collection of medicines.”

So with her toy rabbit in one arm and a bouquet of wildflowers in the other hand, Alice and Miriam set off with Hecate to her cottage which was hidden deep in the woods that bordered on the meadow.

Located in the middle of a clearing in the woods, the old women’s cottage was a lonely looking place but the garden that surrounded the cottage gave it an inviting charm. Miriam expected the front door to open with a spooky creaking noise, but the door opened smoothly to reveal a brightly lit cozy cottage with a fire place and an old fashion wood burning cook stove.

“Oh what a lovely cottage!” exclaimed Alice as they stood in the doorway admiring the well-kept interior.

As they entered, Alice and her sister became fascinated by the old women’s collection of dried herbs and other strange objects that filled numerous shelves and hung from rafters above their heads.

Alice suddenly piped up and said, “Don’t you get lonely living here all alone?”

“Gracious no my dear, I have my cats and all the forest creatures to keep me company,” replied Hecate. “And I see you have your companion with you to keep you company.”

“This is Buggsey,” exclaimed Alice enthusiastically as she held the toy up in front of her face. “He doesn’t say very much because he’s a rabbit, but neither does Miriam because she is shy.”

“Let’s pretend Buggsey can talk; what would he say?” suggested the old woman.

But he can talk,” Alice protested. “He talks to me whenever we are alone.”

“Don’t mind Alice,” Miriam quipped. “She’s always imagining things.”

While pouring her special herbal tea for the threesome, Hecate suggested to Alice, “Let us cast a magic spell that will make Buggsey come alive whenever the full moon rises in the sky.”

“Oh, that would be so fantastic!” Squealed Alice in excitement.
So Hecate arranged everyone in a hand-holding circle while sitting on the floor. Buggsey was placed in the middle of the circle and Hecate recited the magic words from a dusty old book while the girls held their eyes tightly closed.

After tea and biscuits, Miriam suggested that it was getting late and they should get home or their parents would become worried.

So the girls said they would be back for a visit soon and parted.

The pathway leading through the woods was well worn and marked out here and there with stones, so the children had no difficulty finding their way back to the meadow. As Alice and Miriam exited the woods they were greeted by a gentle summer breeze of sweet-smelling meadow grass and wildflowers. The sun was beginning to set behind the wooded lot where it cast long shadows that reached halfway across the meadow.

When the children reached a sunny spot part way across the meadow, Alice decided to pick a fresh bunch of wildflowers before continuing on home.

“Do you really think that Buggsey can become alive during the full moon?” inquired Alice as she finished gathering a handful of flowers.

“Don’t you remember what we learned in Sunday school that there is no such thing as magic? Hecate was only playing a silly game,” replied Miriam in a serious tone.

When they arrived home they excitedly told their parents about the kindly old woman and her collection of magic herbs and potions. However, Alice’s parents said they never heard of such an old woman named Hecate living anywhere near their village and suggested that the girls were making up stories again.

The very next morning Alice asked her mother if she could take some of her homemade peanut butter cookies along on a visit to Hecate’s cottage. Alice carefully tucked Buggsey into a basket with the cookies and set off for the Old Woman’s cottage with Miriam. Across the meadow they went but when they got to the far side, they could not find the pathway that led into the woods. Their way was blocked by a mass of blackberry briars that had grown over a rusty barbed wire fence that ran the entire length of the meadow in front of the woods and looked as if had been standing there for more than half a century.
 
Chapter Seven

Anorexia Nervosa as a Spiritual Problem

The Archetypal Wise Woman
{7-1} The Old Woman Who Knows Everything is a manifestation of the archetypal primordial mother. She is the moon goddess who waxes and wanes with good and evil, light and dark who appears in many manifestations that are both helpful and harmful. She is both the good Queen and the deadly Sphinx in the Oedipus myth. In many fairytales she appears as the devil’s grandmother who pursues frightened children into the wilderness. She is also the old witch who lures children into her magical oven and transforms them into gingerbread. At one time she imprisoned Rapunzell in a tower, and placed Sleeping Beauty in a swoon that lasted a hundred years. She was the wicked stepmother who gave the poisoned apple to Snow White. Nowadays she has been implicated in the act of enchanting children under the spell of an eating disorder. Alice’s attachment to her white rabbit suggests that she is under the spell of the moon’s magnetism and is seeking after the mythological wisdom of a moonlit Wonderland that is presided over by the archetypal Wise Woman.

