Minerva and Bluebeard (Carlin Binet, “Fairy Tale and Myth No. 1”)

Fairy Tale and Myth | No. 1 2019 • Psychology • Karl Binet | Minerva and Bluebeard

Carlin Binet is a Jungian psychoanalyst, member of the French Psychoanalytic Society, and currently director of the French School of Morphopsychology.
Published in the journal Cahiers jungiens de psychanalyse, 2017/No. 145. Translated by Elena Revzina

Slowly and methodically, Minerva fights against her husband to prove her intellectual superiority, but he rebuffs her, severely devaluing her. I ask why she's attached to a man who makes her, a brilliant university graduate who followed him to the backwoods, unhappy. "I wanted to enter his life, save him, discover his secret, understand what lies beneath."
I suddenly exploded: "When you open your husband's innermost door, you might find yourself in Bluebeard's secret room!" This phrase became the starting point for a reflection on the fairy tale and its inclusion in my analytical work with Minerva. What terrible thing lurks in this forbidden and coveted room? What bloody secrets does her husband hide there? And what unnamed thing lurks in her own secret room?
Reading numerous Bluebeard tales, a friend's book about Gilles de Rais (M. Le Coz 1989), and a production of Bartók's opera "Bluebeard's Castle" by another good friend at the medieval castle of Sussigno in Brittany led me to think about this feminine curiosity, which, according to some tales, becomes a starting point in psychological development for some, and a deadly invasion for others. Bartók's Bluebeard (Béla Bartók 1918) cries out, having lost hope: "Love me, be silent, ask nothing!"
The story Minerva told me seemed rewritten from an ancient fairy tale. An evil fairy had cast a powerful spell on her: "You will fall asleep in a remote backwater, resigned to the oppressive emptiness of the social obligations of the local bourgeoisie. You will not develop the talents bestowed upon you by the good fairies who bent over your cradle."
She wanders in a vicious circle, sometimes imitating her mother, a quiet and passive servant to her energetic and powerful husband, sometimes emerging as a brilliant intellectual and debater. It will take years of analytical work, a consistent descent into the chambers of her unconscious castle, for her inner prince charming to restore her creative potential.
Characters from fairy tales and films will serve as amplifications that will help her free herself from this difficult fate. The analytical work conducted and its containing framework will allow her to access inner archaic images, as terrifying as those behind the seventh door of Bluebeard's Castle in Bartók's opera. But for her, this door will become an opportunity for escape. We will explore the various stages of the first two years of her analysis, tracing the symbolic descent through the seven doors of this opera.

First door: fox.

Minerva is a pretty woman of forty, rather reserved, with angular and aristocratic features that betray her German origins. She is dressed practically and elegantly, in dark colors. It is clear that her clothes have been carefully chosen. Her bob haircut emphasizes the angularity of her face. She wears almost no makeup. Minerva is truthful and open, yet exudes an air of intellectual superiority.
Minerva is the only daughter of her father, a successful businessman who devoted all his energy and time to developing his business. She says this is a natural strength. "I was destined to be my father's heir"—she uses the masculine pronoun—"until I was thirty-five, I constantly helped him. However, by the age of sixteen, I no longer wanted to continue his business. I chose philosophy, the field closest to what I wanted to do. I was always the best in class, but I was haunted by the feeling that I would never amount to anything in life."
Her mother stayed at home, raising her daughter and serving her husband, who had a "cult of strength." He constantly devalued this fragile woman. She suffered from respiratory failure and underwent numerous operations. "My mother was very protective, affectionate, passive. She was like a very cute porcelain doll. There was barely a flicker of life in her. She was timid, deadly submissive, and had no desires. Before her marriage, my mother worked as my father's secretary. She, like me, was an only child of fairly elderly parents. However, before marrying, she studied and mastered a profession that would allow her to travel, which was quite "impudent" in the post-war era. In her youth, in photographs, she looks strong, cheerful, and quite healthy."
At seventeen, Minerva had an affair with a boy her age, who died of cancer two years later. “He died very slowly; after many rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, all his hair fell out. He had always been alive, and his death was pure. I carried that death like the Grail. I felt like I had learned everything. The veil lifted, and I lost my memory, which had previously been excellent. At nineteen, my first love and my first death. I was like a fox that had been stabbed in the shoulder blade, but kept running. But I was dead and cut off from everything. I came back to life, thanks to an old psychiatrist who had been a great support to me.”
Minerva then graduated with honors in philosophy and entered graduate school. She was offered a job at a prestigious company. She declined, having fallen in love with her husband, a dentist much older than her and descended from a respectable provincial family. She abandoned all intellectual pursuits and followed him to devote herself to housekeeping. Minerva welcomed his many friends, family, even his first wife and son, who lived near their home, as if they were in the backyard of Bluebeard's castle. She took great pleasure in tending to the vast garden and growing vegetables. And all of this stemmed from a natural desire to be "accepted" by her husband and his company.
Her intellectual life revolves around long conversations with her husband. She takes a keen interest in his research, finding it very fascinating.

