After the Fall of man «The man named his wife Eve because she is the mother of everyone who lives. The Lord God made the man and his wife leather clothes and dressed them». Gen. 3:20, 21. Afterward Adam and Eve descended to the Earth.
«The Lord God said, “The human being has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil”. Now, so he doesn’t stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever, the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to farm the fertile land from which he was taken. He drove out the human. To the east of the garden of Eden, he stationed winged creatures wielding flaming swords to guard the way to the tree of life». Gen. 3:22–24.
Now it's purely a fantasy. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – the eternal dichotomy… And if we imagine that the Serpent was a branch of this tree from the part responsible for the knowledge of evil, and its fruit was the apple, and it contained the DNA of the Serpent. It is hard to see anything good in this apple – it brought misery to those who ate it. God warned that the fruit of this tree is deadly, but man, endowed with his own mind, ignored the warning. So, with the help of an apple, the Serpent penetrated into the consciousness of the first people. And then penetrated into the consciousness of all their descendants, where regret about the lost Paradise and guilt for the first sinful fall also live. And, as the Serpent deceived naive forefathers, so now it continues to deceive no less naive you and me. He promises us that if we listen to his teachings, we will reach a certain fullness, and then we will be happy as in Paradise, knowing exactly that it is impossible. And we endlessly dream about that eternal happiness, try to achieve the fullness necessary for it, and constantly punish ourselves for not succeeding.
Thus, Ouroboros, swallowed with the apple, promises and punishes everyone and always. He promises a return to Paradise, punishes by striving for perfection and the impossibility of achieving it. He exists in the psyche of all people – the same evil that was the fruit of the tree of Eden. And this evil is the punishment for the original sin of the forefathers.
Now let us imagine an infant in the mother's womb – there, the infant is protected, always fed, never lonely, has no worries, is always warm, and does not know about its «inferiority». The infant does not have to do anything there, only sleep. The mother's womb, the memory of which lives in the subconscious of each of us, may well be associated with the lost Paradise.
Ouroboros, transmitted by inheritance, having originated in a new person in the «paradise» of the mother's womb, leads this person through self-destruction to death in the life following birth, so that in a succession of incarnations, they again find themselves in the "paradise of the womb" together with a new life.
God → Paradise → Adam and Eve → Expulsion → life of labor and care → death → return to the earth, "from which one is taken".
And similarly: mother (God) → womb (paradise) → child (Adam or Eve) → Expulsion (birth) → life poisoned by the poison of the Ouroboros → self-destruction → death → hope of repeating the cycle.
Of course, no Ouroboros exists in our consciousness, and this book is about the emotional reactions and behavioral options of a person stuck at the infantile stage of psychological development. But if we take this fantasy as the starting point of a journey into our subconscious, it will be easier to navigate there. Therefore, let us accept as axiomatic the fact that every human being has in their psyche the structure of «Ouroboros», which I will discuss in this essay, because they are descendants of Adam and Eve. They also have the experience of life in the "paradise of the womb" and the experience of «expulsion» from the "paradise of the womb" at the moment of birth, followed by helpless infancy. With a responsive mother, the person successfully lives through this time and grows into a realized personality. However, even an adult personality under stress or overwork can regress to an earlier stage of psychological development.