A Man’s Struggle with the Archetype of the Mother
This title came out of a very low-key conversation I had with my brother about our mother, an issue close to our hearts as we wait for the forsythia to bloom, announcing her birthday. My brother and I have daughters and granddaughters and have strived to cultivate our anima or feminine sides, which for me meant making it up as I went along. My study of Carl Jung has helped me navigate these tricky waters.
My brother and I chatted about how we remembered our mother who gave birth to us and an older brother, now deceased, during World War II. We know we were breastfed and wore baby clothes made out of old parachutes. This narrative, caste and recast over generations, became lore and made sense because this was a time of great scarcity and suffering. My brother and I have a sense of being passed around a lot, in the care of many. I told him I don’t remember a particular closeness to my mother, perhaps not surprising because bombs were dropping and we were chased out of a number of flats. Perhaps it was that British thing. Our father, who couldn’t get in the RAF because of his Irish background, served out the war as a London “Bobbie.” I have heard and read a lot about his bravery, but he was largely absent from my early childhood memories.
A move to America, the death of our father and the sheer penury of life pushed my brothers and me into the street and a kind of independence while we were still teenagers. Then we all joined the military and got a real taste of growing up. A few years ago I wrote a novel, “Bunker Kills: A Sea Story,” a fictional account about my time in the U.S. Navy. The protagonist, a young sailor, was running away from a lot of things, including the mother, her shadow and long reach. There’s a religious element that I won’t go into here. The mother dies and a priest sends her ashes to her son aboard ship, which is steaming in the South China Sea. He retreats to the fantail after determining what would be the most optimum time to throw his mother’s ashes over the side so they would flow towards India and not back to him.
Frankly, I’m not exactly sure where this particular scene came from. “Bunker Kills” is about a young man running away from religion, his mother, and his past toward the exotic, the foreign, and the unknown. He wanted to cross the International Date Line to the other side of the world. In a way he was seeking deliverance from his mother. Fiction calls on our unconscious elements and can speak a certain truth.
We know fiction often serves as a compensation for the author and perhaps the reader. I actually stayed in close touch with my mother through letters while at sea. I sent her money when I could from my meager Navy wages. In my fourth year of service I decided to go to college after I left the Navy. I sent money to my mother every month for my college. The account was almost empty when I returned home and I said nothing.
I am reading an essay by Carl Jung, “The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother,” found in his “Symbols of Transformation.” He writes about individuals who are apparently masterful towards life but have remained infantile in regards to the demands of feeling. I can readily identity with this and my failures speak legions. There are many ways to be caught in a mother complex.
Jung writes that “It is not possible to live too long amid infantile surroundings …without endangering one’s psychic health.” Life in turn calls us forth to independence and those who don’t hear this trumpet call are threatened with neurosis. And the libido energies that do not flow into life at the right time regress to the mythical, fanciful and dangerous world of archetypes. Or the world of the unconscious.
But what about that young sailor who “ran” away from home, from his dead father and his mother to the other side of the world. Is this man free? Was I free of the mother? Or the Mother? In some respect my mother seemed to grow archetypally as she aged and her life story became written in stone. I participated in writing this tale. For a Jung class in Philadelphia I wrote: “My mother survived at least two wars, seven children and two husbands.” The teacher wrote “Wow” in the margin, and added that family tales can bind us to a complex, including a Mother Complex, as it contains raw emotion, energy and a kind of unconscious attraction and allegiance. This event occurred more than a decade ago and it still haunts me, as a reminder of how a family history, perhaps like a mythological tale, can both define and confine. It was my mother’s story and I, along with others, served to keep the narrative intact.
Not doubt I placed my mother on a pedestal for most of my adult life. My family cared for her during her last ten years. I was inconsolable when she died. Soon after her death I made plans to transfer my father’s remains to be buried next to his wife. My mother never requested this; in fact, she rarely spoke about my father. I was trying to find peace, bring closure and honor them both one last time.
Jung reminds us that we all have a shadow side that is usually unconscious, and can reside in an individual, a family and a culture. At times this can be simply a case of repression, pushing down the darker side of life. I never heard my mother talk about her first husband and children and the need to put them in an orphanage after their father died. As an adult I grew close to a half-sister who spoke of her abandonment with a mix of chagrin and disgust. Our mother was a stranger to her. Up to the time of his death my father seemed furious about my mother’s past lives, lovers and children. This anger speaks to my father’s shadow side, perhaps his feelings of inferiority and his narcissism. Heroic tales often have a beast lurking in the background. The unconscious is the perfect playground for shadow characters.
Jung writes that “each of us has a tendency to become an immovable pillar of the past.” We listen to the daemons, those dark forces, that make us traitors to our ideas and cherished convictions. He calls this unconscious movement “an unmitigated catastrophe because it is an unwilling sacrifice.” But, he adds, “Things go very differently when the sacrifice is a voluntary one,” because that suggests real change, growth and transformation. Jung describes this movement as a descent, perhaps dangerous, full of risk and uncertainty. After all, who wants his cherished convictions overturned.
Jung adds in his unmistakable rhetorical style: “Every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness to new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles.”
Jung’s remarks are about the examined life, taking the past out of the shadows and creating new images, new forms and new wine for the soul to feed on. This task is not about morality, pointing fingers or getting at some final truth. The task is to rescue ourselves from our own literal biographies written by unseen hands. The task and journey are always archetypal, inward and downward, a search for new forms, a transformation in how we perceive, dream and remember.
For Jung, this is our fiction and our fate.
