Frankenstein’s Children

When Medicine Plays God

"You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been."
— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

The Rise of the New Demiurge

We are no longer a society seeking to understand the human experience—we are a society seeking to redesign it. The sacred art of healing has been replaced by algorithmic diagnosis. The therapist has become a bureaucrat of identity. The doctor, an engineer of flesh. The shaman has been exiled, and in his place stands a clinician with a scalpel and a state-funded ideology.

We now stand in the age of mechanized mercy—where despair is a diagnosis and sterilization is a solution. Where a healthy body is treated like a mistake and the mind is never to be questioned. Where to question is to harm, and to affirm is to heal.

Teachers facilitate transition, then claim innocence when the consequences surface.

What do we call this?

Science?
Progress?
Empathy?

Or is it something older, deeper—an instinct embedded in the human psyche? A modern enactment of age-old patterns? A psychological compulsion wrapped in institutional authority?

A religious impulse wrapped in sterile robes.
A priesthood of certainty cloaked in empirical language.
A technocratic revival of the ancient myth: man reaching beyond his nature to remake the world in his own image.

Underneath the language of compassion lies a metaphysical assertion: we can conquer chaos, rewrite the map of the body, eradicate uncertainty, and control what is wild. The sacred, the ineffable, the unknowable—all of it is to be measured, sanitized, and corrected.

But every system that attempts to replace mystery with management creates unintended consequences. When we aim to control nature rather than commune with it, what we lose is not just nuance—it is our humanity.

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From Healing to Hubris: The Collective Psychology of Control

From the lens of depth psychology, this pattern is not new. It is an expression of collective ego inflation—the archetypal drive to transcend human limits, to master life and death, to reengineer reality when it no longer aligns with our psychic comfort zones.

Carl Jung warned of this: when the ego identifies with the archetypal, it becomes bloated with a sense of godhood. It does not serve the Self—it replaces it. This is the birth of pathology. The ego, cut off from nature, from soul, and from shadow, seeks domination over what it cannot understand.

"The more inflated the ego, the greater the shadow." — Carl Jung

Modernity has created the illusion that suffering is optional, and that pain is a failure. The cultural psyche can no longer tolerate uncertainty, grief, ambiguity, or the slow alchemical process of becoming. Instead, it demands instant resolution. And the body has become the battleground.

In this climate:

• A child’s dysphoria becomes a surgical problem.

• Grief becomes depression, and depression becomes grounds for state-sanctioned death.

• Identity is no longer discovered—it is declared and enforced.

This is not compassion. This is control. And the deeper question is not, “Why are they doing this?” but “Why do we—as a species—keep playing God?”

Because we are terrified of mystery.
Because we are terrified of limits.
Because we have lost our mythic literacy.

In the absence of myth, culture turns to management. In the absence of archetype, it turns to algorithm. But no code can hold the nuance of the soul.

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Frankenstein’s Mirror

Shelley’s Frankenstein is more than a Gothic horror—it is a psychological parable. Frankenstein does not represent the rogue scientist. He represents the collective psyche of modern man: brilliant, traumatized, and disconnected from soul.

He creates life not out of evil, but out of a distorted compassion and an inflated desire to do good. He bypasses death not because he is cruel, but because he cannot face grief. And in doing so, he creates something unnatural, unrooted, unloved.

Today’s medicine mirrors Frankenstein’s error.

• It seeks to cure what it does not understand.

• It intervenes before it inquires.

• It creates irreversible outcomes in an attempt to resolve inner pain.

The monster, in Shelley’s tale, is not born evil. He becomes monstrous through rejection, isolation, and the absence of integration. That is the danger we now face—not just in our clinics, but in our collective consciousness.

And like Frankenstein, our culture creates outcomes it cannot emotionally metabolize. Regret is outsourced. Accountability is dissolved. Consequences are reframed as systemic failures, rather than archetypal eruptions.

We no longer ask, "Should we?" but only, "Can we?"

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Playing God as Psychological Reflex

The urge to play God is archetypal. It is the shadow of the Creator archetype—the side that seeks not to co-create with nature, but to override it.

James Hillman wrote that we have pathologized our instinct for meaning, turning soul symptoms into clinical data. In that framework, the gods don’t disappear—they become diagnoses. And so the magician becomes the surgeon, the priest becomes the psychologist, and the alchemist becomes the pharmacist.

When soul is denied, psyche becomes a problem to fix. The human experience is flattened, literalized, and pathologized. Transcendence is no longer initiated—it is induced.

This drive to override nature reflects not only the shadow of the Creator—but the inflation of multiple archetypes: the Savior, who must rescue others to validate their existence; the Puer Aeternus, who rejects limits and longs for unfettered freedom; and the Magician, who manipulates the hidden layers of life without reverence for their deeper meaning. These archetypes, when lived unconsciously, express through professions, policies, and public sentiment, shaping entire systems that no longer mirror human dignity but archetypal possession.

