One cannot escape one’s fate; the whole pain of it must be accepted
Jung writes that women with a negative mother complex often miss the first half of life; they walk past it in a dream.
Life to them is a constant source of annoyance and irritation.
But if they can overcome this negative mother complex, they have a good chance in the second half of rediscovering life with the youthful spontaneity missed in the first half.
For though, as Jung says in the last paragraph, a part of life has been lost, its meaning has been saved.
That is the tragedy of such women, but they can get to the turning point, and in the second half of life have their hands healed and can stretch them out for what they want — not from the animus or from the ego, but, according to nature, simply stretch out their hands toward something they love.
Though it is infinitely simple, it is extremely difficult, for it is the one thing the woman with a negative mother complex cannot do; it needs God’s help.
Even the analyst cannot help her — it must one day just happen, and this is generally when there has been sufficient suffering.
One cannot escape one’s fate; the whole pain of it must be accepted, and one day the infinitely simple solution comes.
Mutatis mutandis, the problem for men is similar where the anima has been
hurt by the mothers animus.
Such a man may be able to talk about it, but he cannot bring up from within the genuine chthonic masculine reaction and be of himself definitely masculine.
He lives according to what he believes to be the masculine pattern.
To find one’s personal spontaneity is something so simple that those who have it cannot understand how difficult it is for those who lack it.
A woman who has gone through such an experience of finding her hands again
has missed a part of life, which the woman with the positive mother complex
had, but the latter remains unconscious of certain deep healing processes.
The former, however, who has had to go around the whole world to find life, will
have also found the religious meaning of it.
Simply to live is like a Zen experience for her.
She will have the full consciousness of what she is doing and is therefore rewarded for her suffering, which is what Jung means when he writes that “a part of life is lost, but the meaning is saved.” — Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Page 84
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