Second door: a cat with a broken head.

The very first dream Minerva recounted at the first session described much of her problem. We will understand its significance much later. In it, she must hold a perfectly healthy cat tightly while her mother kills the animal by piercing its head three times with a short spear. The weapon resembles the kind used to irritate bulls in bullfights. Minerva tries to resist her mother's wishes, but to no avail. The cat's death devastates her.
Cats in dreams, like Lovecraft's "Cats of Ulthar," will become Minerva's totem animals. They will infiltrate her dreams. Christian Fonseca (2008) cites E. Humbert's statement about animal guardians in shamanic communities: "In our societies, where common sense has sought to take on the task of governing life, the only remaining reference is the motif, very common in fairy tales: the hero can accomplish his task only with the help of an animal" (E. Humbert).
Minerva recalls a childhood game. When she and her parents returned from a walk, she would run ahead, climb onto the porch, lie down in front of the door, and say, "I'm a rejected child, I'm cold and hungry, I need to be comforted." This "game" would also run through our work like a red thread, and its interpretation would remain unclear to us for a long time. At first, I asked myself if this wasn't an identification with her mother, devalued and, of course, rejected by her father as a desirable woman.
"Shortly after I was born, my mother had a miscarriage. She said she felt blood running down her legs. Then I fell off the changing table." Minerva tells all this with detachment, as if it were an ordinary story. It will take much work before it will be possible to return to this event and reintegrate it into the story of her life.
At the beginning of the analysis, the mother's place was insignificant, uninteresting, even despised. Her father or husband persistently loomed large, as in life. I wondered about her femininity, noting the contrast between the masculine in this imposing woman—manifested in her intelligence and education, as well as in her posture and bearing—and her everyday activities as a "servant." Why, in this dream, does she submit to her mother, who kills a cat by piercing its head? She was quite consciously submissive to her husband, who, like her father, was intensely dominant. Minerva obeyed him, trying to avoid conflict, and, as best she could, imitated her despised mother: "My head follows my father, my behavior follows my mother."
Minerva is self-destructive. She kills her own head just as her mother kills the head of a cat. In an intense sadomasochistic relationship with her husband, she renounces intellectual life and autonomy. At the same time, I wondered if the mother, who attacked in the dream and was ill in real life, was directing her aggression against herself out of fear of being "rejected" by her father. Minerva, incidentally, fought tooth and nail to avoid being "rejected" by her husband, which he constantly threatened. I pointed out the contradiction between the description of her mother as a fragile porcelain doll and the woman killing a cat. When I tried to interpret, she looked at me and quickly changed the subject, but gradually integrated this idea and mentioned it in subsequent sessions, like a model student. Minerva avoids feelings and hides in her intellect.
Later in the dream, the question of incest arises. “I am with my parents. Our old cat no longer recognizes us. My father’s mother, very old, looks at us with a broad smile and says of herself: “You must say to yourself: she lived a very long time.” I am sleeping on the floor, on a rug by the threshold. My father is sleeping in my old room, and my mother and paternal grandmother are sleeping near the kitchen. I am watching a movie on TV. There are people there, they are leaving the house in a hurry and taking bottles of wine […] They are walking with guns to the office building where the authorities are located, wanting to intimidate them. But the authorities also have hidden guns. A very handsome soldier takes a gun from the pistil of a flower on a tapestry. He shoots those who threaten him. I say: I hope this does not disturb my sleep.”
Minerva is surprised by the theme of violence in this dream. Her cat and grandmother died eleven years ago; could this be related to her memory loss? She herself is sleeping on the doormat, reminiscent of her childhood game of "rejected" girl.
The second part of the dream makes Minerva remember that her parents bought her a television to distract her from sad thoughts after her fiancé's death. The handsome soldier is perhaps an animus. He awakens, takes a gun from the pistil of a flower—what a vivid detail—and kills the representations of her father. Is this mass murder an allegory of the eroticized conflict between her and her father? He sleeps in her room, recalling the incestuous atmosphere between them, while the devalued female servants are in the kitchen. Minerva certainly managed to avoid becoming her father's successor and resisted him by taking up philosophy. However, she is still far from "killing" him. I draw a parallel here with the dream of killing the cat, in which Minerva submits to her mother's will. There is something deadly emanating from both her father and her mother, reminiscent of the dead fiancé.
As a child, her grandmother was one of the few examples she had of a different way of living. This domineering, willful, and firm woman kept a tight rein on her three sons. A Catholic, she went to the city alone in the 1920s to get her tubes tied! "She was an independent, sensible woman who lived alone until she was ninety. At that age, she went to dances with her boyfriend." Grandmother had far more vitality than her mother.
Minerva behaves like a model student, an excellent student, and therefore it is difficult to understand anything about her transference. She is impeccably dressed and smart, always on time. Minerva brings me numerous dreams, neatly typed on the computer. She reads Jung attentively and easily expands her vocabulary. Apparently, Minerva trusts me and, no doubt, projects onto me the role of "the one who knows." She adopted this behavior pattern during her studies, when she was an excellent student. Isn't she doing the same with me? A diligent student, doing what she has to do—like her mother. But I got the impression that we were always staying on the surface, that she wasn't sufficiently engaged. She was able to do this later.
I found it difficult to connect with her at the beginning of our work. The countertransference was cautious. I saw many similarities in our stories as foreigners living in France. We both had, and still have, a need to be integrated and accepted without a hint of mistrust, a condescending look at someone who doesn't belong to the same culture or doesn't have the appropriate education: "You can't understand, you're not French!" At the beginning of our work, social media didn't exist. Minerva didn't know about my roots; my accent didn't give me away. Moreover, sometimes she spoke to me as if I were French. She asked me anxiously: "Am I in a foreign country? When I return to my home country, I'm also considered a foreigner there, and I don't feel at home. Who am I then?" This exclusion intensified our shared need to learn and develop. We also share a creative approach to solving personal and intellectual problems. In her superior, cold mind, I find my inferior thinking function. Her chatty, often superficial side amuses or irritates me; I see myself as in a distorted mirror. And the lack of human warmth at the beginning of this work made my tender and receptive sensory function suffer.

