Luigi Mangione: A Case of Psychedelic-Induced Grandiose Inflation?
A depth psychological perspective on the angry young man archetype
I admit that I haven’t been very interested in reading or listening to all the discussions happening around the Luigi Mangione case, but it’s been near impossible to avoid hearing at least the basic details and most popular theories.
His name and face are everywhere on the internet, and everyone seems to be talking about the case, speculating on his motives and what factors might have pushed him over the edge, and yet I still haven’t heard anything from the Jungians (you’ll have to let me know if Jordan Peterson has chimed in, I think I’ve successfully exorcised him from my algorithm and don’t want to even whisper his name lest I call him back).
From what I’ve heard, it sounds like Mangione (and Daniel Penny to some degree) got caught up in an archetypal possession, specifically the archetype of the Hero.
Here’s post-Jungian James Hillman on the concept of the archetype:
The curious difficulty of explaining just what archetypes are suggests something specific to them. That is, they tend to be metaphors rather than things.
We find ourselves less able to say what an archetype is literally and more inclined to describe them in images. We can't seem to touch one or point to one, and rather speak of what they are like. Archetypes throw us into an imaginative style of discourse. In fact, it is precisely as metaphors that Jung—who reintroduced the ancient idea of archetype into modern psychology—writes of them, insisting upon their indefinability. To take an archetypal perspective in psychology leads us, therefore, to envision the basic nature and structure of the soul in an imaginative way and to approach the basic questions of psychology first of all by means of the imagination.
Let us then imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world. They are the axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return. They are similar to other axiomatic first principles, the models or paradigms, that we find in other fields. For “matter,” “God,” “energy,” “life,” “health,” “society,” “art” are also fundamental metaphors, archetypes perhaps themselves, which hold whole worlds together and yet can never be pointed to, accounted for, or even adequately circumscribed.
All ways of speaking of archetypes are translations from one metaphor to another.
Even sober operational definitions in the language of science or logic are no less metaphorical than an image which presents the archetypes as root ideas, psychic organs, figures of myth, typical styles of existence, or dominant fantasies that govern consciousness. There are many other metaphors for describing them: immaterial potentials of structure, like invisible crystals in solution or form in plants that suddenly show forth under certain conditions; patterns of instinctual behavior like those in animals that direct actions along unswerving paths; the genres and topoi in literature; the recurring typicalities in history; the basic syndromes in psychiatry; the paradigmatic thought models in science; the worldwide figures, rituals, and relationships in anthropology.
But one thing is absolutely essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance. By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a god. And gods, religions sometimes say, are less accessible to the senses and to the intellect than they are to the imaginative vision and emotion of the soul.
The archetypal perspective offers the advantage of organizing into clusters or constellations a host of events from different areas of life. The archetype of the hero, for example, appears first in behavior, the drive to activity, outward exploration, response to challenge, seizing and grasping and extending. It appears second in the images of Hercules, Achilles, Samson (or their cinema counterparts) doing their specific tasks; and third, in a style of consciousness, in feelings of independence, strength, and achievement, in ideas of decisive action, coping, planning, virtue, conquest (over animality), and in psychopathologies of battle, overpowering masculinity, and single-mindedness.
(Re-Visioning Psychology, xi, xii–xiv)
Robert Moore, a Jungian analyst and co-author of the seminal text on the male psyche, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, associates the Hero archetype with boy psychology vs. mature, adult male psychology. When a young man is uninitiated by ritual elders into full manhood, he’s vulnerable to possession by the shadow aspects of the archetypes, which have two polarities, active and passive.
The active shadow aspect of the Magician archetype is what Moore calls “the know-it-all Trickster.” Listening to reports of Mangione’s immersion into red-pilled conspiracy thinking while living at a commune in Hawaii, and taking into account his background as a software engineer, I suspect that he had a natural inclination toward the Magician archetype.
One way to understand the archetypes is that they are sources of power, and because we are living in the information- and technology-driven age of the Magician, many disaffected, power-hungry young men are understandably attracted to this particular mode of expression.
Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, and Andrew Huberman (to name just a few) are all prominent Magician-types and act as role models for these young men, giving rise to the countless number of know-it-all keyboard warriors, irony-poisoned Redditors, YouTube experts and Twitter twits that make the internet nearly intolerable these days.
Moore writes of Trickster:
“We need to clearly understand this immature energy. Though its purpose in its positive mode seems to be to expose lies, if it is left unchecked, it moves into its negative side and becomes destructive of oneself and others. For the negative side of this immature masculine energy is really hostile and deprecating of all the real effort, all the rights, all the beauty of others. ”
When channelled through the archetype of the Lover, a young Trickster might find expression by becoming a comedian, creating satirical YouTube videos, engaging in community activism, or making political art. When channelled through the Hero archetype — the immature expression of the Warrior — we get school shooters, Proud Boys, and Luigi Mangione.
While it’s easy to grok why we have so many know-it-all Tricksters nowadays, we have to dig deeper to understand what pushes a young man over the edge, from keyboard warrior to real world murderer.
