The Seba library treats Puppet in 5 passages, across 4 authors (including Plato, Schoen, David E., Alexander, Bruce K.).
Every creature is a puppet of the Gods—whether he is a mere plaything or has any serious use we do not know; but this we do know, that he is drawn different ways by cords and strings.
Plato establishes the foundational puppet metaphor in depth-psychological discourse: the human being as a divine instrument pulled by competing cords of gold (reason/law) and iron (passion), making heteronomy the constitutive condition of creaturely existence.
, Laws, -348thesis
The Addiction-Shadow-Complex replaces the ruling ego complex with its own ruler, a puppet pseudo-king who serves ultimately only the desires, interests, and agendas of the addiction.
Schoen reactivates the puppet figure clinically to describe the addict’s ego as a false sovereign installed by an autonomous complex, expressing total psychic heteronomy in which no authentic self-governance remains.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis
Acting as an American puppet state not only makes today’s Canadians accomplices to American imperial depredations, it also robs us of a shared sense of national sovereignty, thus contributing to our dislocation.
Alexander extends the puppet metaphor from individual psychodynamics to collective political psychology, arguing that national puppet status produces social dislocation analogous to the individual’s loss of autonomous selfhood.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
Perhaps the United States’ most brilliant marketing achievement in the past few decades has been to have the bulk of its mass murder and torture committed by allied puppet governments.
Alexander deploys the puppet-state concept to expose how imperial power structures operate through proxies, paralleling the way autonomous complexes operate through displaced ego-agents in psychodynamic theory.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
in peace as in war he must live always with his eye on his superior officer, following his lead and guided by h
Dodds, citing Plato’s Laws, notes the subordination of individual will to authority as continuous with the puppet-of-the-Gods doctrine, indicating how Plato’s image pervades his political and psychological thought.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951aside