The Mother Complex, Biography and the Fictions that Heal
At a C.G. Jung Foundation seminar in NYC about the mother complex, the instructor asked us to summarize our mother’s life in a brief statement. I responded with this: “My mother survived two world wars, two husbands and at least seven children.” (I forgot to include the 1918 Pandemic.) The instructor responded that a son is more likely to be more closely tied to a mother’s narrative if it is charged and complicated. She added: Beware the biographical trap. Though I didn’t understand the full implication of the instructor’s remark at the time, her proviso stayed with me.
I started my Jungian studies not long after my mother’s death. I was the last family member she had spoken to. She said that the effects of a massive heart attack she experienced were “hard,” her final invocation in customary, tart, British understatement. She died as she lived, letting others make a fuss over a life that was well lived and well suffered.
In the Jung seminar I learned about the negative mother complex, a kind of Don Juan-ism where the son searches for his mother in every woman he meets. That didn’t seem to ring true for me. I sensed that my obligation to my mother’s memory seemed to be a weight that defined, confined and restricted me, a classic definition of a negative mother complex. This condition is not necessarily set apart from morality. My first real paycheck was from the U.S. Navy and every month I sent her a portion of that meager $100. That responsibility remained until her death.
But this complex also has positive implications. My mother was a fine landscape artist, a hobby she stayed with all her life. I often wondered how she could have painted such beautiful scenes from the Kent, England, countryside while there was so much war and want in her midst. Jung’s psychology pays special attention to the anima principle, the archetype of the eternal feminine. My mother was very much born into a man’s world, martial and menacing, but she remained fiercely independent and productive to her last breath. I been having dreams of my mother and other characterizations of anima for thirty years and have recorded most of them. Dreams, of course, are metaphors and reside in the symbolic realm. In a sense dreams are fictions, metaphorical conversations with the psyche. I have used these and other dreams extensively in both my poetry and fiction. To borrow a line from my psychology class: dreams are the fictions that heal.
However, that healing takes time and effort that included therapy in my case. My instructor’s observation that I might have a charged relationship with my mother seemed to speak to me directly. A few years later, while this psychological advice had not fully settled in, I wrote a novel about my Navy experience: “USS Bunker Kills: A Sea Story.” The main character is an immigrant who had been shown the door after his father’s death and was at sea, both physically and psychologically. He is running away from a lot of things, including his mother. He literally is trying to put oceans between himself and the maternal pull. She dies while he is at sea and a local priest arranges for her ashes to be sent to him aboard ship where he releases them into the Indian Ocean while praying that a shift in the wind doesn’t send them back into his face.
In the novel the above scene is consistent with the character’s efforts to run away from his mother and his past. The psychology of this piece is even more obvious to me now than when it was written. Fiction is a fine place to park unresolved unconscious issues, whether it’s about the mother or that Catholic priest, Father Bede, who has popped up in my fiction from time to time. The Catholic Church also casts a long shadow, but that’s another story.
It seems a truism in Jungian psychology that a mother complex can both define and confine. This seems even truer when the mother is the carrier of the past, the narrative and the story-telling. My mother’s ability to survive, define and manage the past put her in the driver’s seat in some respects. This was a complicated relationship. I have no particular memories of her talking in detail about the past other than the Battle of Britain during which her survival skills were surely tested. That she survived two husbands and put her three young children in the orphanage for years contributed to my mother’s hold on the narrative. I am still not certain about how many children she actually had. Even Ancestry.com cannot fill in all the gaps in her narrative.
As a writer, a student of psychology, a veteran and a keeper of the family story, I have long known the traps of biography or that no man’s land between memoir and fiction. A literary agent might say, if you’re going to write a memoir, do it, making public all the sources that made the “literal” task possible. Now close the door. Or perhaps you enter the world of the metaphor and symbol. Now everything is fiction. And fiction has its layers. Beware the biological trap.