I don’t have an email for this web site yet. I will post one after the book is published.

Although I live in Canada, please use my US mailing address because mail has often gone missing at my Canadian address:

Malcolm Timbers

P.O. Box. 3 4 4 1

Blaine, WA

98231

USA

This blog web site was created in support of those individuals who are experiencing self-harming compulsions in order that they might be able to understand what these compulsions are about. Entrenched anorexia nervosa cannot be cured without this understanding. Yet, the psychological authorities are not interested in helping an anorexic understand the underlying nature of her malady. They are only interested in finding ways to make the anorexic give up her quest for understanding and, instead, conform to the acceptable belief system.

Merely suggesting that anorexia nervosa might possess a positive meaning is considered to be an unspeakable heresy to the authorities. This refusal to help anorexics to understand the enigmatic meaning of their quest has resulted in some frustrated anorexics creating pro-anorexic web sites. Anorexics have a legitimate conviction that suggests that their quest has a meaning that needs to be understood. However, these pro-anorexic web sites only windup becoming a potentially deadly exercise in irony because of the impossibility of an anorexic understanding the meaning and purpose behind her malady without some outside help.

You can post comments on this web site that express how you feel about things that might not be understood elsewhere. For example many people who are anorexic have an uncanny feeling that their condition possesses a positive meaning and purpose but the psychological authority discourages any understanding of these feelings. Therapists may be skilled professionals at expressing compassion for your feelings, but definitely not any sincere understanding because they are not taught genuine understanding. Professional therapists are taught theories that are nothing more than canned explanations that dictate how things should be understood.

Unfortunately, the psychic factor that causes anorectic symptoms tailors the symptoms to conform to the attitudes of our culture, which is a culture that refuses to understand psychic reality. Consequently, the nature of the symptoms is hidden behind vague symbolism and maddening riddles, so the actual meaning becomes next to impossible to understand.

This web site gives positive support for understanding the meaning behind compulsive disorders like cutting and eating disorders because this is the only way to cure the destructive aspects of the psychic process without belittling a patient’s quest for understanding. The psychic process behind eating disorders became destructive in consequence of not understanding what it is or how to deal with it. Anorexia nervosa is difficult to cure because the individual cannot consciously direct the psychic process so long as she does not consciously understand what it is actually about.

The purpose of this web site is to give support to individuals who are seeking an understanding about the meaning and purpose of anorexia nervosa, Bulimia nervosa and cutting. A new book that is dedicated to understanding the psychological meaning and purpose behind these maladies is about to be published. Neither the psychological authorities nor the religious authorities are interested in helping an anorexic understand her malady. They are only interested in finding ways to make the anorexic give up her quest for understanding and, instead, conform to the acceptable belief systems.

My book, a work in progress, The Queen of Wonderland, is nearing completion. However, other work is keeping me busy, so I do not know at this time when I will have it ready for publication.

 Queen Alice Receiving her subjects.

This site is about a new publication in progress that describes the psychological nature of compulsive self-harming behaviour from a Jungian psychological perspective that employs mythology and fairy tales in a creative way. This book is not going to be a typical rehash that is based upon every other book on anorexia nervosa or cutting. Everything in this book is new as far as it pertains to self-harming behaviour.

Before we begin, it must be understood that Alice’s adventures do not represent the conscious experience of her personality, but the dreamtime adventures of her dream-personality or soul.

 Preface:

by

Malcolm Timbers

copyright 2008

Foreword to the First Edition

This book is an attempt to explain, in plain language, the hitherto unacknowledged psychological factors that are behind a group of self-harming behaviours that have become somewhat of an epidemic among young women during the past thirty-five or so years. Unlike ever other book about self-destructive behaviour, almost everything discussed in this book is new as far as it pertains to self-destructive behaviour in the public arena of ideas. Privately, the ideas for this publication represent my research going back more than twenty years into the problem of destructive and self-destructive behaviour. However, it was only recently that I finally cracked the enigmatic code of anorexia nervosa.

