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. The motto of this type is: Anything, so long as it is not like Mother!. It is the supreme example of the negative mother-complex. In Jung’s view, these three extreme types are linked together by many intermediate stages, the most important being where there is an overwhelming resistance to the mother and all she stands for. As devoted and self-sacrificing wives, they often project their own unconscious gifts onto their husbands.Īnd then we have the spectacle of a totally insignificant man who seemed to have no chance whatsoever suddenly soaring as if on a magic carpet to the highest summits of achievement. The daughter leads a shadow-existence, often visibly sucked dry by her mother, and she prolongs her mother’s life by a sort of continuous blood transfusion.īecause of their apparent “emptiness,” these women are good hooks for men’s projections. She is content to cling to her mother in selfless devotion, while at the same time unconsciously striving, almost against her will, to tyrannize over her, naturally under the mask of complete loyalty and devotion. She is then unconscious of both her own maternal instinct and her Eros, which are then projected onto the mother.Īs a sort of superwoman (admired involuntarily by the daughter), the mother lives out for her beforehand all that the girl might have lived for herself. Jealousy of the mother and the desire to outdo her become the leitmotifs of subsequent undertakings.Īlternatively, the inhibition of the feminine instinct may lead a woman to identify with her mother. The intensified Eros places an abnormal emphasis on the personality of others. ![]() ![]() In the second case, the feminine instinct is inhibited or wiped out altogether.Īs a substitute, an overdeveloped Eros results, and this almost invariably leads to an unconscious incestuous relationship with the father. first and foremost the instrument of procreation, and she regards him merely as an object to be looked after, along with children, poor relations, cats, dogs, and household furniture. The negative aspect is seen in the woman whose only goal is childbirth. The exaggeration of the feminine side means an intensification of all female instincts, above all the maternal instinct. In the first case, the preponderance of instinct makes the woman unconscious of her own personality. In the daughter, the effect of the mother complex ranges from stimulation of the feminine instinct to its inhibition. This gives him a great capacity for friendship, which often creates ties of astonishing tenderness between men and may even rescue friendship between the sexes from the limbo of the impossible.In the same way, what in its negative aspect is Don Juanism can appear positively as bold and resolute manliness ambitious striving after the highest goals opposition to all stupidity, narrow-mindedness, injustice, and laziness willingness to make sacrifices for what is regarded as right, sometimes bordering on heroism perseverance, inflexibility and toughness of will a curiosity that does not shrink even from the riddles of the universe and finally, a revolutionary spirit which strives to put a new face upon the world. may have a finely differentiated Eros instead of, or in addition to, homosexuality. To the extent that a man establishes a good relationship with his inner woman (instead of being possessed by her), even a negative mother complex may have positive effects. In homosexuality, the son’s entire heterosexuality is tied to the mother in an unconscious form in Don Juanism, he unconsciously seeks his mother in every woman he meets.Ī man’s mother complex is influenced by the contrasexual complex, the anima. Typical effects on the son are homosexuality and Don Juanism, and sometimes also impotence. The constellation of a mother complex has differing effects according to whether it appears in a son or a daughter. The mother complex is a potentially active component of everyone’s psyche, informed first of all by experience of the personal mother, then by significant contact with other women and by collective assumptions. A group of feeling-toned ideas associated with the experience and image of mother.
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