From all reports, it’s very likely that Mangione had been experimenting with psychedelics in the months leading up to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He certainly wouldn’t be the first young man to be blackpilled by the combination of countercultural, anti-technology ideas and powerful plant medicines that go hand-in-hand within some circles of the psychedelic underground. This combo is especially prevalent in Hawaii, which is home to an abundant native supply of magic mushrooms and ayahuasca, largely thanks to Terence McKenna’s project to propagate these plants in the American colony with the best climate to support their growth and far enough from the mainland to get away with it. It’s a place where the castaways of mainstream American society tend to wash up, and where the most inflated of them choose to start their cultish communes.
If it’s true that Mangione had been supplementing his black- and red-pill reading list with strong psychedelics like psilocybin and ayahuasca, it’s likely that he was susceptible to what I call Psychedelic-Induced Grandiose Inflation, which I write about in my latest book Traumadelic:
Over the past decade or so that I’ve been working with ayahuasca and counselling others who are engaging with psychedelics, I’ve seen enough cases of out-of-control grandiose inflation to make me curious as to how and why this happens, what we can do to guard against it, and how we can help to bring the person (or ourselves) back down to Earth when it does occur.
In my view, psychedelics have the potential to take us into the deep unconscious level of our psyche where these archetypal energies are most directly accessed, just like when we dream. The difference is that we’re awake while it’s happening and able to interact and identify with the archetypal energies, as in cases where the psychedelic dreamer “becomes” a serpent, jaguar, eagle (or lizard, or Saint Michael.) While these energies get expressed most commonly as psychedelic visions, if the psychedelic is strong enough to dissolve the usual defenses of the ego, we can become totally possessed by an archetypal energy.
[…] within ritual contexts like the Santo Daime and with proper mediumship or shamanic training, archetypal possession can be profoundly healing. It can give us direct access to positive potentials that we’d previously been cut off from due to factors like family and cultural conditioning or trauma. However, if not properly contained and worked with, these archetypal energies will potentially leak out into the ordinary waking life of those who engage with psychedelics, causing everything from full-blown psychosis (“I am God”) to less severe but often persistent psychotic delusions (“I speak to God”) to narcissistic grandiosity (“I am a God-like person”). These phenomena are far more common than the psychedelic evangelists would have you believe.
I go on to outline some of the ritual structures and cultural taboos that help guard against archetypal inflation within various communities who regularly work with spirit possession and mediumship, and ultimately conclude that the current models of psychedelic therapy are ill-equipped to deal with this reality.
The fact that these God-sized archetypal energies exist in the human psyche and that psychedelics are so effective in potentiating and inflaming them is cause for advocating for the insistence on ritual structures and leadership that are capable of containing, contextualizing and regulating them.
The sort of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and mindfulness-lite approaches being utilized in current psychedelic therapies are just not equipped to properly deal with psychedelic-induced grandiose inflation. We need, at the very least, psychedelic integration counselors and coaches who are familiar with, and well-studied in, depth-psychological models that account for extreme and mild states of archetypal possession.
Every time I see reports of the almost-daily mass shootings, or unique cases like Luigi Mangione and Daniel Penny, I can’t help but wonder how things could have turned out differently had these young men grown up in a culture that understood the need for initiation and rites of passage in order to channel the god-sized energies within a young man in creative and constructive ways.
Unfortunately, most of the prominent Jungians who would have something useful to offer the mainstream discussions around male rage remain mostly silent except for Jordan Peterson, who triggers liberals so much that they won’t really listen to him, and when they do, are likely to take a reactive counterstance to whatever he says.
After all the mass shootings, suicides and everything else, it amazes me that it’s still not socially acceptable among the liberal elite to talk about how young, white men are feeling so disaffected, disempowered and discarded by our current culture that they turn to horrible acts of violence as a last resort to attaining “hero” status.
One of the guiding figures in the mythopoetic men’s movement, Michael Meade, just couldn’t go with me there when I tried to speak with him about this issue on my podcast. He had so much resistance against admitting that the majority of perpetrators of mass shootings are young, white men that we eventually had to abort the podcast. It’s sad, but I’ve come to expect this kind of willful blindness from the upper middle-class, Boomer-aged Jungians who are (ironically) seen as the greatest experts on the human shadow.
Also somewhat ironically, it’s Meade who popularized the (purportedly) African proverb: “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
What gets left out by most people who repeat this quote is that the embrace that needs to happen isn’t just one of matriarchal love and unconditional acceptance, it is the embrace of mature male elders who guide and counsel the young boy on what it means to be a strong, responsible man who’s role in the community is to protect the vulnerable and serve the greater good.
Go deeper:
Check out my new book Traumadelic: Re-Visioning Psychedelic Therapy, available on Amazon worldwide. https://brianjames.ca/traumadelicbook
Listen to my podcast Howl in the Wilderness which features in-depth conversations exploring the intersection of psychedelics, depth psychology and spirituality. Listen on Spotify:
or watch on YouTube: http://youtube.com/@howlinthewilderness
Find out more about my depth counselling practice and men’s archetypal coaching program: http://brianjames.ca
Suggested Reading:
Robert Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity
Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover
James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology
Assumption on assumption on assumption.
Or perhaps a case of human desperation in the face of apathy, intransigence, the normalisation of corporate parasitism and intellectual armchair dissection of other peoples response to such?