The Curse Position
A discordant encounter
In my human flesh, eternity keeps recurring.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Cyclical Night.
The central clinical concept in my book Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy is what I call ‘The Curse Position’. Here I briefly set out how I developed the theory and its key elements.
In my experience of working as a therapist, I have found that some clients bring an immanent sense that they have more bad luck than other people. Despite attempts to ‘break the spell’ of seeing oneself in this way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where one feels powerless to change. In my experience, most clients who feel this way do not consciously believe that the disproportionate bad luck that they have had is tantamount to being ‘cursed’, yet given the absence of a ‘rational’ explanation, this can lead the individual (often in exasperation) to wonder whether someone - or something - has in fact cast a spell upon them after all.
It also became apparent that those who described experiences of this nature had also suffered from relational trauma beginning at an early age. It is well known that much of our early lives from birth to the age of four cannot be recalled, and I therefore began to hypothesise whether it was this early experience which could not be remembered, but is re-experienced emotionally in the present, and therefore accounts for the most unwelcome ‘cursed’ feelings which continue to return. In such cases, as the early traumatic experience has actually happened, the ‘cursed’ affects are familiar; yet as one cannot consciously remember them, when they return they are therefore experienced as an impingement on one’s subjectivity. This is the essence of what I call ‘the curse position.’
Image by Alex Monk
In the curse position the individual is haunted by a familiarity that maddeningly cannot be recalled. This unsettling and disturbing paradoxical convergence bears some similarity to what Freud called ‘the uncanny’ (Freud, 1919); a discordant encounter between the familiar and the unfamiliar; the homely and the homeless. Freud describes the repetitive and haunting nature of uncanny, recurring misfortune as daimonic and this also more than hints at a psychic force that betrays a supernatural, threatening quality.
In The Witch, historian Ronald Hutton points to a universal and archaic dread of supernatural attack, or what he calls ‘uncanny misfortune’ (Hutton, 2017). If it is indeed the case that, as Hutton suggests, we may all carry such an innate fear, this is therefore likely to be more pronounced in individuals whose early relational experiences did not instill them with a sense of safety; where threat is experienced as an emergency (Van der Kolk, 1989). This fear is at the ontological heart of the curse position, where past experiences become future omens. This results in what Mark Fisher refers to this as a ‘fatalistic eternity’:
The present tense – or rather the hesitation between past and present tense – creates an ambiguity, suggesting a fatalistic eternity, a compulsion to repeat – a compulsion that might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ghosts return because he fears they will. . . .(Fisher, 2014 , p. 36)
When one feels that they cannot escape the curse position, they consequently yearn for a life without recurring fear, and the closest that they can find are moments of ‘eerie calm’, but the unwanted presence of mental pain is never far away (Fisher, 2016, p. 13). As Fisher illustrates, by drawing on medieval witch-lore, Shakespeare’s Macbeth binds the ‘weird’ (lack of belonging) to ‘wyrd’ (fate). The former has evolved from the latter’s Germanic etymological root. The three wyrd sisters, or fates, of Macbeth are so called as they can predict Macbeth’s fate, yet a curse lies inside their prophecy which seals the king’s self-destruction. The imprecation therefore lies at the crossroads between these two signifiers, and it is their conjunction which sustains the curse’s ‘fatalistic eternity’.
It is important to note that, as Donald Kalsched elucidates in The Inner World of Trauma – which has also been an important influence on the curse position theory – traumatised people often exhibit a unique, intuitive sensitivity, and a ‘mythopoetic’ imagination, yet they are also troubled by destructive unconscious phantasies which result in feelings of punishing shame and guilt (Kalsched, 1996). This mythopoetic imagination is part of what I refer to in Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy as ‘magical consciousness’, and I suggest that this capacity may have its origins in what Ferenczi calls the traumatised infant’s ‘clairvoyant’ relationship to the caregiver (Ferenczi, 1988). The ‘clairvoyant’ level of intuition is the result of a relational trauma where the child has developed a heightened, acute sensitivity to the needs of the caregiver without realising the sacrifices that they have made to their own subjectivity. Here, once again then, one can see the relationship between supernatural affective experience and early attachment wounds.
As Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy illustrates, the curse position can be worked through by the development of a robust and safe working alliance with the therapist. Clients can then begin to see ways in which they are standing in their own way and have been going along with the idea that they are cursed and powerless to change. Awareness that this is not the case can consequently lead to a re-framed relationship to the intuitive ‘clairvoyant’ self. This takes place by moving on from the ‘curse’ of a child self who continues to respond to the needs of the internalised caregiver - child relationship, to an adult who then begins to foster increased levels of agency by becoming a ‘medium’ to the needs and desires of oneself in the present, rather than sacrificing them for those of others, as was the case in the past. A new, less threatening present can now begin to release itself from the trauma of the past and the omens of the future.
Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy draws upon historical examples, clinical illustrations, folklore, psychoanalysis, occultism and literature to explore the relationship between supernatural phenomena, along with examples of the uncanny ways in which unconscious forms of communication make themselves known in the consulting room.
Ferenczi, S. (1988). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child – The language of tenderness and of passion. Contemporary Psychoanalysis , 24: 196–206.
Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures . Winchester: Zero Books.
Fisher, M. (2016). The Weird and the Eerie . London: Repeater Books.
Freud, S. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. In Freud, A., Strachey, A., Strachey, J, and Tyson A. (Eds.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works . London: Hogarth Press, pp. 217–256.
Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit . London: Routledge.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (1989). The compulsion to repeat the trauma: Re-enactment, revictimization, and masochism. Psychiatric Clinics of North America , 12(2): 389–411.