The Mother Complex in Life, Dreams and Art
Not long after my mother’s death more than thirty years ago, I began the study of Jungian psychology. This wasn’t primarily a reflective move; I had been interested in Jung since my PhD work. But my mother’s death felt primal and in need of particular attention.
Over the years I’ve written, sometimes playfully, about “putting parents to rest,” a task most of us will face, sooner or later. I have proven myself wrong on many occasions. The pull of parents is, of course, archetypal and in this psychic space, mothers seem to reign.
My father died when I was fifteen, and sad as that was, I went about my business, finished high school, joined the Navy, and then went to college on the GI Bill. I have continued to remember and honor my father, often in my writings. Most recently I fictionalize his memory in an upcoming 2022 novel, “Going Under: The Wound, the Dream and the Prayer.” The night before my mother’s funeral I was hiding in the cellar of my Pennsylvania home, praying for her soul, and I hear my father’s voice coming through the insulation saying: “Son, come to me.” At the time I was in a poor psychological state and perhaps a little delirious. Time has tempered this memory, and I can hear a therapist saying I was simply projecting, bringing the father back into the family setting from which he had been absent for so long. I would not disagree with that assessment.
I wrote for a Jungian class assignment a more than a decade ago: “My mother survived two wars, two husbands and at least seven children,” to which the instructor responded, “Wow.” Jung has written in his Collected Works that the mother image has been glorified in all ages and tongues. “This is the mother-love which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means, homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender yet cruel like fate, joyous and untiring giver of love.”
Jung comes down off the archetypal high road to write, rhetorically, that “a sensitive person in all fairness cannot load that enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on the shoulders of one frail and fallible human being — so deserving of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness — who was our mother.” For Jung it’s “this massive weight of meaning that ties us to the mother and chains her to her child, to the physical and mental detriment of both.”
Jung describes the dangers of being in a mother complex — conflating the physical and archetypal mothers. But he adds one doesn’t get rid of a mother complex by blindly reducing the mother to human proportions, which risks dissolving the experience and “destroying something that is extremely valuable and throwing away the gold key which a good fairy laid in our cradle.” Jung suggests this is the reason mankind instinctively added “divine” parents to the earthly one in the form of “god”-mother and “god”-father of the newborn child who should not forget his own parents have a connection to divinity.
Early on a child lives in complete participation with the mother, the carrier of the archetype. She is a psychic and well as physical precondition of the child. This connection weakens when the child comes into ego consciousness, lessening the hold of the mother’s unconscious, leading to a differentiation of the child’s ego from the mother. Now some of the fabulous qualities the child has projected onto the mother will fall away and can be transferred to someone older, perhaps a grandmother, font of wisdom and related to the Great Mother. The more transference to the grandmother, “the more distinctly does the archetype assume mythological features,” and the archetype is elevated to a higher rank.
Jung notes that the mother image in man’s psychology is very different in character from that of a woman. “For a woman, the mother typifies her own conscious life as conditioned by her sex. But for the man the mother typifies something alien, which he has yet to experience and which is filled with the imagery latent in the unconscious.” From birth the mother “has a decidedly symbolic significance for the man,” which might explain why he tends to idealize her. And for Jung what man fears is the unconscious and its magical influence. The psychologist acknowledges that a woman can also idealize the mother under special circumstances, “whereas in the man idealization is almost the normal thing.”
A man or woman’s natural, psychological development is away from the mother and toward a fulfillment of the self and independence. Jung called this process individuation or “the attainment of self.” This means an inner transformation “and rebirth into an another being. “This ‘other being’ is the other person in ourselves — the larger and greater personality maturing within us, whom we have already met as the inner friend of the soul.”
In my experience the individuation process is a lifelong pursuit. Few of us reach a full attainment of self. Certainly, I have not. And the archetype of the mother can still visit the psyche late in life. And this is not necessarily a negative development. A mother image can appear in a dream as a helper and not necessarily carrying the psychological weight of a mother complex. She might be a shadow, a hint or pure background to a surreal enterprise.
A few days ago, I had a dream about moving like rock climber, but horizontally, on the outside of an apartment building. The dreamer propelled himself along the outside of the walls, waving to those inside when visible. The excursion seems breezy, non-intrusive, and efficient. During this adventure the dreamer asks no one in particular how far he had to go. A woman says about a mile, and the dreamer thought the distance excessive. As he settles into that thought, a bald man who looked like his long-dead brother, handed the dreamer a small collection of their mother’s cutlery wrapped in a napkin. The dreamer thanks him profusely for the gift, shakes his brother’s hand, and wonders how he will complete his journey with the extra weight.
The mother complex does not hang over this dream like a raging Hecuba. The dreamer is certainly climbing the walls, propelling himself along the face of the building. He is outside of the structure, but he does wave to some inhabitants as he passes their windows. He doesn’t seem to have any difficulty with the mechanics, although he seems to worry a bit about completing his task. Then his brother shows up out of the blue and hands him their mother’s cutlery. The trajectory of the dream changes and the dreamer is concerned about the additional weight as well as the distance.
For the sake of simplicity, let me return to the biographical “I.” Like many others, I have often felt outside of community during the pandemic. The notion of climbing walls doesn’t seem to be too far-fetched. In a way I have been on the clock the last couple of years, completing two novels. In one in particular, “When War Becomes Us,” a fictionalized, psychological history of my family at war, the mother plays a central role. I have been conscious of carrying the family’s memory and history for some time.
I think all of this plays into what Jung called the individuation process. It’s the task of a lifetime. I recognize there is a certain weight and cost to memories that involve family, especially the mother and when I’m trying to “put her to rest” again, this time from a psychological perspective. I don’t expect to write other books about my family. Perhaps it’s time to “come home.” Perhaps it’s time to cook up something else. Perhaps my dream mother gave me the instruments.
To close the dream circle: I recall giving my mother cutlery for her birthday when I was sixteen, on a layaway plan with money from my paper route. A “layaway” plan has an interesting psychological resonance.
The psyche never forgets.
Comments welcome.
Note: All citations in this piece are from Carl Jung’s “The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” paragraphs No: 188–198, Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 1
