Many years ago, when I was still playing with studio photography, I created a series of colour photographs called ‘Fairytale gone bad’.
There was a picture of Cinderella walking out of the ‘Lost and Found’ with the second glass slipper. There was one of Rapunzel with her hair cut short and her long braid lying sadly on the floor. One where Gerda who, instead of leaking the glass from Kai’s eye, takes his eye out to lick it hanging in the air. And one with the Little Mermaid being shore-sick outside of the sea instead of walking happily.
The reason I mention them here is because there is something magnetic for me in the fairytales that go bad. It’s because they all imply there is no one to save us other than ourselves. There is no magician, no spell, no prince, and no tool to do the trick on behalf of us. Instead, we hold all the power – only the very realisation of it is often extremely scary.
We humans very much enjoy the idea of being saved by an external, potent figure or force. It feels so incredibly good to think about it, and there is a reason for it. The very notion is wired into us from the absolute beginning of our development – from birth. But just like a fairytale, it can later go very wrong if not managed properly in life.
The kid
To understand the mechanics of this, let’s take a look at the work of psychoanalysts like Otto Kernberg and Melanie Klein, who describe the infant’s initial state of existence as primary narcissism.
It’s not the social media narcissism you probably think of, though. In infant psychology, primary narcissism refers to a state of what they call ‘oceanic bliss’. To a newborn, there is absolutely no cognitive separation between them and the world. The boundaries of them, their bodies, their minds, and their egos just haven’t formed yet. The infant doesn’t look at the crib or the blanket or the mother and understand them as distinct external entities. Instead, it experiences everything as one continuous unitary reality.
It’s even more profound than that. The baby feels a sense of complete omnipotence.
When the infant feels hunger, which is an internal tension, the infant cries. Suddenly, magically, milk appears, and the tension is relieved. Or the infant feels cold. They cry and warmth suddenly envelops them.
Because they don’t have the brain development to understand that a separate human being is performing these actions, their underdeveloped framework interprets this as their own thoughts and desires, causing the universe to just bend to their will. This is omnipotence – born out of the highest form of dependence possible.
It’s a survival mechanism. The very helplessness of an infant is exactly why the delusion of omnipotence is necessary. If an infant had the cognitive capacity to understand its true vulnerability – that it is a fragile, powerless organism completely at the mercy of a chaotic environment or another person – the terror would be too much for the developing nervous system. So they have to believe they’re in control just to not short circuit from panic.
But this oceanic bliss cannot last. Eventually, the milk is late or the blanket is too hot. Frustration occurs and the infant is forced to make a huge cognitive leap. They realise they are separate from the world.
And the illusion of the universe bending to their will just shatters. They realise they are not the source of the milk or the warmth. With that comes ‘annihilation anxiety’. It is the exact feeling of the previously avoided helplessness. So the mind now has to construct a new defence mechanism. This is what Melanie Klein (1957) describes as a process called ‘splitting’.
Splitting is this primitive defence mechanism where the infant categorises the world into absolute extremes just to manage that overwhelming anxiety – good and bad, black and white.
They take all the power, all the nourishment, and all the goodness they previously thought they possessed themselves, and they project it entirely onto the caregiver. Klein uses the metaphorical term the ‘good breast’. The infant constructs an image of a flawless, magical, all-powerful entity whose sole purpose is to protect them and fulfil their needs. So the caregiver becomes a perfect, idealised being in their mind.
Otto Kernberg refers to this specific cognitive act as ‘primitive idealisation’. Because the baby can’t be omnipotent anymore, it basically has to invent a superhero – and the very person who takes care of the baby’s needs becomes the omnipotent one now. (Kernberg, 1985)
This is the way the mind creates a psychological Deus ex Machina object: a perfectly good, all-powerful saviour, just to keep the baby from going insane from the fear of being vulnerable and mortal. It is the brain’s first and most desperate attempt to manage the sheer unpredictability of existence. And so, we survive early life by fundamentally believing that an external force of absolute deliverance exists.
