Mother Complex
It
is a given fact in the mother complex that the sufferer does not want to stick
out a situation. In Aion Jung says, for instance:
There
is in him a desire to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field
of the world. But he makes no more than a series of fitful
starts, for his initiative as well as his staying power are crippled by the
secret memory that the world and happiness may be had as a gift – from the
mother. The fragment of world which he, like every man, must
encounter again and again is never quite the right one, since it does not fall
into his lap, does not meet him half way, but remains resistant, has to be
conquered, and submits only to force. It makes demands on the
masculinity of a man, on his ardour, above all on his courage and resolution
when it comes to throwing his whole being into the scales.
For this he would need a faithless Eros, one capable of forgetting his mother.
TPoPA 51
There
is a certain type of man with a mother complex who is much attracted by Freudian
psychology because its effect on the individual is similar to that of the mother
complex itself; that is, it is another prison, and this time you are imprisoned
in a situation which is known to your intellect. The Freudian
system has its gaps, but these were not approved by its founder, who created the
system as something entirely known, except for the physical aspect where there
are openings left for biological chemistry. On the religious
or philosophical side there are no openings. There everything
is precisely defined, and for this reason Freudian analysis seems attractive to
the victim of a severe mother complex, with his anxious and ungenerous attitude,
because it offers him another cage of protection.
One learns the language easily, and one who has had a Freudian analysis
for six months or so knows all about it. If you have a
patient who has had it, he will bring his dream to you with a cheap, ready-made
interpretation. You feel puzzled by the dream and wonder what
it means, but he will interrupt you and ask if it is not again the
Oedipus
situation. Such people have it all pat, and therefore life
cannot flow.
Freudian analysis is completely unfeeling, and this is also expressed
factually in as much as the doctor is not allowed to have any personal feeling
for his patients and avoids them by putting on his white coat and sitting behind
the client; any personal feeling or feeling-reaction is suspect.
If the patient’s
feeling function is already damaged, the split will be worsened.
TPoPA 156
(Every)
time (a particular patient with a knowledge of Freudian analysis) felt rather
too close to a girl, he thought that was the mother complex again, so he got
out. In this way the Freudian way of thinking helped him to
carry on his Don Juanism. What is so damnable about it is
that there is even truth in it! Naturally, in Don Juanism,
the partner who is looked for in different women (Goethe formulated it aptly as
“seeing Helen in every woman”) is the mother complex, so that to have an affair
and then walk out of it because it is again the mother complex is quite
justifiable. It is a wonderful excuse for escape!
And it is quite true that these first fascinations are due to the mother
complex; that is, to the play of the
anima, and they do
prove to be an illusion. I have not for a long time seen a
man who has got into touch with a woman, with feeling, who has not suffered from
certain disillusionments and disappointments and who, in the end, has not
realized the
transience and corruptibility of all earthly life. TPoPA
156
(Keeping
one in a closed loop of reasoning that leads to inertia) is the spider’s trick
of the mother complex. That is how she tries to catch the
hero. She wants him to sit and ask himself whether he really
wanted it or not: whether it is really a question of opposing the father? – if
he does this, is he really just falling for his father’s suggestion, or is he
simply showing off? You can be sure that he will sit there
forever and the witch will have him in her pocket. That is
the great mother-complex trick. TPoPA 168
Mother complex – [devouring mother]
In
a man – later, when he is on his own – it is a trick of the mother complex to
put a philosophical question at just the moment when action is needed.
You often see this trick in actual life. For instance,
a young man wants to go skiing or go off somewhere with his friends; he is
filled with the élan of youth, which carries one out of the nest, eager
to be with others of the same age. He and his friends are
enthusiastic about taking a boat down the Rhine to
…
one could say that whenever a man escapes the whole problem of relationship by a
wrong kind of spiritualization, he is still in the clutches of the devouring
mother. What is much worse, he turns all the women in his
surroundings into devouring mothers. What else can happen?
If he doesn’t relate, he can only be eaten! That is
naturally the wrong thing, but it is a kind of involuntary and automatic
reaction in a woman. The more the man refuses to accept
relatedness, the more she feels that she has to imprison him, catch him, eat him
up, forbid him to move around. So he calls up the devouring
mother in every woman, and then it is a vicious circle. He is
disappointed because every woman turns out to be a devouring wolf.
Then he says, “There you are! That is what I always said!” and walks out
on the woman. Actually, his flightiness has constellated her
devouring side, and for this reason he is again caught in the vicious,
destructive circle. Because he does not relate, she comes
with her trap and a box to put him in. Because he has no love, he
summons her power-complex.
So
you can say that a man with that attitude toward feeling finds the devouring
mother everywhere within and without. And that would be the
wolf. TPoPA 240
A
man belonging to the Secret Service told me that when he wanted to loosen up
young Nazi prisoners so as to get military information out of them, the leading
– and practically always successful – question to put when they were determined
not to tell the enemy anything was (with a slightly sentimental quiver in the
voice), “Is your mother still alive?”
Usually they started to cry, and their tongues were loosened.
He discovered that this was the key question with which to penetrate the
armor of the hostile attitude in German youths. Naturally
generalizations must be taken as such; they are only half-truths in individual
cases, but if we may characterize national differences, there is still a lack of
differentiation of the
anima in Germans compared with the more Latin-influenced peoples.
TPoPA 219