Third door: "snot".

One dream shed light on Minerva's ambivalent relationship with her husband. "Twelve people are leaving a house, and the boss comes up and says they can't go to France anymore, it's too dangerous, so they're going this way. He says the law requires travelers to be fed." Minerva relates this dream to her own life experience. "I'm a foreigner. I feel like I'm always on the move, my place is precarious, I'm imposing myself on everyone. And I'm always playing the same game: begging for a place."
Her interactions with her husband are unbearable. Minerva spends her days serving him. But then, in their conversations, she assumes the role of a certified intellectual, thus asserting her superiority over him. She criticizes, wants to be right and never gives in, and then finds herself defeated and devastated by her husband’s devaluation (She is captured by the animus: “[…] the typical animus figure, which, so to speak, embodies the male side of the female psyche. He represents an archetypal figure that becomes especially active when the conscious mind refuses to follow the feelings and instincts suggested by the unconscious: instead of love and giving, there is a masculine, argumentative, stubborn self-assertion and an indispensable omnipresent opinion in every possible form (power instead of love). The animus is not a real person at all; he is a somewhat hysterical hero whose desire to be loved peeks out through the chinks in his armor.” (C.G. Jung 2017) “And all this is embodied in the man who, by a twist of fate, met this infantile woman: he immediately identified with her "The hero-animus and inexorably established himself as the ideal figure. If he now even tried to hint at his inconsistency with the ideal, severe punishment would immediately await him!" (Ibid., par. 465).
Minerva wants her husband, like the Frenchman in the dream from whom she legitimately demands food, to nourish her self-esteem, which is based on intellect. Then Minerva will realize she is loved. At the same time, the dream tells her that France is a dangerous place. And Minerva's demand turns into a disaster. Instead of becoming a "benefactor," her husband abruptly pushes her away and crushes her with his aggressiveness, saying "that she's stuck to him like a snot."
And here we see Minerva's life drama unfold. The woman is caught in a neurotic conflict. It recurres regularly and blocks her. The demonic genius of Minerva's arrogant mind struggles with Cinderella, who mirrors her mother's behavior and obeys the rules of the game established by her husband. Minerva has the appearance and mannerisms of a determined and demanding Diana the huntress, and at the same time, she behaves like a devoted and pleading servant. When I asked if these aggressive clashes were a good way to achieve what she wants, Minerva replied, "I want to win not through feminine seduction, but through thinking."
So, she was possessed by the demon of omnipotence. Minerva projected her argumentative animus onto her husband, which made him even more sadistic, as his own omnipotence was under attack. Minerva longs for him to love and appreciate her, but, like her mother, she only encounters complete devaluation. The only option left is to enter a paranoid-schizoid position, which would lead to something like this: "I become gloomy, withdraw into myself, and interpret everything he says and does as aggression."
To tighten the knot of fate that binds her, Minerva unconsciously entrusts her husband with the fulfillment of her lust for power. This projection spares her the effort of developing her own autonomy. It's a good defense—focusing on Bluebeard's secret chamber to avoid the work of discovering what hides in her own. Every time Minerva lashes out at her husband's shortcomings, the mirror returns the image of her own shortcomings.
After four months of work, she tells me about her plans to finish the dissertation she abandoned eleven years ago. Naturally, her husband sees this intention as a threat to himself and begins to rudely devalue his wife as soon as she tries to get to work. To prevent Minerva from feeling like herself, he increases the number of assignments and tasks she must complete. Minerva describes how he persecutes her whenever she wants to do something for herself. For example, he made her life hell when she took up aikido. Minerva was forced to give up her passion, but she was very angry and resentful. At the time, I read a statement by Jung that I think describes this condition well: “Neurosis contains simultaneously a regression into infantilism and a striving for adaptation” (C.G. Jung 1976). We will delve into infantilism at length through Minerva’s projections and dreams. We've already spoken about her desire to adapt, the enormous effort she made to fit into various communities, where she strove to be agreeable, to be "accepted." Minerva's brilliant academic performance was driven by the same desire. And in my transference to her, during this period, she strove to do everything well, but there was a sense of falseness in it.