Later, we grow up; we hit seven or eight or twelve and that illusion eventually cracks. One day we see that our parents struggle with tasks or problems they have. We notice that they are not omniscient narrators of all things and don’t have all the answers. They can’t stop a tornado or cure a terminal disease or protect us from the random brutality of fate. That moment shatters the specific projection onto our earthy parents.
But the psychological need for that idealised protector does not evaporate entirely – at least not that early and just with ageing.
The grownup
In fact, as we gain adult awareness, the terror actually gets worse. Because we understand more about the world. We see the unpredictability, the cruelty, our own vulnerability and weakness.
This leads directly into Sigmund Freud’s 1927 analysis, ‘The Future of an Illusion’. Because Freud argues that as adults, we realise our parents can’t protect us from the truly terrifying stuff.
Freud calls this the crushing supremacy of nature. As adults, we are forced to confront the permanent condition of not knowing, navigating with limited view, and moving through a mostly indifferent universe. And that is a huge cognitive load to carry around every day. So, according to Freud, we scale up the childhood defence mechanism even further.
We resurrect the idealised parent imago (Oppenheimer, 2026), but we project it onto the cosmos and the divine. We create what he calls a ‘father god’.
I’m not always fond of Freud, but here we would agree entirely. Freud’s argument is that the psychological architecture of seeking a divine saviour is mechanically identical to the infant’s defensive reaction to helplessness. So we’re just doing the baby thing, but on a cosmic scale. It is a literal psychological regression to the safety of infancy.
When we surrender our agency to a saviour, whether that’s a cosmic deity or a powerful institution or a charismatic leader, we get to return to ‘oceanic bliss’. The burden of navigating reality is just lifted off our shoulders. We no longer have to face the unpredictability of living on our own.
The trap
I must admit, there are days when handing over the steering wheel of my life to someone else sounds like a really nice idea of a temporary vacation. A handover to someone who could just navigate it for a while. Only sometimes and for some people it’s more of a way of living than a pause. And this is where the problem lies.
The pathology of the Deus ex Machina trap is that it completely paralyses personal growth. When you wait for the crane to lower the god onto the stage, you stop acting in your own life. You just become a spectator. Which brings me to a concept called the ‘Puer Aeternus’, which is Latin for the eternal boy, or the eternal child. It is the archetype of the individual who absolutely refuses to transition into adult responsibility. (Allison, 2024)
Responsibility and agency mean making decisions. And making decisions means making mistakes, and making mistakes means both consequences and condemnation. Free will creates a lot of friction and not that much safety. The ‘Puer Aeternus’ avoids this friction at all costs by simply outsourcing their agency, even as a grown-up.
This behaviour can actually be more complex than just refusing to work or move from one’s parents’ house… When looking into the topic, I found a very interesting case study.
Rezakhany et al. (2025) focus on adolescents with severe anorexia nervosa who are at the exact age where they are mandated to transition from paediatric care to adult care units. And the research shows that their resistance to this transition is just staggering.
For these patients, the paediatric unit reinforces passivity. The doctors, the nurses, and the rigid schedules – they become the idealised parent imago. The paediatric system demands compliance, not agency. The institution manages the disease for them. They get to remain the passive object of the rescue. They don’t have to do the work.
But transitioning to adult care totally shatters this dynamic. Adult medical care demands autonomy. It requires the patient to collaborate, to make choices, and to actually manage their own symptoms. Which means taking responsibility.
Severe anorexia is often characterised by this intense need for rigid homeostasis and an attempt to freeze time. But the adult world doesn’t allow you to freeze time and it doesn’t provide rigid control mechanisms. By definition, the adult world requires flexibility.
It requires adapting to the unpredictable. So the refusal to transition to adult care is a desperate cling to the safety of childhood. Because being a child means you are not ultimately responsible for your own recovery and that when you turn into an adult, the illness will magically disappear.
The shift from childhood to adult care forces the patients to confront a terrifying reality, which is that their illness might not be a temporary childhood phase that the doctors can magically cure. It might be a chronic adult condition that they have to live with and manage themselves for the rest of their lives. There is a quote from one of the patients in the study that really stuck with me when I was reading it. She says, ‘adulthood is longer than adolescence, so that would mean a disease that lasts in the time and that truly scares me.’ Sounds like a brutal awakening from the oceanic bliss where the illness still has a chance of being magically, Deus ex Machina-ish, eliminated by the doctors.
