Spy vs Spy

I drew this in therapy the other day:



We were working on some Jungian-ish mandala and we began with a bit of guided visualization during which my therapist asked me to open a door and see the "saboteur" aspect of my personality. I did, and that is what I saw: The Spy vs Spy guys from MAD Magazine.

Of course I read MAD Magazine when I was a kid. Who didn't? I was always deeply fascinated and deeply perturbed by the Spy vs Spy cartoons. Yes, I knew what a spy was, but I never understood exactly why these two had such a deep and abiding animosity towards one another. The hostility they showed was truly baffling to me. Those two did nothing but concoct increasingly more elaborately violent ways to destroy each other, right there, in a humor magazine aimed at children. (I suppose the same thing happens in "Tom & Jerry" cartoons, but I understood Tom & Jerry's conflict because they were cat and mouse. Everyone understands that cats want to kill mice. The twist, of course, was that the mouse more often than not cleverly outsmarted the cat. If they had been of the same species, I would have been as disturbed by it as by the Spy vs Spy guys. It would have disturbed me, I mean, to see two mice trying to kill each other--or two cats, for that matter.)

So that was what my "saboteur" looked like, a representation from my childhood of the senseless but purposeful efforts to destroy an equal.

I won't even tell you what my "inner child" looked like. Or my "shadow."

I guess the real question of the moment about therapy is: How deep do I want to go? The Brain thinks it's interesting to let my therapist (a woman I barely like, who I would never be friends with in real life, who couldn't pronounce the word "Adirondack" when the subject of chairs came up one day) root around in my brain pan with her rusty, dull Jungian shovel, but The Brain is not the one that pays the price for that bit of fun. I rarely rein in The Brain, because the consequences of doing that are often not very pretty. But I don't know how much of this I want to know about myself.