I decided to revert to the theme layout that is supplied by the host of this blog rather than the cool looking notebook theme that I had chose to use. I did this for the simple reason that the RSS feed icon on the notebook theme was hidden in the bottom left hand corner where it is hard to see or find. The author of the notebook theme made the coding very difficult to change, so that one would have to take a lot of time to study how to code a blog theme in order to change the theme to make it useful.

I reverted to the theme supplied by WordPress because it is simple and readable, but otherwise rather dull considering a lot of other people are using this same theme. I will try to change things after I am through my present research and have the book published, i.e., when I have more time.

Presently I am deeply involved in research and editing the book, The Queen of Wonderland. I am also placing a lot more references in the text of the book. I will be supplying a separate booklet that will summarize the content of these references, which I feel is necessary because some of the books I am using as reference sources are not generally available and expensive to buy. These summaries will expand upon the information and will constitute a reference book in itself.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I do not have Internet service. The problem with the Internet is that it is like a black hole in space that sucks one’s time away. Beside the fact that there are over 6 million web pages with the keywords “anorexia nervosa” on them, there is very little truly useful information for understanding what anorexia nervosa is in itself. Most of those web pages are like a black hole in that many of the contain the same information and a myriad of links whose sole purpose is to try to make some money on “click through advertising.” Unfortunately the servers of these sites splits the take, so they are more than happy to present you with these black hole sites. While there are scholarly searches available, almost all those web pages present an abstract and an offer to but the full essay or “scientific” study.

The problem with an irrational disorder like anorexia nervosa is that science as it stands is not able to deal with it on a meaningful basis. Science can only deal with the sort of things that are available to them on a rational basis, which only paints a superficial picture of what anorexia nervosa is. Anorexia nervosa is a metaphor, which is something that a science that treats things literally, i.e., materialism, cannot deal with. We keep reading that science is on the verge of a breakthrough on understanding anorexia nervosa, but we’ve been hearing that same phrase for the past 30 to 40 years. There is simply not going to be any breakthrough in understanding anorexia nervosa from a scientific standpoint . . . period. Anorexia nervosa is an attempt by the psyche to defy the arrogant attitude of our technological culture, which is why anorexia nervosa only occurs in technologically advanced cultures, or in cultures that have become exposed to the seedy side of a technologically advanced culture.

By way of understanding the metaphors contained in anorectic symptoms and fantasies, one can gain an understanding of the nature of the psychic process behind anorexia nervosa. The Queen of Wonderland will be about understanding those metaphors.

Anorexia and Art

In the last two postings I have been somewhat cryptic about the relationship between anorexia nervosa and ballet and art. This is because I am only now in the process of researching these relationships. C.G. Jung talks about a negative creative process whereby the psyche’s creative inspirations can be constellated in such a manner as to potentially lead one toward self-destructive ends. This phenomenon was illustrated in the Red Shoes ballet that was featured in the Red Shoes movie (1949). Regarding the relationship between anorexia nervosa and art, C.G. Jung says that modern art focusses upon making ugliness and disintegration a desirable form of expression. There is a psychological relationship between some mental disorders and some form of artistic expression. Creativity and destruction are closely related.

I have been expanding upon these themes and another topic in my recent research and I am in the process of making some important changes and additions to the manuscript. Anorexia nervosa was extremely rare in C.G. Jung’s day, but the principles of psychology that he worked on also apply to disorders like anorexia nervosa as well as they did to the more familiar hysterical disorders that were fairly common among city folks during his time.

I am purposely holding up the publication date because I want to include some of the things that I am finding during my recent research. But I cannot get into the relationship between dance and anorexia nervosa in the book because that would add too much text to an already large and complex book project. I may consider writing a separate book on the topic of Dancing with Demons, as the topics that many ballet stories deal with often involves a dance with Death, a demon, a spectre, e.g., the Red Shoes ballet (1949), or some other non-human entity.