This reliance on magical thinking, also common among the patients studied by Rezakhany, isn’t just confined to clinical settings or mental illness. We all do it to some extent to avoid the friction of reality.
The magical escape
The researchers Daniel Gilbert and Emily Pronin published work on what they call ‘Everyday magical powers’. They demonstrate that even highly educated, completely rational adults use mental heuristics to feel in control of totally uncontrollable situations. They call this ‘apparent mental causation’. (Pronin et al., 2006)
Let’s say you have a co-worker who is undermining you and you keep having negative thoughts about them. You silently wish they would fail. And then a week later, that co-worker gets into a car accident and breaks their leg. Pronin and Gilbert’s research shows that a part of your brain will actually feel a weird sense of responsibility as if you cast a voodoo hex on them.
Your brain gladly accepts the illusion of agency because it provides the feeling of power without the actual labour of execution. Does it ring the infant’s milk-out-of-nowhere bell? It should… And yet, we are talking adults now.
In adult life, real-world agency requires productive friction. If you want to handle the toxic co-worker, you have to actually have a difficult conversation or go to HR or find a new job. It requires effort and risk. Magical thinking, on the other hand, hoping the universe just punishes them for you, allows you to bypass all of that friction. Not to mention that it saves you from the helplessness of not being able to win the argument.
I would also add one thing to it. Although I’ve never seen this kind of interpretation anywhere, to me, the concept of limerence also operates as this massive secular Deus ex Machina variation. Limerence is essentially an intense, obsessive, romantic infatuation and a projection of the idealised parent imago – the one who can meet all our needs for us – entirely onto another human being.
It is more usual to approach limerence from the rescuer fantasy stance, i.e., ‘they are so wounded; my love will save them’. But I would rather reverse that into ‘they are so perfect; everything would be easy with them; things would just happen on their own.’ The prince, the glass slipper, and the magic of a rescue to avoid the everyday labour.
From this perspective, a limerent rescue fantasy completely pauses the individual’s narrative causality. The person in limerance stops causing things to happen in their own narrative. While waiting for this romantic saviour to sweep them away, they just stop taking action to built, to maintain, to improve a relationship – or even to start it in the first place. And love and relationships, just like the rest of life, require work and friction. Limerence is a fantasy of bypassing it, just like the rest of the Deus ex Machina narratives.
The tragedy of the ‘Puer Aeternus’, whether they are waiting for a paediatric doctor, a divine miracle, or a prince on a white horse, is that while they are waiting for the rescue, their actual life just passes them by. Both in the micro and macro scales.
Peur Aeternus in the big world
What happens when you put millions of people with a ‘Puer Aeternus’ mindset into a voting booth? To understand the mechanics of this, we have to go back to a classic, i.e., Eric Fromm’s ‘Escape from Freedom’.
We are generally taught that freedom is the ultimate human desire. We fight revolutions over it; we write songs about it. But Fromm argues the exact opposite. He says we are terrified of it. But at the same time, he makes a distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, modern humans achieved massive amounts of negative freedom. We became free from feudal lords dictating our labour, free from strict religious dogma dictating our thoughts, and free from rigid caste systems dictating our social standing. Which sounds great on paper, but Fromm points out that this negative freedom leaves the individual profoundly isolated with one’s decisions to make and no actual structure to make them.
In a feudal system, your life was hard, but you knew exactly who you were. The world had a strict hierarchy, and you had a place. Today, we have no predefined place in the world. We are handed a blank page and told to invent our own meaning, choose our own morals, and chart our own course. It’s so much easier to just colour inside the lines that someone else drew for us, be it the societal roles, norms, hierarchies, or the shared narratives.
Designing one’s own rules is scary. The anguish of having to be the author of your own life is overwhelming and very lonely. There is no group you can be part of, a group that can define the rules partially for yourself. So Fromm argues that, to escape the isolation and anxiety of negative freedom, people will actively seek out the mechanical certainty of an external power. They just give the freedom up in exchange for security.
