When this happens, both lovers cannot meet on earth.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
How does a man whose femininity is locked in the mother complex experience women in outer life?
If a man has too close a tie to his mother, especially a positive one, then he tends to idealize women.
He sees in every woman the Beatrice of Dante, so to speak, or the Virgin Mary, and then such men cannot approach women with their lower parts, with sexuality, and in ordinary human life.
Or they have a split anima situation: they admire a very unapproachable, lofty, beautiful girl from afar and satisfy their sexual desires with prostitutes.
They cannot bring the two together. One can say that love involves these two extreme opposite elements.
On the one side, a romantic spiritual ideal; on the other, a biological drive for the procreation of the race, something very much on the animal level.
And these opposites somehow belong together in a relationship.
But a man who has never freed himself from the mother cannot put the princess and the bitch together, so to speak.
For such a man, an outer relationship with a woman can work as long as it is an adventure or a love affair and the woman fills out his needs and fantasies.
The trouble begins if he marries her and has to live with her in everyday life. There is no human being; there is no warmth.
There is no possibility of a human relationship.
There is also an archetypal background to this which is shown in fairy tales by the motif of the princess locked in the tower.
In one of the most famous, the princess Rapunzel is imprisoned by a witch. It’s the mother figure behind the scene which brings forth the constellation.
And when this happens, both lovers cannot meet on earth.
Only when Rapunzel has come down to earth from her tower and the prince has wandered around in the desert in misery and pain can they finally meet.
I think nowadays movies touch many of these essential psychological facts and replace fairy-tale telling and myth telling of former times.
Movies are our modern form of myths and fairy tales, and therefore movies which tell about the inner world, as fairy tales do, are attractive to the public, because we really need myths to have an orientation toward, a mapping out of, the dream world or the unconscious.
In past time there were the innumerable myths of vampires which fascinated people. These tales were retold all over the world.
In China, for instance, there are a whole host of ghost stories in which a man meets a fox, and then the fox turns out to be really the ghost of the dead, who turns up again as a beautifully made-up girl.
He has a marvelous life with her until one day he discovers that she is an evil demon. She is a skeleton. And then sometimes it ends badly.
She pulls him into death, or, with the help of priests and magicians, he frees himself from the demon.
In the Swiss Alps, also, we have stories about cow herdsmen who live high up in the mountains for the whole summer without having women.
Every night the Doggeli, a female ghost, comes invisibly to the door and rides them all the night so that they have dreams of sexual pollution.
In the morning they wake up completely exhausted and can hardly move.
They are overwhelmed, so to speak, by sexual fantasies and by the unlived life. ~The Way of the Dream, Page 92-95