The fourth door: fools and the Valkyrie.

And then she dreamed: “They give me a huge plate full of strawberries. I’m served first, and this seems inappropriate to me. I pass the plate to my father-in-law. I get up to help the maid, because she’s moving very slowly. In the end, I’m the last one to receive a plate with almost nothing on it. I say to myself: well, yes, everything is as usual! A seventy-year-old host sits down next to a young woman from high society. She shows him her hand, adorned with an enormous diamond, round as a flower. My husband makes a sign to me that this is too much. Then we go to play backgammon. The host explains how to play, but I don’t listen. In the end, I’m not invited to play, and I feel disappointed.”
What do the beautiful high-society woman and the old man represent in Minerva? What wealth of hers could they personify? This is her dream; these are figures from her unconscious. She pondered for a long time before answering: “I have riches within me that I don’t use, such as my ingenuity and creativity. All that remains for me is to serve. A chatty servant, like a high-society woman, is a fool. I act like a gossip and a servant to compensate for their incompetence.” The women in her dream are either incompetent and insignificant, or they have an advantage, an excess of libido, symbolized by a huge diamond and a large bowl of strawberries, which attracts her master and husband. Minerva wants to be valued as a thinking person, and to this end, she adopts an intellectual stance. Her ideal self is cold. She judges rather than enjoys abundance or play. Minerva constantly repeats that she never agreed to please, and yet she did herself no small amount of harm by forcing herself to side with her husband. But this didn't appeal to her. To justify her existence, Minerva diligently played the role of housewife. Incidentally, she never earned her own living, but was always supported by her father, and later by her husband.
“People who have experienced such traumas (in adolescence or adulthood) constantly strive to achieve unity with an idealized object, since, due to a specific structural defect inherent in them (insufficient idealization of the superego), their narcissistic equilibrium is maintained solely through the interest, response, and approval of current (i.e., currently active) duplicates of the traumatically lost self-object” (H. Kohut, 2003). The first dream in which the mother kills the cat and the childhood game when she felt rejected indicated from the very beginning of our work that her mother was not a reliable attachment figure. Perhaps her mother “rejected” her when she allowed her to fall off the changing table. The death of her unborn child and the life-threatening rejection deprived little Minerva of any trust in her "dead mother," who had fallen into depression after the miscarriage, as Andre Green explained in his article "Dead Mother." (A. Green 2005)
"The most specific pathogenic elements of parents' personalities relate to their own narcissistic fixations. In particular, we find that in the early stages, the mother's self-absorption can lead to the projection of her own moods and tensions onto the child, and, consequently, to a lack of empathy." (H. Kohut 2003)
Subsequently, little Minerva had no choice but to identify with her very much alive father, who loved her narcissistically, wanting to make her an extension of himself, with enough structure and warmth for her to rely on. Perhaps this is the source of her fear of his wrath: if her father were to withdraw his love, then Minerva would have no support left in life. However, this identification gave her enough confidence to confront her father and choose a different path. Her father allowed this, albeit reluctantly.
"After my fiancé's experience, I lost interest in anyone who might be considered mere mortals. I felt cut off from the world, living as if behind a glass wall. I felt nothing. It passed, but when my husband is particularly cruel, I see that glass wall reappear. I've healed, but it keeps coming back."
The contradiction between these two positions clearly illustrates her inner turmoil. She must be both a servant and a Valkyrie. The paternal and maternal imagos are not differentiated in her unconscious. In her dreams, two conflict zones come to the fore, repeating themselves over and over again. I try to discern the roles of the respective parental imagos in them, but it is difficult, as they consist of several layers.
At the beginning of our work, the maternal imago appeared weak and insignificant. But the mother carried death secretly. She castrated her daughter, depriving her of intellectual abilities and the ability to separate from her surroundings. This is the story of a little girl deprived of contact with other children or pets so that she could serve only as an object of her mother's narcissistic resilience, her "ray of light." Devalued by her own husband, the mother's sexual life was undoubtedly unsatisfactory. Since the mother was stuck in an infantile stage between orality—the pursuit of pleasure by another—and anality—the obsessive control of her daughter regarding decorum and housekeeping, one can assume she suffered from conversion hysteria. Her respiratory failure made her an object of pity and constant medical manipulation.
The paternal imago was threatening. Minerva described how her father's anger completely "smeared" her, "as if I were losing all my energy, and my knees were buckling." Undoubtedly, her father's narcissistic rage stemmed from his fear of helplessness, and only occasionally did his phallic stance of omnipotence and hypercontrol over his objects strengthen it.
As a child, Minerva identified with him as the only interesting person in the house. He was her deity. Later, to separate herself, Minerva defeated him with his own weapons and the cult of strength. She devoted herself to her separation, preferring philosophy to the business school her father had chosen. Minerva went to live in Paris, continuing to depend on her father financially.
Narcissistic identification with the power of the paternal imago led to intellectual confrontation with her husband from a position of rebellious rivalry. Minerva loved to have the last word in arguments. She told me she could defeat her husband with her invincible logic. Her arguments with her father were just as heated!
These were serious battles, as Minerva was confident that intellectual victory would earn her her husband's respect and love. Minerva's marriage revived her introjected conflict with her father.
I asked Minerva if she thought her striving for intellectual superiority (“What happens in this case can hardly be called a positive therapeutic activation of the grandiose self – it is more a matter of a rapid hypercathexis of the patient’s archaic grandiose self-image, rigidly defended by hostility, coldness, arrogance, sarcasm, and silence.” H. Kohut 2003) partly provoked her husband’s verbal aggression. Minerva replied, “Is it impossible to be direct?” Reflecting on what directness means, Minerva realized that for her, it is “having the right to say whatever comes to mind to prove my superiority and express my anger.” Was Minerva’s spontaneity synonymous with an exercise in the desire for power? I quoted a colleague: “Directness can be a kind murder!” (D. Baumgartner, 2001) Minerva immediately retorted, triumphantly putting an end to the matter: "Isn't indirect protection intended to manipulate others? It's no better!"
“We have a family myth of strength. After the death of my first love, I was advised to see a psychologist, but I didn’t want to. As Nietzsche said: ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.’” Minerva continues haughtily: “Now I understand why philosophy disdains the applied sciences, and especially psychology and psychoanalysis. In philosophy, we deal with ideas, not with the subject. This comes from Aristotle and Plato, who always preferred the general to the particular.” At the same time, she gradually comes to the realization that “the history of strength is isolation, an inner impregnable fortress that I believed I had to guard. I refused to integrate into the flow of life.”
That same day, I named her Minerva. (Jupiter, troubled by an oracle's prediction that one of his sons would overthrow him, swallowed his pregnant wife. One day, he felt a terrible headache and begged Vulcan to heal him by splitting his skull. From there, Minerva emerged, fully armed and with a war cry. Her shield bore the image of a Gorgon.) I could also have named her Radgridr. That was the name of the most power-hungry Valkyrie.
This session was a turning point. Minerva began to realize that her fighting spirit wasn't much of an advantage, as others, particularly her husband, could perceive it as a threat. In Minerva's dream, the diamond, the attention of her husband and master of the house, and the right to play were possessed by a shallow and less intelligent woman.
At the beginning of our work, Minerva idealized me in her transference and positioned me as an expert. She inundated me with terribly long and meticulously recorded dreams. She submitted to the therapeutic framework, just as she adapted to her husband's mores and customs so as to no longer be a foreigner.
My involvement consisted primarily of paying attention, working with her dreams and memories. I offered Minerva amplifications based on myths or characters that could serve as containers. Visual representation and active imagination gave fluidity to experiences, allowing her to connect representation and affect. I picked up the tragic stories Minerva told and tried to help her connect with her feelings, recalling the experiences she had then. Little by little, in contact with me, her feeling function warmed and differentiated, humanized, and balanced her thinking function.

