Donkeyskin and the BPS: Symbolic Veils Over Professional Ruptures.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I imagined I could shape the birth I would have and the mother I would become. Like many choices of identity, I thought it would be a matter of desire and preparation.

The reality of labour shattered that illusion.

Childbirth has only recently, in parts of the world, shifted from one of the most perilous experiences a woman could face to something often framed as routine. For centuries, maternal and infant mortality were tragically common. Advances in sanitation, medicine, and obstetric care have reduced these risks, yet they persist: globally, around 287,000 women still die annually from pregnancy-related causes, and even in the UK maternal mortality remains at roughly 8 per 100,000 live births. To imagine birth has been mastered is a delusion, a realisation that shocked me.

My first birth was a forced yielding. The notion of being separate from nature collapsed as my body took charge. The energy moving through me was relentless, terrifying, beyond my control. Far from feeling natural, it felt brutal. My body and psyche seemed misaligned, as if I were poorly designed for the task. I had no choice but to endure, stripped of any identity to cling to.

With my second birth, I approached differently. I no longer sought mastery but embraced humility and submission, choosing to yield rather than having it imposed. In that choice, I could breathe through contractions, align with the pauses, and meet the power moving through me. It was still nature acting through me, but my willingness transformed the experience.

These births taught me that identity is never absolute. We may choose, but only within the boundaries nature allows. Birth is not a blank canvas for the self to inscribe; it is a force that reshapes the self, humbling identity before embodiment. One can be broken open or bow willingly, but the threshold cannot be avoided.

For years, I taught Derrida, Butler, and the linguistic turn, which argue that language and social practices shape our reality. Their ideas, such as Butler’s notion of performativity or Derrida’s deferral of meaning, once felt liberating. Yet childbirth revealed their limits. My body did not wait for discourse; it acted before language, before identity. While these thinkers illuminate how societies construct reality, they falter in the birthing room, where the body’s raw, pre-linguistic force takes precedence. As Merleau-Ponty suggested, embodiment grounds experience in a way language can never fully capture.

Myth and fairytale have long recognised this truth. They return obsessively to what resists language: incest, death, betrayal, the unbearable wrapped in symbolic form. Incest, for instance, recurs from Oedipus to Donkeyskin to Perrault’s Peau d’Âne. In lived reality it is one of the most disturbing traumas; its very mention arrests thought. Yet storytelling insists on circling back, as if the psyche needs symbols to metabolise what cannot be faced directly.

Donkeyskin makes these dynamics vivid. A widowed king, bound by oath to marry only a woman as beautiful as his late queen, fixes on his own daughter. To resist, she demands impossible gowns woven from sunlight, moonlight, and starlight, along with the hide of his magical donkey that drops gold. When these are miraculously produced, she dons the donkeyskin, flees her father’s realm, and lives in obscurity until a prince glimpses her radiance. Their marriage ends the tale, but the father’s desire, with its violence and betrayal, remains unnamed.

Donkeyskin is not a story of healing. It is a story of displacement. The incestuous threat is dressed in spectacle and disguise. Trauma is transposed into magical garments and grotesque concealment. Closure is offered without confrontation. The tyrant father remains unchallenged. From a Jungian view, the gowns gleam with individuation’s promise, but the donkeyskin holds the body’s defilement as protection. From a group-analytic lens, the kingdom enacts an anti-group process: silence, collusion, spectacle in place of truth-telling. The collapse is never metabolised. The group breathes by not breathing.

So what does it mean, symbolically, to marry one’s own daughter? In myth and dream, incest rarely speaks only of sexuality. More often, it signals a collapse of boundaries necessary for life to continue: the father devours rather than protects, the generational line folds back on itself, the future is consumed to preserve the past.

This collapse resonates beyond the family. In the life of ideas, one might call it epistemic incest: the moment when a cherished theory, institution, or professional identity turns inward, unable to withstand scrutiny. Desire for a concept overrides embodied truth, consequences are denied, dependency disavowed. Communities collude by cloaking violation in gowns of rhetoric or policy. Resolution is promised, but only at the level of symbol. The donkeyskin is still there, foul and unacknowledged.

Professional institutions, too, can enact this pattern. The British Psychological Society (BPS), entrusted to steward ethical and evidence-based practice, often finds itself caught between enchantment and reckoning. Faced with ruptures, whether contested theories, political pressures, or clinical harms, the temptation is to cloak wounds in symbolic attire: new guidelines, glossy apologies, inclusive slogans.

Here epistemic incest becomes institutional. Instead of passing life forward by nurturing evidence, supporting practitioners, and protecting patients, the profession turns inward. The pattern recurs in the circulation of knowledge. Journals decline submissions on sex and gender, not for methodological flaws but for “problematic” conclusions. Departments train new psychologists in poststructuralist vocabularies as though they were facts rather than theory - a ccepted as unquestionable truth. Professional silence greets legal judgments that reassert biological sex in the context of single-sex spaces.

In each case, epistemic incest is at work. Ideas are treated as daughters to be preserved, adored, married to ideology, regardless of what their embodied realities reveal. The community colludes in silence, decorating wounds rather than reckoning with them. The donkeyskin is carried into the scullery, hidden yet omnipresent.

The Cass Review (2024) exposed striking weaknesses in the evidence for interventions such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in young people. It called for holistic, multidisciplinary approaches, noting the surge of referrals (particularly natal females) and the complex co-occurrence of mental health difficulties. The BPS welcomed Cass with cautious endorsement, praising its balanced tone. Yet one must ask whether the profession has truly metabolised these findings, or simply woven another gown.

The pattern recurs in journals declining submissions, departments treating theory as fact, and silence greeting legal judgments on sex-based rights. In each case, epistemic incest is at work: ideas married to themselves, incapable of facing embodied realities.

The image of the “gender-creative child” reflects these dynamics. To raise children as “theybies”, withholding recognition of their bodies while saturating them in ideology, gleams like Donkeyskin’s gowns. Yet the donkeyskin truth is dependency: children require caregivers to anchor self to body, to provide stable recognition. To deny this is to marry ideology to the child’s subjectivity, an incest of ideas consuming embodied reality.

What looms behind these dynamics is the shadow of the profession itself. The tyrant father archetype, embodied in entrenched theories, charismatic figures, or institutional authorities, consumes what should be nurtured. Symbolic gestures, whether apologies or inclusion campaigns, offer closure without metabolising rupture. Naming the father becomes essential. Silence allows him to persist; naming him allows transformation.

Yet Donkeyskin’s tale also offers a paradoxical gift. The donkeyskin itself, foul and humiliating, preserves the daughter until she can be seen. Likewise, for psychology, confronting what stinks, our failures, harms, and ideological collapses, may be the path to genuine transformation.

This is, in the end, the same lesson I learned in childbirth. We are not authors of our identity, nor masters of the body. We are humbled by forces that strip us bare. We can yield willingly, or be broken open, but the threshold cannot be avoided.

For our institutions, too, the choice is stark: continue to cloak wounds in gowns of rhetoric, or tolerate the raw truth of rupture. To resist epistemic incest is to recover the possibility of care. Attunement rather than projection may be the true magic: recognising not the shimmer of gowns but the body that bleeds, resists, and depends on us.

Only then might psychology, like the labouring mother, discover that yielding is not defeat but the ground of transformation, where what stinks can finally be breathed through, metabolised, and lived.