Over the past several month I gradually became aware that certain fairytale themes that can be found in the mythology of anorexia nervosa can also be found in ballet productions. While working on The Queen of Wonderland book and observing videos of ballet for clues, I began to form a picture that illustrates a potential intimate relationship between ballet and the phenomenon of anorexia nervosa.
 Conventional theory suggests that the reason why girls who pursues ballet and fashion modelling become anorectic is because of the demands by producers of these media to lose weight. But this in only an accessory factor, i.e., a trigger if you like, to a much deeper complex of factors taking place in both the culture and in the individual’s psychic background.
 Because of ongoing revelations surrounding the phenomenon anorexia nervosa, I have been delaying the publication of the book. It keeps getting revised, and each revision makes it so much better that it was worth the delay. But I cannot keep letting this interfere with the publication of the book. I believe that I have reached a point where I must stop making revisions and publish the book because I intend to follow up this book with future volumes. The subject of self-harm is far too complex and variable to be dealt with in one volume on the topic. As it stands now, the text of the book has grown to about 300 pages in 6″ by 9″ book format, and that doesn’t even include the bibliography, endnotes, references and index. And as much as I try to find stuff to delete, I am unable to find any more stuff to delete after tossing out a lot of repetitious stuff last summer. Consequently, my plans are to provide the bibliography, endnotes, references and index in a separate book in 8.5″ by 11″ format and bound like a cookbook, so that it can be laid out flat when open. That will make accessing the reference material so much easier because one won’t have to go back and forth through the book when looking up stuff.
 The endnotes, references and the summaries of what the references are about now takes up over 100 pages in that format, which translates to almost twice that number of pages in the 6″ by 9″ book format! Not everyone who is interest in the book will bother with the references, so I figure it is better to provide the reference material in a separate format that one can order as an option if they so choose.
 I mentioned a while back, that anyone who is sincerely interested in understanding the actual cause of anorexia nervosa, that they should try to acquire at least the first season of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. From what I gather, these episodes are sometimes broadcast as reruns, so that one could record them for later viewing. However, I really don’t have any information on that because I don’t have a TV and have never personally owned a TV set. Half of The Queen of Wonderland book is devoted to the analysis of 11 episodes from season one. One would never guess from watching these stories that they contain analogies to the psychodynamics of anorexia nervosa. From an adult’s perspective, most of these stories will appear to be nothing more than silly nonsense. But the theme of a heroine having been chosen against her will to struggle with a horde of homicidal demons and bloodsucking vampires represents a suitable metaphor for how many anorexics experience their own lives. And there is a lot more in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series that parallels self-harming behaviour in a metaphorical way.

While one list of causal factors may apply to one individual, a different list is needed to explain why a different individual developed self-harming behaviour. There are as many forms of anorectic expression as there are of artistic expression. However, there are certain universal factors involved in developing self-harming tendencies. First there is a very general genetic factor, but since this factor applies to so many other individuals who never develop self-harm, there can be no genetic cause of self-harm. Besides, the genetic factor cannot explain why self-harming behaviour had suddenly become an epidemic. The next factor involved is the fantasy factor whereby the individual consciously or unconsciously develops a mythological or fairytale fantasy about life.

The next factor involves some form of trauma. This trauma factor can take the form of abuse or it can be something as benign as a rude awaking to the facts of life that dispels the fantasy. In most circumstances the frustration of the fantasy will cause the individual to adopt a more realistic outlook on life. Some creative individuals will become inspired by the conflict between one’s fantasies and harsh reality to develop a Gothic style of attitude and fantasies. While a writer may become inspired to create enchanting Gothic stories, an individual who is vulnerable to developing self-harming behaviour will use her body as a medium to express herself.

The Queen of Wonderland project draws a parallel between these Gothic fantasies and the fantasies that transpire in the psychic background of self-harming individuals in order to paint a picture of self-harm by way of analogies.

