This week I have been noticing a “Gollum” voice and puzzling over it (to be clear, I am not hallucinating, but rather paying close attention to what I suppose I could call inner psychological moments. I have a CD created by Paul Ekman on lie detection through what he calls “microexpressions”, which are facial expressions that for a split second betray true emotions, prior to being covered up. There is an inner psychological process similar to this.)
As I analyze it, it occurs to me that it is an expression of self loathing IN TANDEM WITH a sense of some external perfection. Very early childhood wounds can create this emotion, but the mind needs reasons; and by mind I mean that mind/heart synthesis which in Hindi they call Mun. It seeks reconciliation, and like water it flows by the easiest path, which quite often is not the correct path. It does not necessarily, and in fact frequently does, describe truth. Truth might be that your mother was a thoughtless uncaring bitch, but that is a hard truth to accept.
So your relatively Unconscious creates a perfection against which you have failed, and against which you will always fail. You cannot hope to succeed, which means that you will never have to honestly explain your feelings of self hate. The more Gollum hated himself, the more beautiful the Ring became.
And consider Sauron himself. I have described evil as the inner acceptance of self hatred. Can we say that power itself is the perfection against which such self loathing is measured? That such people seek power precisely because they hate themselves unconsciously, and yet semi-consciously fight against this? That they are in a conflict between justifying their existence and execrating themselves? I think this gets at something very deep.
Remember, Sauron’s very existence–his soul, his self–was tied with the Ring, and hence the unrealizable ideal of perfection. We have this common sense notion that, as Bruce Springsteen put it, (in what used to be one of my favorite songs) “Poor men want to be rich/ Rich men want to be king/ and the king ain’t satisfied ’til he rules everything.” And at that, ruling everything would not be enough either, because in the end power was not actually the goal. The justification of existence was, and the self loathing only increased in the process of doing all the evil things it takes to win and keep power. The process is inherently contradictory.
In my own case, I have wondered what used to drive me to debate so hard and long on the internet. I used to spend hours every day arguing with people, being insulted relentlessly (this is what leftists do: I state this clinically and as a matter of extensive empirical validation), and it seems to me it was simultaneously a desire to be abused, and a desire for power, both deriving from unprocessed emotions I have finally figured out how to process. That is why I can say this.
William James commented 100 or more years ago, that psychology really only has three tools: introspection, measurement, and a combination. Clearly, when we want to generalize our own emotional processes, there is the risk that we projecting. At the same time, many of us clearly share many life experiences, feel the same things, and this fact creates the possibility of connection.
Peace be upon you.