Mother is Motherlove, my Experience and my Secret.
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
The positive aspect of the first type of complex, namely the overdevelopment of the maternal instinct, is identical with that well-known image of the mother which has been glorified in all ages and all tongues.
This is the mother-love which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of cur 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 and yet cruel like fate, joyous and untiring giver of life-mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead.
Mother is motherlove, my experience and my secret.
Why risk saying too much, too much that is false and inadequate and beside the point, about that human being who was our mother, the accidental carrier of that great experience which includes herself and myself and all mankind, and indeed the whole of created nature, the experience of life whose children we are?
The attempt to say these things has always been made, and probably always will be; but a sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail and fallible human being-so deserving of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness who was our mother.
He knows that the mother carries for us that inborn image of the mater natura and mater spi1’itualis, of the totality of life of which we are a small and helpless part.
Nor should we hesitate for one moment to relieve the human mother of this appalling burden, for our own sakes as well as hers.
It is just this massive weight of meaning that ties us to the mother and chains her to her child, to the physical and mental of both.
A mother-complex is not got rid of blindly reducing the mother to human proportions.
Besides that we run the risk of dissolving the experience “Mother” into atoms, thus destroying something supremely valuable and throwing away the golden key which a good fairy laid in cradle.
That is why mankind has always instinctively added the pre-existent divine pair to the personal parents-the “god”, father and “god” -mother of the newborn child-so that, from sheer unconsciousness or shortsighted rationalism, he should never forget himself so far as to invest his own parents with divinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 172
Carl Jung hypnotizes his mother
Another instance of the same thing was C.G.’s mother.
She remarked to him that hypnosis was a lot of nonsense and he replied, ‘Oh no, I’ll show you.’
He told her to hold up her arm, and then said, ‘Now you can’t put it down.’
She said, ‘Oh yes I can.’ ‘Well, put it down then,’ said C.G.
‘No,’ shevanswered, ‘I’m not hypnotised but I don’t want to put it down.’
Mrs. Jung and C.G.’s sister were there and they laughed.
Then he lifted his mother’s leg and held it horizontally, and there she sat with her arm up and her leg
stuck out.
She couldn’t move until he told her to do so, and yet she insisted that she was not hypnotised.
~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Pages 97-98
My Mother’s Second Voice
June 7, 1957
On this day) C. G. Jung talked about his mother. Since early childhood) and again during significant phases of his adulthood) he had been aware of two personalities in her.
The usually visible one was a warm-hearted) conventional and affable woman) but at decisive moments a second voice with powerful) unassailable authority could emerge) stirring simmering, deep-seated contents in Jung, e.g.) the issue of the anima or his research ambitions.
In January 1958) a few months after this description of his mother’s twofold personality)
C.G. Jung wrote) in “From the Earliest Experiences of My Life) ” about his own twofold personality) calling the two aspects number 1 and number 2.
As a young assistant physician at Burgholzli 3 in Zurich, I lived on Zollikerstrasse.
I was working on the association experiments at the time, and my whole room was plastered with graphs.
One day my mother visited me, with no idea of what I was doing.
She looked around the room and then asked: “What’s all this then?” – “These are the graphs from the experiments I’m working on at the moment.”
I was feeling rather proud of my efforts. But at that point I had no idea yet whether my results would come to anything.
I was just at the point of discovering what the disturbances in the experiments might mean, and assumed they were connected with feeling-toned, autonomously acting complexes.
My mother looked at all the drawings again and suddenly stood up – like a judge – and with her “second” voice asked me: “Well, do you think it could be something?”
My mother rarely spoke in this tone – but when she did, she would intuitively and unexpectedly say something of great significance.
At those times she often hit exactly on an unacknowledged or unconscious feeling of mine.
At sometimes what she said sounded something like an ambiguous oracle.
In this case, I could have taken her question to mean either that I was not valuing my work highly enough, or that I was overestimating its worth.
But in any case, she gave voice to an unrecognized doubt within me.
Her question affected me so much that I could not lift a pen for the next three weeks.
Her words had unflinchingly exposed my own doubts about the importance of my undertaking, and now I asked myself in all seriousness whether what I was doing really made sense.
I always find it hard to accept that my own judgment can deceive me.
My mother, in that very moment, had expressed my own unacknowledged apprehension.
And she did so in that grave serious voice, so different from her usual way of speaking – as if she wanted to make me realize that my work really did have something worthwhile, but at the same
time raise the doubt about whether it amounted to anything.
Almost in the same breath, she added: “I don’t understand any of it!”
It was like a Delphic oracle: “Thus, or just not thus.” Ambiguous and pregnant with meaning like the prophecy: “If you cross the Halys you will destroy an empire!”
Actually, my mother emphasized the great significance of what was present. ~Carl Jung, Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung, Page20-22