They want an authority to tell them what to do, who to hate, and exactly how the world works. It was obvious in the 40s when Fromm was writing his work. But speeding up from Fromm’s time to today – when people are feeling crushed by the complexities of the modern world, whether it’s runaway inflation, global pandemics, or massive cultural shifts – they still want a saviour.
They want the political Deus ex Machina, they want the Strongman. Which brings in Theodore Adorno’s work on the authoritarian personality.
Adorno studied how individuals with weak internal ego structures actually compensate for their lack of internal agency by seeking out a totalitarian figure. Adorno’s analysis reveals the cognitive framework of this process. (Adorno, 1950)
He found that individuals prone to authoritarianism view all human relationships through a rigidly binary and simplified lens, like the splitting from Klein’s work. They see the world exclusively in terms of strong versus weak, dominant versus submissive. Or, as Adorno famously phrased it, ‘hammer versus anvil’. There’s no room for nuance or debate or democratic compromise. You are either the one swinging the hammer, or you are the metal getting crushed.
And if your daily life makes you feel like you are constantly getting crushed by the economy, by cultural changes, by a sense of irrelevance, you naturally look for the biggest, heaviest hammer you can find to hide behind.
You don’t submit just because you are cowed by fear. You submit because of ‘vicarious omnipotence’.
Psychologically, the individual hopes that by attaching themselves to the strongman, the strongman’s absolute power will kind of rub off on them. The authoritarian follower merges their weak ego with the massive inflated ego of the political leader. It gratifies the individual’s desperate need for power, while simultaneously gratifying their need to submit and be relieved of personal responsibility.
Whatever the ideological direction – left, right, up or down – people lean towards, the underlying mechanism is identical. A group of people begins to identify primarily as a helpless victim class and decides to wait for a political saviour to vanquish their enemies. Rather than engaging in the difficult, unglamorous, incremental work of actual civic agency.
As a result, society enters into a vicious spiral of externalised agency. (Melmed, 2020) By constantly deferring to the strongman, the machine, and the civic muscle of the populace, it atrophies.
People forget how to debate neighbours with opposing views or how to tolerate the friction of a pluralistic society. They just wait for the leader to issue a decree their opponents need to submit to. And because their civic muscles have atrophied, they become even more genuinely helpless in reality, which only intensifies their desperate craving for the strongman. It is a self-reinforcing loop that slowly strangles the life out of democracy. And turning the wheel back is not easy.
There is one more problem here, other than handing over the agency itself. When we rely on someone else and see our own helplessness and inability, we start resenting our saviours, the very mirrors that remind us about the weakness we feel. Maybe this is why no authoritarian structure can survive seamlessly and not because the rules are too strict?
Relief turned hatred
To understand that trigger, we have to return to Melanie Klein’s envy and gratitude. The infant loves the ‘good breast’ because it provides milk and comfort. But Klein made a really radical observation here. The infant doesn’t just love the good breast. The infant envies it, which is actually interesting to look at – because if gratitude and envy are just two elements sitting on the same continuum, then the picture changes.
When the infant realises that the breast possesses all the power, all the nourishment, and all the life-giving force while the infant is helpless and completely dependent, the gratitude ends, because dependency is not a neutral state. It is a very limiting state.
The infant hates the fact that they require this external object to survive. So the very thing keeping them alive is also a constant reminder of how weak they are.
Klein argues that this primitive envy is the root of a specific kind of destructive hostility. You want to spoil the very thing that sustains you because its perfection and its power constantly highlight your own inadequacy.
When you scale this up to adulthood, the presence of the saviour is a humiliating experience. You hate the saviour precisely because you need them. Not immediately, though. First comes the gratitude.
Imagine you are on a multi-day hike through the mountains, and you just hit a wall. You’re exhausted, your feet are blistered, and you just can’t take another step. Someone in your group offers to literally carry you on their back. At first, what you feel is pure euphoria.
