Carl Jung: My schoolmates hung the nickname; Father Abraham on me.
It was some months after the incident just described that my schoolmates hung the nickname “Father Abraham” on me.
No. 1 could not understand why, and thought it silly and ridiculous.
Yet somewhere in the background I felt that the name had hit the mark.
All allusions to this background were painful to me, for the more I read and the more familiar I became with city life, the stronger grew my impression that what I was now getting to know as reality belonged to an order of things different from the view of the world I had grown up with in the country, among rivers and woods, among men and animals in a small village
bathed in sunlight, with the winds and the clouds moving over it, and encompassed by dark night in which uncertain things
happened.
It was no mere locality on the map, but “God’s world,” so ordered by Him and filled with secret meaning. But apparently men did not know this, and even the animals had somehow lost the senses to perceive it.
That was evident, for example, in the sorrowful, lost look of the cows, and in the resigned eyes of horses, in the devotion of dogs, who clung so desperately to human beings, and even in the self-assured step of the cats who had chosen house and barn as their, residence and hunting ground.
People were like the animals, and seemed as unconscious as they.
They looked down upon the ground or up into the trees in order to see what could be put to use, and for what purpose; like animals they herded, paired, and fought, but did not see that they dwelt in a unified cosmos, in God’s world, in an eternity where everything is already born and everything has already died. Carl Jung, MDR, Pages 66-67
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
This girl later became my mother-in-law. She admired my father.
I did not see her again until I was twenty-one years old. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 9
I began to see my parents with different eyes, and to understand their cares and worries.
For my father in particular I felt compassion less, curiously enough, for my mother I was seized with the most vehement pity for my father.
All at once I understood the tragedy of his profession and his life.
He was struggling with a death whose existence he could not admit.
An abyss had opened between him and me, and I saw no possibility of ever bridging it, for it was infinite in extent.
I could not plunge my dear and generous father, who in so many matters left me to myself and had never tyrannized over me, into that despair and sacrilege which were necessary for an experience of divine grace.
Only God could do that. I had no right to; it would be inhuman.
God is not human, I thought; that is His greatness, that nothing human impinges on Him. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 55.
From him I learned the impressive news that he had become friendly with the Catholic priest there.
This seemed to me an act of extraordinary boldness, and secretly I admired my father’s courage. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 78
Father complex:
A group of feeling-toned ideas associated with the experience and image of father.
In men, a positive father-complex very often produces a certain credulity with regard to authority and a distinct willingness to bow down before all spiritual dogmas and values; while in women, it induces the liveliest spiritual aspirations and interests. In dreams, it is always the father-figure from whom the decisive convictions, prohibitions, and wise counsels emanate. [“The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales,” CW 9i, par. 396.]
Jung’s comments on the father complex were rarely more than asides in writing about something else. In general, the father complex in a man manifests in the persona (through identification) and as aspects of his shadow; in a woman, it manifests in the nature of the animus, colored by the projection of her father’s anima.
The father exerts his influence on the mind or spirit of his daughter-on her “Logos.” This he does by increasing her intellectuality, often to a pathological degree which in my later writings I have described as “animus possession.”[“The Origin of the Hero,” CW 5, par. 272.]
The fathr- is the first carrier of the animus-image. He endows this virtual image with substance and form, for on account of his Logos he is the source of “spirit” for the daughter. Unfortunately this source is often sullied just where we would expect clean water. For the spirit that benefits a woman is not mere intellect, it is far more:
it is an attitude, the spirit by which a man lives. Even a so-called “ideal” spirit is not always the best if it does not understand how to deal adequately with nature, that is, with animal man. . . . Hence every fath-r is given the opportunity to corrupt, in one way or another, his daughter’s nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For “what has been spoiled by the fath-r”[ A reference to Hexagram 18 in the I Ching (Richard Wilhelm edition, p. 80): “Work ok on What Has Been Spoiled.”] can only be made good by a father.[“The Personification of the Opposites,” CW 14, par. 232.]
http://www.nyaap.org/jung-lexicon/f/