Fifth Door: Minerva and Lauren Bacall.

Sometimes Minerva politely resisted: "We Germans are like that, you French..." "Madame Binet, I love it when you speak in cliches!" She put me in my place. Minerva could behave this way because she trusted me completely.
Then she dreamed she met her old professor: at a conference, he told her it was time to finish her dissertation. While Minerva was talking to him, terrorists killed her husband in a shootout.
Minerva's associations were curious. "In my dream, I need to kill my husband so I can finish my dissertation. To find my way, I need to protect myself. I've always thought that superiority lies in masculinity, in intellect, and inferiority in femininity, hysteria, and sensuality." Minerva couldn't find anything that was both feminine and valuable to her. I asked her to name heroines from books or films who might have embodied femininity for her in her youth. She couldn't recall a single female figure that inspired admiration. Minerva worshiped only men and their capacity for thought. "I don't have a well-established feminine identity; I've never liked dolls, and I could never have the pet I dreamed of. It protected me from filth and disappointment, my mother said. All I could do was read."
Then I asked her to imagine how an actress she admired could take a mature stance in the face of a partner's offensive remark. Minerva imagined Lauren Bacall under the brunt of Humphrey Bogart's caustic taunts. "She had a smile and irony, a demonstrative femininity, a sense of herself as someone playing with another, desirable and attractive. I can only behave like that if I'm happy with a man who treats me well."
Could seduction be a pleasurable game? She currently lacked both the feminine game and the Mercurial Mediterranean "metis" of Odysseus. (The term "metis" broadly refers to the cunning attributed to Odysseus.) Minerva never backed down, responding to attacks only with masculine arrogance.
This attempt at active imagination had significant consequences. It freed and made Minerva's feminine libido accessible.
In another session, Minerva once again told me about her bitter clashes with her husband, and I reminded her of the story of Paris, who had to choose one of three goddesses—Venus, Juno, or Minerva—one of three images of femininity: a lover, a great mother, or a warlike thinker. She laughed, seeing the obvious: Paris had chosen the empty-headed Venus. Now Minerva also remembered the mother of her young fiancé, a brilliant and independent woman, as well as the wife of a director with whom she had once lived. The latter was her ideal of a creative and powerful personality. Working with these images of feminine identity allowed her to discover the path to a positive femininity. Her associations became richer. Symbolization became easier.
At the next session, Minerva told me that she felt liberated, as if she had gotten rid of something. “I accept the past; everything is calm there now. I’ve started to organize my dissertation notes. It’s easier for me to work alone, not under my husband’s supervision. I return to the proverb: Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo (Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo or Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re is a Latin expression from a 1600 work by the second founder of the Jesuit Order, Claudio Acquaviva, in which he explains how one should not deviate from the essence (of the Christian faith), but present it in an attractive way. Industriae ad curandos animae morbos, § 2, 4, reprinted in 2016 by San Paolo, Alba (Cn) and given by the Pope to all bishops for Christmas. A wonderful synchronicity!), firm in action, gentle in manner.”
I was very careful in my countertransference, aware that I wanted Minerva to complete her dissertation. I wondered how she was going to escape Bluebeard's castle, where she was locked away, and what she would do to channel her libido into creative pursuits.

The sixth door: a disgusting parasite.

