Marie-Louise von Franz: The Mother as Fate
The archetypes of the collective unconscious are not a theoretical construct but an experiential reality with the power of destiny.
Many people seem unable to see this, perhaps because they identify themselves with their impulses.
They think they are living, and do not realize that to a large extent they are being lived.
In psychological terms their actions are chiefly the result of autonomous psychic activity, in religious terms of such things as God and the devil.
People generally have no interest at all in the great inner forces that mold them.
But only with such an interest can one experience the reality of the archetypes.
For example, a man at one time during his life might have had a great interest in some area of enquiry, which then gradually dissipated.
He does not know how this happened.
He simply could not find the energy for it.
Of course there is always a sensible, plausible explanation for such things.
It does not occur to him to think it was anything apart from his consciousness which first aroused the burning interest, and that later a different power took possession of him and lulled him into inactivity.
Only primitive people who believe in demons have such thoughts.
It is no longer possible for us to believe in demons, although that might be nearer the truth, for it was not the man himself who first aroused his passion and then extinguished it.
If, on the one hand, we have to agree that he did not do it consciously, but on the other hand, with our sharpened awareness of outward reality, we cannot find any demons there, the only other possibility is that something in the unconscious affected him.
He followed a pattern in his mind because he had no alternative.
In order to see this we cannot continue to identify ourselves with our impulses.
If we were to investigate the dreams of the person in our example, we would perhaps find a dark female figure at work, an Earth Mother figure, the old enemy of the spirit, just like the hero in a fairy story sent into a magic sleep by a witch.
If the victim turns his attention away from these things, he may manage to save his peace of mind.
He will still appear to himself to be a psychic unity dominated by his will and his reason.
But the fact that a man knows nothing of the powers that really lie behind most of his good or evil actions does not block their influence.
On the contrary, their influence is all the greater if they are unacknowledged by consciousness.
Creative and destructive, they stand behind every human life.
As long as their effects are not too extreme they can be left unobserved.
It must be said that many people do not turn to face these forces even when they all but ruin their lives.
They do not have the courage to admit to themselves that they are not in control.
That is why many people have only a theoretical understanding of the archetypes and cannot see or experience them.
The French apparently believe that they even make their own dreams, since they say, “J’ai fait un rêve” (I made a dream).
In America there are those who believe they can influence their dreams by will power.
So our mistaken belief in the supremacy of the ego even extends to our dreaming lives.
Until a person outgrows such a naive attitude, archetypal reality remains a mystery.
Jung made continual efforts to remove the prejudices preventing modern man from being open to the experiences of the suprapersonal, because he realized that for us today conscious awareness is a matter of life and death.
This can be done by making conscious the psychic contents in dreams and fantasies, which originate partly in the individual psyche and partly in deeper archetypal levels.
The word archetypal describes what is autonomous, independent of the ego, functioning within the psyche according to unseen laws; it is stronger than we are.
Not until the archetype bursts into our lives either destructively or constructively can we become conscious of the effect of the primal image.
Only then can we discover it as a power in the psyche distinct from the ego.
Among all the archetypes of the unconscious, that of the mother has a special role connected with predestination, which is why the fates in mythology are usually female and often mother figures.
For the ancient Greeks, the mothers of fate were the three Moirae.
In Hesiod there is a detailed description of them spinning the threads of fate.
The first is Clotho, the spinner.
The second is called Lachesis, the drawer of lots.
The third is Atropos, the inevitable.
She has a pair of scissors to cut off the threads of human lives.
The first is the benevolent mother who gives life.
The second gives one a definite lot.
The third is the inevitable, the terrible, because all that is manifested in time has an end as well as a beginning.
Sometimes one can escape one’s destiny, but only at the expense of totality.
On the other hand, if one accepts it, in other words affirms it consciously, one finds oneself.
The three goddesses are actually the mother archetype divided into three different aspects, which, however, all belong together.
In this motif what are called the threads of destiny in a person’s life, one’s whole fate, are seen as a single thread spun by the mother, an integrated whole.
In his essay on the mother archetype Jung writes: “The structure is something given, the precondition that is found to be present in every case. And this is the mother, the matrix—the form into which all experience is poured.” ~~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Mother : Archetypal Image in Fairy Tales, Page 114-115
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
#AnalyticalPsychology #DepthPsychology #CarlJung #TheUnconscious #JungianPsychology #Psyche #JungianConcepts #PsychologicalType #Archetypes #Individuation
