Up: [[Compulsion]] Created: 2025-10-03 Updated: 2025-10-12 Course: Compulsion as the Great Mystery of Life with Margaret Klenck for Washington Jung ![[Compulsion Cycles.webp|500]] We want more of whatever exciting new thing the spark gives us. That’s positive. If that seeking of more gets satisfied, as in the three steps on the left of the diagram, all is well. If it doesn’t the green dot in the centre indicates a pivot. The compulsion flips to its opposite. The consuming fire kicks in, we eat ourselves up with envy and despair and we start relentlessly chasing the spark. ### Getting to Good Enough Imagine a child who loves to play a sport. I’m Canadian so I’ll make it hockey. The child explores the game, thinks it’s absolutely wonderful, and sets his or her sights on becoming the next Wayne Gretzky. Remember that the spark is always numinous and compelling. Perfection is the goal for this child. Then reality steps in. The young hockey player notices that other kids are better at the game. Frustration results. If it’s optimal frustration, that’s good, that’s healthy. Optimal frustration presses the child to practice more, to willingly embrace early mornings at the rink. But no matter how much the child practices, he or she never makes the region’s triple A team. The task then becomes embracing “good enough.” Can the child continue to love hockey by getting some of what he or she wanted and considering that amount of pleasure as good enough? This is referred to as attaching to the spark “by proxy” and it is a sign of the symbolizing nature of our psyches. Maybe it’s continuing to play the game. Maybe it’s watching hockey on television. Or maybe, especially if we’re an adult, it’s working to [[Identify the Spark of a Compulsion]] and seek other ways of getting that hunger met. If we can be in optimal frustration and get to good enough, we stay in the life-giving warmth side of the compulsion as passion. But if that doesn’t happen, then we have the pivot and we slide down the scale on the right. The big question then is, how far do we slide? ### Heading for Despair It would be unusual for a child to get to the kind of despair that results in addiction, so we’ll change examples now. Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck has some women in her practice who shoplifted as teenagers and continue to do so as adults. These women could intellectually assert that they’d felt unloved as children and that the compulsion to steal satisfied the urge to punish their mothers. But that knowledge wasn’t good enough. There wasn’t a spark by proxy, a satisfying substitute for the missing love. When the spark can’t be retrieved, hopelessness sets in. The desire for the love is still there just as strong as ever, but there’s no way to get it, no proxy. The goal now is to either obsessively get the numinous spark back, or to destroy it. We’re at the point of rage, envy, bitterness and this is where compulsion gets dangerous, and can turn into addiction. One more shoplifting spree, one more cigarette, one more night in the pub, one more injection. ### Go All the Way to Grief It’s not good enough to just get to despair. That isn’t seeing the dynamic all the way through as Jung talked about in [[Compulsions Can't and Mustn't Be Ignored]]. You have to push beyond despair and descend right down to grief, to accepting that whatever held the spark for you is never coming back. You’re not letting go of the spark, you’re letting go of the manifestation of the spark. In the shoplifting example, the women have to get to the point of saying, “My mother never loved me the way I needed her to. That is never going to change.” When you can get to grief, says Margaret Klenck, you can get back to the spark as life-giving warmth. You discover the spark again in a new way. You can know that your are lovable and are capable of love even if your mother didn’t love you. *You have brought back wisdom from the underworld of grief and loss. You are sturdier. You are more able to be prompted by new compulsions and be warmed by them.* (Klenck)