The pain is gone; the burden is completely lifted. But after a mile or two, you realise something terrifying. You’re not in control anymore. You are essentially their hostage. They decide the route. They decide the pace. They decide when you stop for water. And they decide when you get put down. The euphoria of being carried very quickly mutates into the feeling of being trapped. And so you move from one helpless state, asking for a saviour, to another – resenting the very saviour you have because of their control over you.
This is exactly how the submission to authority works on a scale – it alters the whole relationship. You trade your autonomy for security, but the currency you use to pay for that security is your own self-esteem. The saviour inevitably becomes the prison guard.
Mirel (2014) describes adult children whose mothers did absolutely everything for them well into their 20s and 30s. Laundry, taxes, cooking, making doctor appointments.
While the mother is alive, there is this massive underlying paranoia and hostility. The adult child feels totally incapacitated. Because the mother does everything, the child feels forced to let the mother dictate their life choices, who they date, and where they work. They’re denied the friction required to build a self.
Then when the mother inevitably dies, the adult child completely unravels because they possess zero internal architecture. The gift of the saviour is poisoned by the price of dependency because they never face the productive friction of reality. They never develop their own ‘sense of mastery’.
Mastery only comes from facing a challenge, feeling the terror of potential failure, and surviving it through your own actions. Without that mastery, you are elected in a state of perpetual infantile rage, just lashing out at the very machine you prayed would save you.
Being the victim is a trap. Waiting for the saviour leads to claustrophobic resentment. So the logical solution seems obvious – switch roles from victim to rescuer.
The illusion of a breakthrough
After all, when you look at the rescuer, you think, ‘they have all the power, all the respect, and all the agency; I want to be them.’ Sounds easy, but there is a catch.
Interestingly, Mirel (2014) calls the people who adopt this role ‘compulsive rescuers’. These are the people who are chronically drawn to painful situations, who have terrible boundaries, who can’t say ‘No’, and who are obsessed with being the architect of a magically happy ending for someone else, as they cannot or don’t want to design their own.
It’s true that when you shift into the role of the rescuer from the prior victim position, it feels like immense growth. You feel powerful, you feel in control, you feel morally superior, and above all, you feel desperately needed. (Vanheule, 2002)
It feels like you have finally claimed your agency. Only the clinical perspective reveals that this is not a vertical step up into maturity but a horizontal lateral move within the exact same pathology. It is simply victimhood in disguise. In order for you to be a rescuer, someone helpless and fragile, someone who can’t make it on their own must exist in the environment first.
In a way, you require a broken system to assume the rescuer role. You need someone else to be weak and constantly in crisis so that you can maintain your identity as the strong, capable saviour. If everyone around you suddenly became healthy, autonomous, and self-sufficient, you would lose their entire sense of self. They would have absolutely no role to play.
So on a subconscious level, the rescuer actually feeds on the dependence in others. And in the extreme version of it, they foster dependence. Think mothers who don’t let their children make decisions, who constantly show them that they are still not capable of independence in thinking and navigating their own lives. Think teachers who never let their pupils outgrow them.
Mirel (2014) explicitly states that compulsive rescuing is a distraction mechanism. The rescuer uses the blazing chaos of other people’s lives as a shield to avoid looking at the profound emptiness and vulnerability within their own self. They aren’t actually exercising true agency. They’re just playing a rigidly scripted role in a psychological drama.
This behaviour, whether you are playing the victim, waiting for a saviour, or playing the rescuer, pretending to be a god, has also been neatly diagnosed by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
The escape into roles
In his work Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues that human beings are, in his famous phrase, ‘condemned to be free’. What he means is that unlike a rock or a table or a biological reflex, human consciousness has no predetermined essence.
There is no script. And most importantly, there is no Deus ex Machina coming to relieve us of the burden of having to invent our own lives through our choices. We have to make them ourselves.
Being responsible for our own existence is scary on the biological level. So how do we cope? Sartre says we engage in a phenomenon called ‘bad faith’. Bad faith is the deliberate refusal to acknowledge our total responsibility. It is the act of lying to ourselves by pretending that we are fixed objects, a thing determined by circumstances rather than a free, conscious subject capable of choice. We assume roles.
