The Psychology and Mythology of the Mother Complex
I think a lot about mothers and my mother in particular. A male character in my yet-to-be-published novel, “Dancing with the Dream Family,” admits to his girlfriend that he always looked in on his mother, who lived with him, on returning from foreign travel before seeking out his wife. His current girlfriend tells him that he is a Peter Pan figure, the eternal child, tied to his mother’s apron strings, seeking her approval before calling on his wife. The girlfriend says “Mummy doesn’t care whether you fly away as long as it’s not too high or too far and you return home for a well-deserved pat on the head.” The man has the distinct impression he’s been castrated.
Psychologist Carl Jung writes that the mother complex in a son can result in a kind of Don Juanism, a state in which he unconsciously seeks out his mother in every woman he meets. If the son’s entire heterosexuality is tied to the mother in unconscious form, Jung suggests that this might point to homosexuality. The psychologist makes clear that from the outset the mother has a “decidedly symbolical significance for the man.” This probably accounts for his strong tendency to idealize her. But this idealization can come with a price. We tend to idealize what we fear. For Jung, this is the mother’s association with the unconscious and the magical. I’ll come back to my idealization of my mother.
Jung reminds us that a mother complex is a concept borrowed from psychopathology and therefore is always associated with injury and illness. But if we take the concept out of this narrow frame, we can see it also has positive effects. A man with a mother complex might have a finely differentiated Eros that has nothing to do with homosexuality. He could have a great capacity for friendship and tenderness between men and “may even rescue friendship between the sexes from the limbo of the impossible.” He may have good taste and an aesthetic sense fostered by a feminine streak. He is often a student of history and religion and has a spiritual receptivity.
The conventional wisdom is that Freud wrote a psychology of the Animus, the archetype that represents male qualities while Jung’s focus was on the Anima, the archetype that represents the eternal feminine. Jung, who came to prominence on the shoulders of Freud, was able to move away from the didactic, patriarchal and somewhat literal world of Freud. Jung often referred to his psychology as material for the second half of life where men and women would focus on energies that remained unconscious or repressed. He was especially emphatic about the need for men to be open to their anima selves through dreams, visions and work with the unconscious. His psychology, his focus and his readings of religious and mythological histories suggested he might have been more comfortable speaking and writing about the psychologies of women.
If Jung’s remarks about the mother complex in men might seem somewhat poetic and faintly mythological, his remarks about the mother complex in women seems much more straightforward and psychological. After all, the mother is the center of birth, life and creation in this sense carries more psychic and archetypal weight. This complex in its negative is a result of an “overdevelopment of feminine instincts indirectly caused by the mother, or with a weakening of them to the point of complete extinction. The first instance makes the daughter unconscious of her own personality; in the second, the instincts are projected on the mother.
In his “The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” Jung suggests that a daughter in a mother complex experiences an intensification of all maternal instincts. The negative side of this would be represented in a woman whose only interest is in childbirth. In this instance, the husband is of secondary importance. He is an object to be looked after, like the children and furniture. If a daughter is involved, the mother would cling to her as if she were a possession.
Another iteration of the mother complex is an overdevelopment of Eros hastened by the hypertrophy of the maternal instinct. A woman in this complex often competes with the mother, and in Jung’s words, “loves romantic and sensational episodes for their own sake, and is interested in married men, less for themselves than for the fact that they are married.” The psychologist calls this behavior “remarkably unconscious.” This is neither an ethical statement nor a judgment. Jung is referring to the forces or feeling-toned complexes that seize a woman when in the shadow of the mother.
A third iteration of the mother complex refers to a close identification with the mother. If a complex does not lead to an overdevelopment of Eros, it will likely lead to identification with the mother and a paralysis of the daughter’s feminine instincts. In this instance, the daughter is unconscious of her maternal instinct and her Eros. Jung writes that there is usually a keen feeling of inferiority in the daughter and this compels her to return to the mother who is seen as a superwoman who does everything right.
And a fourth version of this complex is resistance to the mother which Jung refers to as the supreme example of the negative mother complex. And this is a very heavy weight to carry. Jung writes that when living in this complex, “All instinctive processes meet with unexpected difficulties; either sexuality does not function properly, or the children are unwanted, or maternal duties seem unbearable, or the demands of marital life are responded to with impatience and irritation.” In some instances Jung has seen women who have had spontaneous development of the intellect “for the purpose of creating a sphere of interest in which the mother has no place.”
For Jung, feeling-toned complexes, the stuff of the collective unconscious, can have either positive or negative aspects, depending on how conscious we are of these forces and whether we project this archetypal energy onto others. He wrote that our fundamental task is “to dissolve these projections, in order to restore their contents to the individual who has involuntarily lost them by projecting them outside himself.”
I am thinking of my mother as in some arc of history, thus giving her an archetypal dimension. The family conversation goes something like this: “She survived two wars, two husbands and seven children.” Someone might recall she outlived her first husband by fifty-six years and her second — my father — by thirty years.
My mother never mentioned her mother to me. Apparently her mother thoroughly embraced a late-born son and shut my mother out. I never recall meeting my grandmother in London. If I did, she was my aunt, another stranger. This was London after the Blitz. Everyone was pinned down at the safety level, to quote the psychologist Maslow. Everyone was in a complex or hiding under the kitchen table.
Jung refers to the process by which the mother becomes the grandmother who in turn might become the Great Mother as an archetypal movement. At each turn, the archetype is elevated to a higher rank. In psychological terms, opposites that might be contained in the mother figure — say, good fairy and wicked fairy, or benevolent or dangerous goddess — could be joined without contradiction. After all, the legends about the gods are full of contradictions.
I think that my mother has lived long enough in life and in memory to be remembered in this world of contradictions. Her oldest daughter, who witnessed my birth and is still living, takes the long view and sees her as a noble, every-suffering figure who overcame enormous obstacles in her life.
Another daughter (now deceased), who lived fifteen years in an orphanage and was rarely visited by our mother, resisted her. She decided early on never to get married or have children. She saw our mother as self-centered and narcissistic yet found in her heart the strength to forgive the woman later in life.
I will accept Jung’s insight about men tending to idealize the mother, with its implications for the unconscious. After our father died, my mother made it clear that she could not support my two brothers and me. We all got jobs and then joined the military. We put time, distance and experiences between us and our mother and we were all better for it. We still have our demons to wrestle with. There remains that small task that Jung proposed about withdrawing projections. That is my responsibility, not my mother’s. Just because my mother once chased me with a broom doesn’t mean she was a witch.
I am not so unlike the character in my “Dancing with the Dream Family.” On returning from foreign travel, I felt a responsibility to check in with my mother before my wife at the time. She was the matriarch after all. The choice of inviting her into our home was about compassion. I did not think I was married to the archetype. Nonetheless, mother complexes die hard.
That is my tale and that is my fate.