Self-harming behaviour cannot be explained in a rational manner because of its paradoxical nature. Although the method that I am using is largely unscientific, science has proved itself to be inadequate and unable to understand self-harming behaviour. Scientific explanations for self-harm are mostly fantasized constructs, a smoke screen to hide the fact that scientists are at a loss to explain self-harming behaviour. Self-harm, like Gothic fantasies, is a dark art form and a psychic reaction against an attempt by scientists to reduce life to some economically useful facts and statistics. Freud made an attempt to explain art by reducing it to fit his theory of infantile sexuality and all it garnered him was being label a cynic.

Meanwhile I have spent more than a month and a half working on the index for the book. I had no idea that it would take so long to put together an index. I was hoping to make a simple index for the book and provide a more comprehensive index on a CD. Unfortunately, it is not possible to create a simple index for a topic with some many variables as self-harm. I found that many of the categories were dealt with on many widely separate pages, and to try to choose which pages were the most relevant would have meant examining each page for each category. While I did this for some entries, it was an impossible task to do it for all entries. This is something that would have taken months to accomplish. So I have created a rather comprehensive index prepared for the book that will take up many pages. The index was not generated by the computer because those kinds of indexes are more or less useless because they index every page a word occurs on but some of these pages say nothing relevant about that category. Each entry in the index that I have created is relevant to the word in question.

My hope of making the book available in November has been frustrated by the amount of time to create the index, and it is going to take more time to finish the project. At this time, I am aiming at making the book available in January.

Because The Queen of Wonderland project involves analysing most of the episodes in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, it suggests that anyone who is interested in this project seek to acquire at least the first season’s collection of episodes. Sometimes these can be recorded from reruns on the television. Anyone who is sincerely interested in understanding the actual cause of anorexia nervosa is going to need both The Queen of Wonderland and at least the first season of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. If you don’t understand the reason for this, please read the Preface to the book, link to the right, near the bottom of the list of links, titled: About the Book.

This first volume of The Queen of Wonderland will only be analysing the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The introductory part of the book takes up half the book and explores the historic precedencies, method of analysis, a description of the symbolic meaning behind the themes and other things that the reader will need to understand in order to make sense of the analyses. These analyses will avoid psychobabble as much as possible, but the reader needs to become familiar with the concepts of the inherited archetypes and the shadow of the personality, which will be explained in easy to understand terms in the book. Besides the videos themselves illustrate the shadow’s relationship to the heroine in clear and unmistakable terms. Yet this most important aspect of the shadow is not discernable unless it is pointed out.

The aspect of the shadow that concerns us in this study is that aspect of the shadow as it pertains to an adolescent’s psychological development in the school setting. There is two reasons for focussing upon this aspect of the shadow. The one is because Buffy’s highschool is the setting for much of the Buffy series. The second reason is because the shadow of the personality is the aspect of the shadow that concerns us when trying to make sense of the problem of self-harming behaviour.

A muddle as to what the shadow is about can be acquired from reading some other interpretations of Buffy episodes where the term “shadow” is used in such a general way that it could only leave the reader with a very vague conception of what the shadow is about. This is because the concept of the shadow covers a lot of psychic territory. The Buffy videos combined with the analysis will give the reader of The Queen of Wonderland a clear picture of the aspect of the shadow that we are concerned with. This clear picture of the shadow will no doubt upset the sociological community because it is contrary to their world view, so expect some sort of backlash against The Queen of Wonderland from that realm of delusional authorities.

Another analysis that is going to upset the sociological authorities is the analysis of the Nightmares episode, which is about child abuse. Child abuse was a topic that reached near hysterical proportions in the media just before the Nightmares episode was written. It is also relevant that the Nightmare on Elm Street series started about the same time. Some of the episodes will take up many pages of text as some of these seemingly simple fantasies were unconsciously influenced by cultural events that took place shortly before or during the inception of the Buffy concept. These cultural events need to explained along with references because even people who lived through that era more than likely only have vague memories about the rumours and innuendos that were flying about during the 1980s and early `90s. Some of these episodes would be difficult to analyse without an understanding of the cultural events that were transpiring just before and during the time these episodes were written. This is because the works of writers and artists are very much a product of the cultural atmosphere as of the individuals’ own personalities.