The following month, Minerva dreamed that an old barn was slowly collapsing on top of her. However, she managed to save all her cats. But she left her grandparents' oval mirror there, fearing her husband's reproach for being only interested in her own affairs. In her associations to this dream, Minerva wondered what had collapsed—her marriage or the old structures that were destined to fall. She told me about this mirror, which she gazed into during intense intellectual work at the age of twenty-five. "I looked into it, and it brought me back to my senses." The mirror restored her narcissistic stability, which enabled her to work independently. Noting that only animate beings are saved in dreams, Minerva thought that her dissertation should become less dogmatic, should be breathed into life.
At the end of our first year of work, Minerva had a dream that reflected her current state. She was in my office, considering continuing the analysis. Minerva remarked that the dream was very "homoerotic" for an autoerotic one. She told herself that the sessions were calming her, but she wished I would give her some allowance. "Then Madame Binet lies down on the couch under the blanket to rest before the next session with the man who is already waiting for her. Not wanting to disturb her, I begin to write down the dream I wanted to tell her. "I sleep with my mother in an old inn. In the morning, I watch the news on television. They talk about the inn, where young people lit a bonfire, throwing a party. The roof is gone and the entire frame has burned. I worry about my mother, climb the stairs that lead to the roof, and above me, a beautiful blue square is visible. I go into my mother's room; she's fine, she knows nothing about what happened. I tell my husband, to whom I'm very attached, about this dream. Madame Binet asks me, "Who are you trying to charm? Him?" I answer, "Yes." I leave, but my car has been stolen from the parking lot. I can't go home. I have to stay with Madame Binet."
This dream raises many questions. It reveals ambivalence toward the analysis and toward me. Minerva wants to finish the work and continue it simultaneously. We see a homosexual desire for a maternal figure, represented in the dream both by me and by the woman's mother. There is also ambivalence toward money. Minerva wants me to give her a discount—a devaluation of the analysis, the problem of money that doesn't belong to her. As soon as Minerva's allies, young trickster revelers, burn the roof covering what is contained within her mother, she sees a beautiful blue sky. The transference connection is strong. Minerva tries to leave repeatedly, but always returns to me with questions. Ultimately, she needs her car stolen so she has a reason to stay. The frame provides Minerva with security and allows her to regress, to process the constantly emerging monstrous chaos in which she unconsciously flounders.
I didn't facilitate Minerva's regression, fearing disorganization. After all, we were dealing with very archaic elements. That's why I didn't offer her the couch. The regression immediately brought elements of the anal stage to the surface. Then we reached lower levels.
"At that moment, I had many dreams in which I saw animals, dolls, embryos that were dying before they were born. Something inside me turned to stone, a great deal of sadness, grief for my fiancé, my unborn child—I had a miscarriage a few years after my marriage."
Finally, Minerva dreamed she was flirting with the lawyer-surgeon who would be operating on her. Her father was supposed to escort her to the operating room. She asked to go to the toilet, where she expelled a huge amount of excrement. Minerva was afraid the toilet wouldn't be able to absorb such a mass, not to mention the meters of toilet paper she'd used.
The vast amount of material she's been accumulating since childhood can finally surface. Everything that's been locked away by years of control and blocking begins to emerge through the mediation of the eroticized lawyer-surgeon. In this dream, the father helps her escape from her mother's influence through a regression to the anal stage, the first period when a child can decide whether to hold back or not and can resist the mother's control over what enters and exits her body. And we know how long the mother kept her daughter imprisoned, using her as a soothing toy. We understand the need to lift the roof of this prison and finally see the blue sky of autonomy. But there's also a "double kisskul effect" (an expression from commercials that has entered everyday language, meaning "side effect"): after liberation from the mother, the father takes up the baton, wanting to ensnare his daughter!
In the middle of that same year, Minerva dreamed she was holding a baby in her arms. She squeezed him, but he was a little tense and didn't hold his head up, which worried her. She placed the baby on the table, and he immediately became unusually agile and slipped to the ground. "I run after him, but he's impossible to catch. I dive down and grab the lizard's tail, which is still moving. I'm frightened. At that moment, my husband enters, and I exclaim: 'It's a lizard!'" The associations center around this limp child. To Minerva, he reminds her of her own body, which she perceives as barely alive, but, like a lizard, capable of regeneration. One part of Minerva yearns for relaxation, like this baby, while another demands regression. She will be reborn through the living and agile ancient reptile, of which the tail remains, like the image of a shadow containing vital energy.
