Love fulfillment is for the gods
If you look at African fairy tales, there are many stories where a young man and a young girl love each other and it doesn’t suit the clan.
It’s the Romeo and Juliet problem. They don’t love according to the clan rules.
They love somebody from another clan which is taboo, and these stories always end tragically.
For instance, the two drown and from then on, sometimes on shiny moonlit nights, you see their ghosts over the water.
It’s always a tragic, unhappy love. Deep, romantic, personal feeling is discouraged by such stories; it is as if people who want to live in that way want something impossible, as if to say,
“You are trespassing in the realm of the gods. Love fulfillment is for the gods. On earth you have to keep the clan rules, just put up with your husband or wife, however they are.”
So what we are trying to do now, seeking to establish a personal feeling relationship between men and women, is a new situation.
It began in the Middle Ages with courtly love. That was the first attempt.
Then it was discouraged by society, so we can say that we are really treading on absolutely new grounds, grounds that poetry and religious rules until now have called tragic and impossible, something that never ends well. It is really a new task for both sexes.
One should not forget that Jung was the first to show a way and to promote it, long before there was Women’s Lib and such things; showing that we now have to try, for the first time in history, to establish a real relationship between men and women beyond the blind attraction through the projection of animus and anima.
Of course that attraction is always at first mixed up with it in some way.
Nobody has really integrated anima or animus to a degree that that doesn’t come in.
But to be able to hold on and go beyond it into a real love relationship, whatever that is, that’s the great mystery anticipated in this story, in this meeting. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption, Page 93-94
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