I will be going back east to visit my folks in Pennsylvania during the month of September. Although The Queen of Wonderland is almost completed, I will not be able to format the book for printing until I get back in the beginning of October. This is because my book formatting programme resides on my desktop computer, which I cannot take back east with me. Then the book manufacturer will need about 3 weeks of lead time to produce a proof for my perusal and schedule to have the books printed. So, hopefully, the book will be ready for distribution sometime in November.

I know it has been a long wait since I put up a web site announcing the The Queen of Wonderland project, but I needed to do a thorough job on the presentation of this work because it is going to set a hostile sociological community in an uproar. One for their failure and resistance against understanding the actual cause of anorexia nervosa and secondly because this understanding is contrary to the very premise from which they work. They’re going to be hurt and, consequently, are going to want to strike back.

The sociological community had been focussing their spotlight overbrightly upon the fashion scene as the main cause of anorexia nervosa, but, as you will soon learn, fashion is not the cause of anorexia nervosa. The fashion industry is merely the sociologists’ scapegoat for their own failings. However, in stating this, I am not condoning the focus upon the thin image by the fashion industry. What I am alluding to is that fashion designers are possessed by the same demons as anorexics are themselves. I am using the word “demons” to mean mental disorder of sorts rather than using some long-winded, arcane psychobabble because terms like “demons” and “fairies” are part of a universally understood language.

I had no idea that it would takes this long to complete this project as I had a preliminary edition completed in October of last year. Then, while going through my research database in order to place references, I kept turning up references for which I had forgot existed. I wrote the book in a somewhat serendipitous manner as I had no idea where to start or even any idea about how to put together an outline for this project since I did not want to write the book in a complex psychological idiom that would be difficulties to understand. My initial attempt to write The Queen of Wonderland wound up with about 500 book length pages that I was no happy with because it was written mostly in a psychological idiom. But, as it turned out, it was necessary to write all that stuff down to organize my thoughts, so as to be able to rewrite it in a more or less fantasy idiom.

In January of 2010, I made an effort to go back to my original objective about writing in a fantasy idiom. I decided at that time to purchase season one of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series to see if I could find anything relevant there and discovered a gold mine of themes that corresponded to what I had been attempting to write about. So after looking at all the episodes from that season I went on a shopping spree and purchased the rest of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series along with some other Gothic videos. These popular Gothic videos appeared to me to be unconsciously illustrating the problems that adolescents face in contemporary society in a symbolic fashion. By analysing this material, I was able to put together an entirely different rendition of the The Queen of Wonderland based upon what I had already discovered about the psychodynamics of self-harming behaviour and creativity.

I discovered that many of the themes found in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series and the Twilight series parallel the same themes that occur in the fantasies surrounding self-harming behaviour. The main theme of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series centres around the mythological maiden’s descent into the underworld, which parallels the fact that the anorexic typically descends into a twilight state of mind where her symptoms mime the fantasies of tragic romanticism that are transpiring in her psychic background.

In The Queen of Wonderland I will also be mentioning some of parallel themes from the Twilight series, The Vampire Diaries series, the True Blood series along with Dracula, Mary Reilly, Nightmare on Elm Street series, The Queen of the Damned, Interview with a Vampire along with some other popular videos.

After the final movie in the Twilight series comes out as a DVD, I may decide to make a separate analysis of the Twilight series because it involves important themes that deviate from the pattern set out by most of the other popular vampire series.

Who is this vampire who is all the rage these days anyway? Chapter two of The Queen of Wonderland explains this archetypal character in detail. Chapter one tells about the bewitchment of the heroine, while chapter three tells how it all got started during the Victorian era with a story about of a child’s descent into the underworld. Chapter four explores how to understand the meaning of the themes in these popular Gothic stories. The remainder of the book analyses all but one of the episodes from the first season of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.