This example is too stark, of course, but it does warn against that in-between world bounded by the two genres. This distinction became even more stark when I started writing my new novel “When War Becomes Us,” now in its final editing. As I intimated earlier, my family’s story is about war, loss, death, displaced children, and accompanying plagues. The wars that touched the family covered more than a century: World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The battles and the blood are everywhere in family lore.
Years ago, I felt an obligation to tell the family’s tale in full but realized this would put me right back in my mother’s territory where the past is defined and confined. From a psychological perspective I knew it was time to let the “fiction of biography” go and reimagine the past from the inside. But an author always has his guides. I recall a conversation with my sister, Hilda in the novel, from my mother’s first marriage, in Canterbury, England. She was ill and spoke at length about her fifteen years in the orphanage, her absent mother, and final abandonment. She asked me to take care of things if anything happened to her. She also said, “Tell them everything,” though I really did not know what she meant at the time. She died one week later and I returned to England to bury her. I think the novel began when I gave the eulogy for her.
“When War Becomes Us” is really about the psychology and mythology of war. Fictional family members return to the theaters of war: battles of the Somme, the Bulge, Inchon, and others. Hiroshima and Nagasaki figure prominently in the waking dreams of a brother who has carried these A-bomb cities in his psyche for a lifetime. The characters in this novel revisit and revision the past. Their dreams infuse the narrative. Psychologist James Hillman writes in his “Healing Fiction” that image-work, even if it comes from pain, is directed to the imagination. Image work that give a fictional sense to our ailments within an imaginative universe, can be a source of healing.
Hillman differentiates outer and inner events or, more precisely, two perspectives towards events, namely an inner, psychological perspective and an outer, historical perspective. For him this is about the relationship between soul and history. For Hillman, an event becomes an experience, moves from outer to inner, and becomes soul when it goes through a psychological process and is worked on by the soul in a number of ways. Hillman mentions Plato’s dialectic and also mania, including love, ritual and poetry, plus sickness and pathologizing. We can take in the world by putting it through sickness; by symptom-making we can turn an event into an experience. But a simple narrative, just a story, is not sufficient to make soul.
I’ll close with a dream I had of my late sister (Mary in the novel) when I was deep into writing the book. The dream seems to capture the essence of what Hillman means by “healing fictions.”
“I nod off again. In the dream I am half-awake and half-asleep, looking at my bedroom ceiling that appears as a slab of granite, a kind of relief, that suggests art work that might appear on the Egyptian pyramids. Within the art, there appears to be gravestones. Within this space I see an image of my sister Mary’s face, embossed, and wearing what appears to be the headset of a goddess. There was a martial feel to this; something warlike.
“Within the dream I am terrified. I blink frantically, trying to get this image out of my head but without success. For what seems to be a long time I am in a suspended state between dreaming and wakefulness and a captive of this region. Nonetheless, I keep trying to get out of this trap where I am forced to look at an image of a young Mary, who now looks like she is embossed in brass as if on a medieval tomb. I am finally able to pull myself out of this state, yet I still see the same image on the ceiling cloaked in what appears to be a gray midst. I look away and focus on the bedroom curtain, but the dream seems have followed me into the daylight with a fainter image of my sister projected onto the drapes. I look away again, furiously blinking my eyes until the image disappears.
“I had never had such an experience before; a dream that stays with me when I wake and refuses to leave. For a moment I thought I was destined to see this image of Mary wearing a goddess headdress against every backdrop I would encounter through the rest of my life. I panicked because I thought my vision was failing. My greatest fear was that the dream would follow me into my waking life and I would be forced to inhabit that zone and witness the unrelenting image of my elderly sister on a headstone that was rooted in the pyramids. Though the physical dream had now left me and returned to the night sky, I thought the image would never leave me and I would be pulled back on some eternal whim into the twilight zone where goddesses roam and rule. I was being summoned and could never leave.”
“When War Becomes Us” inhabits this domain.
It will be available later this year.