Then she had a long dream, which I will reproduce in full. “I’m sitting in the toilet near our house in front of the garage entrance. A car pulls up with a young blonde woman. She gets out and walks towards me, I shoo her away. There are cats there, the blonde is chasing a kitten to kill it. I ask why she wants to kill the kittens, she replies that they all need to be exterminated! The blonde doesn’t leave. Some kind of infection crawls out of her, tiny parasites similar to fleas. The woman changes and becomes very small. We put her in a bag. Then we sprinkle her with talcum powder. This immobilizes both her and the fleas. Now she looks like a small, sexless, white doll, about 30 centimeters tall. We close the lid. She can’t be touched, since the infection is still there. My mother is infected and must leave. I see her sitting on the edge of the sidewalk in the city, she is not moving and cannot eat. She is waiting for the exorcism to end. We lift the lid, there are still insects, And we close it again. Since my father and brother are watching, they too are destined to be exiled. Later, I see them in the city, waiting, not eating or moving, like cocoons, butterfly chrysalises. It's unclear how long this lasts. I wake up anxious."
The woman in the dream resembles a very destructive person, as a psychoanalyst would say, whom Minerva knew when she was 20 years old. "She was the mistress of one of my teachers, a hypocrite. She had a large retinue. She bewitched and seduced, and then broke people, destroyed them, and devoured them." Can she be compared to the Gorgon, who turned people to stone, or to Lilith, who devours children? "She had the evil eye." This woman attacks her mother, father, and brother (the dreamer's double). Could this brother be an imaginary son from the mother's first or second miscarriage? What are these parts of Minerva herself—disempowered and subject to exorcism after the curse? The curse occurs while she is sitting on the toilet in front of the garage in full view. We also see her companion, the totem cat, being killed by the deadly maternal figure. As soon as Minerva emerged from the protective wall, she was immediately cursed. Her contents, her excrement, were discovered and in danger: infestation, a voodoo doll, a maggot encased in talc. The curse was tied to excrement and recalled a dream in which Minerva vomited mountains of excrement. Of course, the maternal curse began with the fall from the changing table, as a prolegomena to abandonment and rejection, but also with Minerva's early capture as an object of narcissistic resilience. A little girl was perfectly suited for this.
I was then able to better understand the first two years of her analysis, during which Minerva was particularly heavily inundated by the forces of undifferentiated parental imagos, preventing her from reaching an incomprehensible archaic depth. At first, she brought her dreams and memories and symbolized little. The enormous number of dreams may have been a defense against their interpretation. One wonders if Minerva was trying to render me helpless by bringing me so many dreams. We had no time for their interpretation. She flooded me with her contents, like a lawyer-surgeon's toilet with excrement.
Exceptionally powerful and undifferentiated parental imagos coalesced in the figure of the ogre, represented by Bluebeard. They locked Minerva-Judith (Judith is Bluebeard's husband in Bartók's opera) in an endless and fruitless search for her husband's secrets. From the moment she fell from the changing table and the onset of her mother's probable depression, they undoubtedly weakened her psyche. The controlling part functioned well, but the other, severely fragmented, damaged, and overwhelmed by death, drove Minerva into a masochistic stance. A dissociation of affect and representation occurred, resulting in a defiant dominance of the thinking function. Minerva was completely powerless in the face of life, and the death of her fiancé exacerbated this state. "I was like a fox cub who keeps running with a knife between his shoulder blades." Before the analysis began, her world was chaotic and explosive, with a non-viable and catastrophically destructive core.
Minerva then began to rely on transference and the containing frame. Her personality functions became differentiated. Positive images of female intermediaries emerged, allowing her to experience an undevalued femininity. Minerva didn't have to make Paris's choice; she learned to experience the three facets of her femininity without conflict with intellectual creativity.
After dreaming about a rich man and two foolish women, she realized that her cold and arrogant intellectual position was isolating and leaving her without help and without love.

