Her sexuality and femininity foundered on the reef of her primal relationship to her mother.
Daughters of both types of men will be so-called anima women (good hooks for men’s unconscious projections), though of a very different tempering.
Both will have dreams where they appear, for instance, in well lit glass solariums, in perfect blue apartments without kitchens, in plastic bags or coffins that threaten to suffocate them.
Both will realize there is something between them and the world, something that cuts off their own feeling, a veil that is seldom penetrated.
Both will strive to make life into a work of art, and vaguely realize they have not lived. Because of that primal relationship, the father’s daughter walks a thin line precariously close to the collective unconscious, unable—like Rainer Maria Rilke, for example—to separate her personal angels and demons from the transpersonal.
And demons are as immediate to her as angels, because she lives so close to her father’s shadow.
Unless he has worked on himself, as in analysis, and gained some insight into his puer psychology, he is probably quite unaware of his ambivalence toward women.
His bonding to his own mother may have created a Prince Charming, but a prince who is nevertheless dependent on women’s approval.
His chthonic shadow hates that dependence and hates the women who make him feel vulnerable.
Unless he has worked hard on his own feeling values, he may function on a conscious level as an ascetic scholar, a priest, or even a carefree Don Juan, while his unconscious shadow is a cold, violent killer, intent on destroying any “witch” who would seduce him into her power.
Men who live close to the unconscious quite legitimately need to protect themselves from the seduction of the lamia (see figure below, page 167), as the
Romantic artists, many of them dead before forty, make painfully clear.
The puer’s shadow, however, may murder not only witches but the femininity of his little daughter as well.
On the one hand he may be mothering, nourishing, cherishing, while on the other creating a femme fatale whose attitude toward men is kill or be killed.
The femme fatale lives in an unconscious body: her femininity is unconscious, her sexuality is unconscious.
Often promiscuous, she manipulates “lovers” to prove her power as a woman, but her love is unrelated to her lust.
Thus she may consciously love her father (or her father surrogate) and be committed to her own creativity through that incestuous bonding, and at the same time be lured into violent and dangerous adventures.
Her sexuality and femininity foundered on the reef of her primal relationship to her mother.
The puella mother who has never taken up residence in her own body, and therefore fears her own chthonic nature, is not going to experience pregnancy as a quiet meditation with her unborn child, nor birth as a joyful bonding experience.
Although she may go through the motions of natural childbirth, the psyche/soma split in her is so deep that physical bonding between her and her baby daughter does not take place.
Her child lives with a profound sense of despair, a despair which becomes conscious if in later years she does active imagination with her body and releases waves of grief and terror that resonate with the initial, primal rejection. […]
The body that appears in dreams wrapped in fire, encircled by a black snake or encumbered by a fish tail from the waist down, may be holding a death-wish too deep for tears. ~Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin, Page 36-37