Sartre uses the example of a waiter in a cafe. He observes a waiter whose movements are a little too precise, his voice a little too eager, his posture a little too rigid. Today, we would say it’s a classic impression management technique.
Sartre realises the man is playing at being a waiter. He is trying to convince himself and the world that he is entirely defined by the role of waiter, that he is there only to serve coffee with no outside agency, no other possibilities, and no freedom to simply take off the apron and walk out the door. He embraces the restriction of the role to escape the anxiety of his freedom, which in return gives him role-based safety and even pleasure in fulfilling his duty defined by the externally created purpose.
If we apply bad faith to the Deus ex Machina trap, playing the victim is bad faith because you are pretending you have zero power. You are acting like a rock tumbling down a hill, completely at the mercy of gravity, just waiting for a net to catch you. You ‘act’ according to the victim role.
And playing the rescuers is also bad faith because you are pretending you are a perfect, omnipotent machine designed only to fix others rather than a flawed, messy human being who needs to do the agonising work of fixing themselves. In both cases, you are just hiding behind a mask.
Both roles are elaborate evasions of true agency. As long as you are playing a role in the drama triangle, you are shielded from the fear of the blank page and no restrictions. So it’s only natural to refer to the idealised parent imago figure on scale in such moments. Or maybe not?
Up is down
Traditional addiction recovery models, which have helped millions of people, often require a specific structural step. The individual must admit they are entirely powerless over their addiction and submit their will to a higher power.
And structurally speaking, that is the invocation of a literal Deus ex Machina. It is the explicit utilisation of the rescuer to manage the chaos of addiction. But there is another approach which flips this architecture entirely upside down – the Satanic Temple Sober Faction. (Diaz, 2025)
They use a framework they call ‘satanic recovery’, which is grounded in entirely non-theistic radical self-empowerment. They completely reject the pathologising, lifelong label of ‘addict’.
They reject the premise that the individual is fundamentally broken and requires an external force for salvation.
This framework facilitates an identity renegotiation away from the pathology of helplessness. By refusing to submit to a higher power, the individual is forced to rely on radical acceptance and the building of internal resilience. They focus on harm reduction and self-determination.
It is the ultimate structural rejection of the saviour model. What this ethnography demonstrates is that true recovery, or in a much broader sense, true psychological maturation, requires an individual to become what phenomenologists call an embodied subject.
It means you stop waiting for the powerful saviour and stop pretending you are a powerless object. You just accept it and move towards a different model of doing the hard, unglamorous daily work of steering your own life, choice by choice, consequence by consequence.
It basically undoes what we are wired to do from birth and catapults us from the trap of carrying this infantile defence mechanism into adulthood, projecting it onto the cosmos, looking for a father god, ideal romantic partners, and political strongmen, or tricking ourselves by putting on the rescuer’s mask and playing the omnipotent role ourselves.
It exercises self-mastery.
It teaches that real, authentic agency is never handed down from a machine in the sky. It is found in the dirt, the noise, and the productive friction of the everyday trouble. It is found in making difficult, imperfect choices. It is in the willingness to fail, to own that failure, and to try again. It is about developing the profound internal architecture, that sense of capability that can only ever come from facing the consequences of our own actions and doing the heavy lifting ourself. From making mistakes and making up for those with our own strength. From putting broken pieces together and glueing them meticulously instead of waiting for a miracle.
It takes time, but it gives us the real insight into the actual power we have ourselves when no one is there to save us.
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Sources:
Adorno, T. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29308286-the-authoritarian-personality—vol-i
Allison, S. T. (2024). Puer Aeternus Phenomenon: An Obstacle to Hero Development. In Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies (pp. 1682–1686). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48129-1_387
Diaz, M. (2025). Getting Sober with Satan: An Ethnography of the Satanic Temple Sober Faction [UC Irvine]. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/537947tg
Freud, S. (1928). The future of an illusion (p. Pp. 98). Hogarth Press.
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Rezakhany, C., Lambert, M., & Blanchet, C. (2025). “This is my place of reference”: Transition from adolescent to adult care in a qualitative study of patients with anorexia nervosa. Journal of Eating Disorders, 13, 226. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-025-01397-6
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