Two years ago, I decided to split off this project from a larger project after I happened to crack the first bit of psychic code behind anorexia nervosa while working on the phenomenon of destructive disorders. The second bit of code, which turned out to be the key that completely separates the phenomenon of anorexia nervosa from destructive behaviour and reveals its archetypal meaning and purpose, was only cracked during the summer of 2007. Understanding the function of this second factor that operates in the psychic background of anorexia nervosa changed my whole outlook on the phenomenon and this necessitated a complete rewrite of the manuscript.

As I developed these ideas, I began to realize that what is manifested as self-harming behaviour is a normal psychic process that became self-destructive only because it was not understood and hence, the individual is unable to consciously deal with it. In other words, the psychological purpose of some forms of self-destructive behaviour were not self-destructive after all, but a form of self-harming behaviour that, paradoxically, had a resourceful purpose to it. It was only after I thought that I had the book almost finished, and I was working on its index, that I began to realize that this was the hidden purpose behind self-harming behaviour. I had to stop writing for a while and research the basis of this factor. Eventually, I discovered that this factor was actually the objective of a psychic process and that a self-destructive end in death is oftentimes the result of not being able to understand the cause, the meaning and the purpose of the anorexic quest. Henceforth, with a sincere desire to understand the meaning and purpose of the anorexic quest, no one should have to die from this malady.

From Chapter 2:

Modern psychology is not interested in helping anorexics to understand the meaning and purpose of their malady. They are only interested in finding ways to make their charges conform to modernism. Modern psychology misinterpreted the anorexic’s delusions as an attempt to forcibly modernize the way people think by denying the influence of the soul. Although modern psychology ostensibly treats the individual in a humanistic fashion, it proceeds as if the human mind were a machine that can be tweaked with drugs and programmed through an educational interface in order to make it perform in a satisfactory manner. This attitude assumes that anorexia nervosa is a learned behaviour that can be corrected by eliminating what they consider to be bad influences and re-educating the patients in order to instil idealistic norms. It is quite obvious that their programme isn’t working.

Self-harming behaviour may very well be the soul’s expression of alienation and rejection of an ego/body that has lost touch with its roots in the ancestral life of the soul.

It was difficult for me to realize that self-harming behaviour can actually have a meaningful purpose that can result in a positive mental development for some individuals. However, this can only happen if the anorexic can understand the nature of the psychic process that is transpiring in the background of her psyche. The reason that people are not able to understand self-harm is because people get a deep sense of foreboding about the profound change in attitude that is necessary for this understanding because it portends the demise of the ego attitude and everything about their life that has gone before.

Modernism is totally concerned with the ego and the body and this attitude has the effect of alienating the soul.

 A longer Introduction is posted at: https://actualboulder.sslpowered.com/thequeenofwonderland.com/index.html

Alice, The Queen of Wonderland is a web site that explores the psychology of anorexia nervosa and cutting from the perspective of Jungian Psychology. Jungian psychology is about the life of the soul and its symbolic mythology.

Alice spends a lot of her time gazing at a curiously strange body in her looking glass. One night, while in a trance like state of mind, Alice felt herself being drawn through the silvery mist of her looking glass by the magnetism of an enchanting wonderland. 

In Through the Looking Glass, Alice finally gets to become the Queen of her own Wonderland.

The Queen of Wonderland is about the fantasy life of the soul or dream-personality, while the existential life of the anorexic languishes in a state of anorexia nervosa.

Dreams and fantasy speak in a symbolic language because this was the original language of the mind before humans developed language skills and the ability to think in a rational manner. Since rationalism is no guarantee of truth, the unconscious psyche still uses its symbolic style of thinking in dreams, fantasies and in the so-called delusions of the anorexic.

Modern psychology, on the other hand, is only concerned with the ego and a literal interpretation of the cutter’s compulsion to self-harm and the anorexic’s protests. Because of this practice of literalizing, the only thing that a modern therapist can see in anorexia nervosa appears to him as delusions, lies and magical thinking. Jungian psychology trusts that the anorexic is not delusional, but that she is behaving in a dream-like symbolic manner that possesses a hidden meaning and purpose. This project explores the meaning and purpose behind a self-harming individual’s curious behaviour.