Somehow we get the impression that Buffy, like the anorexic, is being used as a scapegoat by the authorities because the disturbances that she gets caught up in appear to be the result of having been chosen by fate to deal with the demons (in ordinary language: modern cultural influences) that have infested her school and community.

During the past year or so, there have been numerous reports on the Internet about an alarming increase in incidences of anorexia nervosa in younger children. It should be self-evident that there is some disturbing factor in modern culture that is causing this phenomenon. The authorities keep blaming the fashion industry for the problem, but the people who work in the fashion industry are being inspired by the same factors that can give rise to anorectic thinking.

The Queen of Wonderland project explores the factors that can give rise to an obsession with a thin image. This project is the result of many years of research, so it is not going to be just another book of anorectic trivia or psychobabble. The Queen of Wonderland project is going to analyse the psychodynamics behind modern Gothic fantasy stories because the authors of the most popular Gothic stories have been inspired by an unconscious factor to metaphorically portray the cultural factors behind this modern mania of self-harming behaviour in their stories. This is done unconsciously in a hidden symbolic fashion that even the produces of the fantasies are unaware of. In other words, anorexics, fashion designers and Buffy’s producers are being influenced by a unconscious factor to become obsessed by the mythology surrounding the theme of a heroine’s descent into the underworld which also involves the theme of reduction to essence. The theme of the reduction to essence can take different forms depending on the nature of the fantasy.

It is very interesting to note that some universities have been moved by the huge popularity of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series and the Twilight series to hold seminars on these Gothic fantasy series in an attempt to try to understand what this phenomenon is all about. But all their efforts amount to nothing more than a collection of trivia that is going to become obsolete once The Queen of Wonderland is published.

It will be a while before I can get back and replace all those links provided by the creator of the notepad theme. There is also links at the bottom of this page to the website where you can get your very own notepad blog theme.

The Queen of Wonderland project is coming along fine. I am finishing up the last chapter right now, so I won’t be making too many posts here until I get done as I really need to finish this project and make the book available.

I have deleted the blog and reinstalled it. There was something wrong with the notepad theme instillation because multiple function on that page were not working. I will try to reinstall the notepad theme again next week.

I do not have Internet service. Research for The Queen of Wonderland is being done almost entirely through textbooks, video media and personal accounts of people who have experienced self-harming compulsions. Really, there is almost nothing on the Internet that is relevant to the research of this book because it is a unique project. This may seem odd, but I spend days trying to find anything that is relevant to my work and have come up with almost nothing, just a lot of the same old stuff repeated over and over on a million different websites. There is a lot of personal accounts, but I prefer to use printed matter for reference material rather than stuff from the Internet because these accounts can easily disappear after a while when web pages are deleted.

I am presently working on the last chapter of the book, and the index. I am planning on only including a basic index in the book because the index that I am compiling for The Queen of Wonderland is too complex, meaning that it would require too many pages to include in the book. Therefore I will provide the complete index to the book either as a download from my web site or on a CD with the book. That way anyone can find anything contained within the book quickly and easily. The index file can be put in a word processing programme and searched there or placed in an information management programme, i.e., some kind of database like AskSam.com or One Note. I use the AskSam programme as I have been using this programme since the old DOS days and love the Windows version of this programme for research work.

As far as research work goes, I am planning on having a summary of each reference in the back of the book. However, that may turn out to be too big for the book, i.e., too many pages thus more expense for producing the book. Also, big books get too difficult to handle for reading. So I may decide to simply place the references and supply the summaries on the same CD with the complete index. I have 65 reference alone for my analysis of the Nightmares episode of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, season one.

I am leaving this link here to my The Art of Tragedy blog over at Blogger as I will be posting information on that site that is aimed at individuals who have some understanding of Jungian Psychology. The information posted on The Queen of Wonderland will be mostly about a straightforward analysis of Gothic themes. Jungian Psychology for a topic like Gothic themes and self-harm can get too complicated for most people to put up with it.

Blog for The Art of Tragedy at: theartoftragicromanticism.blogspot.com