The seventh door: the exit from Bluebeard's castle.

As Minerva's individuation with respect to her husband's gaze and influence as a bearer of the projection of her parental imago progressed, her associations grew richer. The parental imago "deflated" in her dreams, and her father now appeared more positive, humane, and sometimes even lost. In another dream, Minerva saw an Italian professor who could be useful for her dissertation. A conversation with him was non-committal, yet tinged with seduction and frivolity. Finally! She was no longer a servant bound to her maternal imago.
Resuming work on her dissertation gradually led her to discover introversion and individuation independent of the wishes of others. Gradually, Minerva freed herself from her projections onto her husband. She connected with her creativity and successfully completed a voluminous and captivating work. The dissertation committee warmly welcomed her work and praised it, noting the originality of the plot.
Minerva explored the underwater part of the iceberg, the ever-active unconscious, despite the fact that she could only function through reason and control. She got to the very core of the desire for power, both her own and that of others, which is essentially the same thing. Doesn't the ability to let go mean letting go of the desire to control everything?
Cinderella, the servant girl under Bluebeard's command, escaped after a long period of analysis. This happened when a third party, like the brothers in Perrault's tale, symbolically killed her husband. The psychological chains were broken. Minerva was able to embark on a path leading to an understanding of otherness, to the acceptance that the other is the other, and not at all who she wants them to be.
I quoted Indira Gandhi to Minerva, who said something like, "Why are Western women so stupid? They're always in conflict with their husbands. As a result, they're unhappy and achieve nothing!" Thus, from her words, we understand that a woman's phallic animus, trying to cope with the humiliation of narcissistic wounds, fights with a man, seeking recognition of her own worth, which serves as proof of love. The irony is that in such a situation, a woman pays a very high price for this struggle, feeling rejected and isolated. Indira Gandhi, of course, wanted to speak of a feminine power that is not phallic and does not arouse masculine belligerence. Then a woman will be able to manage this power through her feminine logos and creativity.
“The feminine logos […] is a mind that is by nature mediating, since it is closer to people than abstractions. It is in relationship with the sensitive aspects of the world. In concrete space, this feminine logos is interested more in the particular than in the general, more in the characteristics of living beings than in their classification by species and numbers. […] This logos is the organ of perception of reality through the feminine function of sensation” (M.-L. Colonna 2007). The saying that Minerva taught me: Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo, could also mean that an integrated animus can help a woman realize her goals by unfurling the soft and seductive velvet of a calm and perfect femininity. And then her new companion, the connoisseur of femininity, will say to her: “You are beauty itself.”

M. Le Coz, Gilles de Raiz ou la confession imaginaire, Paris, Seuil, 1989
Béla Bartók, “Bluebeard's Castle,” one-act opera, 1918, libretto by Béla Balázs in Hungarian
Ch. Fonseca, “L'animal, ombre des dieux et frère de l'homme”, Cahiers jungiens de psychanalyse, No.126, 2008, p.16
E. Humbert, “Reflection sur les idees d'archétype et d'inconscient collectif”, Cahiers de psychologie jungienne, No114, p. 28-31.
K.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Moscow, 2017, par. 462
Ibid., par. 465.
C. G. Jung, La guerison psychologique, Genève, Georg&Cie, 1976, p. 205.
H. Kohut, Analysis of the Self, M., “Cogito-Center”, 2003, p. 74.
A. Green, Dead Mother. French Psychoanalytic School, St. Petersburg, Piter, 2005, pp. 333-361.
H. Kohut, Analysis of the Self, M., “Cogito-Center”, 2003, p. 83.
H. Kohut, Analysis of the Self, M., “Cogito-Center”, 2003, p. 83.
D. Baumgartner, L'Inconscient dans relations en entreprise, Paris, Dunod/APM, 2001, p. 121.
F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, section “Sayings and Arrows”, par. 8.
M.-L. Colonna, L'Aventure du couple aujourd'hui, Paris, Dervy, 2007, p. 96.

Proceedings of the round table “The Bluebeard Case through the Lens of Classical and Jungian Analysis” at the XXI Congress of Analytical Psychology of the IAAP in Vienna in 2019.

Carlin Bene “Minerva and Bluebeard” No. 1 2019
Alan Gibeau, "The Bluebeard Mystery and Solutions to the Riddle," #2, 2019
Christian Gaillard, "Bluebeard on the Couch," No. 3, 2020
Since the first issue of Sims and Messrs. is already sold out, I, on behalf of the Sims and Messrs. publishers, am posting the text of Karlin Binet's article, translated by Elena Revzina, on the website. Sims and Messrs. ...