Jung taught that such possession by archetypes leads to inflation—the ego mistaking itself for the Self, swelling with power it cannot responsibly wield. In this state, the healer becomes the hero, the parent becomes the prophet, the teacher becomes the oracle. Responsibility is displaced. Doubt is repressed. The shadow is denied.

This is the origin of the God complex: not merely hubris, but a psychic defense against vulnerability, mortality, and uncertainty. The individual or collective psyche, unable to bear powerlessness, begins to identify with divine agency.

And what follows? Institutions that refuse to acknowledge error. Clinics that do not pause. Educators who facilitate transition without introspection. A culture that medicalizes confusion rather than listening to it.

Meanwhile, the collective shadow—our fear of chaos, our grief, our helplessness—is projected outward. Onto parents who question. Onto whistleblowers. Onto the unconverted. To challenge the system is to trigger its denial complex.

We are not merely intervening in the name of healing. We are exiling parts of the soul we find too chaotic to integrate. And in doing so, we become modern-day Frankensteins: unable to accept the monsters we have birthed, and unwilling to look into the mirror they hold before us.

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The Psychological Cost of Certainty

Certainty, in this context, is not clarity. It is defense. It is an attempt to banish the unknown through premature closure.

The psychological impulse to “affirm without question” arises not from wisdom, but from collective fragility. It is easier to agree than to witness. It is easier to intervene than to wait. And so the clinician becomes a validator, not a guide.

This is the shadow side of modern medicine: it cannot sit with suffering, only solve it. And in its rush to eradicate pain, it erases complexity.

This is why Shelley’s monster was feared. Not because he was evil. But because he reflected our own failure to integrate what we create.

When we refuse to confront ambiguity, we construct systems that are allergic to nuance. And what cannot be named, cannot be held. Instead, it is managed, medicated, and ultimately mutilated.

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Restoring the Mythic Context

To heal, we must return to myth. Not as fantasy, but as psychological truth.

In myth, suffering is part of initiation. Confusion is the prelude to wisdom. Death is not failure—it is transformation.

But we live in a time where death must be avoided, grief must be medicated, and identity must be stabilized. The mythic dimension has been flattened into policy. Mystery has been replaced by management.

Buddhism and Taoism, in contrast, invite us to yield to the unknown. To listen. To observe. To trust the unfolding.

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” — Lao Tzu

In this spirit, healing becomes an act of witnessing, not controlling. Transformation becomes a process, not a product.

To restore mythic consciousness is not to reject reason, but to rejoin it with imagination. It is to remember that not all suffering requires fixing, and not all identity demands affirmation. Sometimes, what the soul requires is not permission—but initiation.

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Frankenstein’s Children

We are all Frankenstein’s children now.

We inherit the belief that suffering is to be conquered. That nature is a problem. That wholeness comes from fixing, not feeling.

And yet, the monster still walks among us—not as a creature, but as a culture.

• One that divides body from soul.

• One that enshrines ideology over inquiry.

• One that claims moral superiority while denying consequence.

The teacher facilitates transition, then claims innocence. The doctor prescribes death, then cites policy. The therapist affirms confusion, then exits the scene.

Each one, like Frankenstein, acts with good intentions—yet without accountability.

And what of the children themselves? What happens when the next generation is shaped not by myth or soul, but by ideology and compliance? What happens when their stories are edited, their bodies are reconfigured, and their grief is reframed as progress?

We will not know for decades. But the seeds are being sown. And the soil is unnaturally tilled.

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Beyond Blame, Toward Understanding

This is not a condemnation. It is a clarification.

The impulse to play God is part of the human story. It is the shadow of our genius, the inflation of our empathy, the shadow of the healer untempered by wisdom.

To understand it is not to justify it. It is to see clearly the archetypes at play. It is to restore discernment in a time of denial. To hold complexity in a time of simplification.

We do not need to moralize. We need to remember.

Remember the myth.
Remember the soul.
Remember that nature is not something to master, but something to be in relationship with.

In that remembrance, perhaps, we can stop creating monsters—and start listening to the ones we’ve already made.

And perhaps, just perhaps, we might become human again—not gods, not engineers, not saviors—just humble stewards of what is true, and wild, and alive.

Take heart,

Jason

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I'm conducting a confidential, spiritually grounded survey exploring identity through the lens of unique energetics rather than conventional psychology. Each submission helps expand a growing sample aimed at uncovering deeper patterns beneath gender-related distress. If you identify as trans, are questioning your identity, or know someone who is, your participation would be deeply valued.