M. Esther Harding, The Parental Image
The Return Home
In the preceding chapter we saw how the subjective injury that Nora had received
as a result of her childhood experiences had affected the image of the Mother and Father archetypes in her psyche.
That is to say, the ontogenetic, personal aspect of the archetypal images had been injured or disturbed for her.
We also saw how, as a result of her analysis, this injury was gradually healed and
positive images replaced the damaged ones.
However, something further was accomplished by the analysis, for the symbols
that occurred in the last series of fantasies were not just of a loving human
father and mother restored to her, as if she were a child again.
If this had been so, she would have been left in a condition of childish dependence on her analyst, as a mother surrogate, and this was not the case.
The symbol of Mother as a personification of the feminine wisdom within herself, and of the Father as a stone marked by lightning so that it had a spirit in it, were numinous.
They produced in her a sense of freedom and inner autonomy she had never experienced before.
And as a result of these deeply moving subjective events Nora became, for the first time in her life, truly an individual.
To recapitulate, during the course of her analysis two processes had gone on in Nora simultaneously. She had gradually come to see that the lack of an adequate
relation to a positive mother figure was the cause of the difficulties in her
relations w ith other people.
She realized that the lack of rapport with others could not be overcome by conscious effort, nor could it be adequately compensated by identification with the animus.
Her inner insecurity, augmented by her unconscious sense of guilt arising from the childish sexual play, had resulted in alienation from her own feminine nature, the source of feeling and relatedness.
This had caused a serious deformation of her character.
It had meant that, instead of basing her human relationships on genuine feeling, she had acted on animus ideas of feminine behavior.
But an idea of feeling is the opposite of real feeling, and so it alienated instead
of uniting. This realization was not merely an intellectual one, though understanding was a necessary part of the process.
The realization went much deeper than that, involving her whole being.
As a result of this change, she was able to renounce the old way of functioning through animus magic.
Even the “white” magic, represented by the knight in shining armor, had proved helpless before the obstacle in her path.
But when she experienced a true turning of the heart, then things changed, as if by a m iracle, one not wrought by an imus magic. While this change was occurring, another was taking place without which the inner transformation wou ld have been imposs ible.
This deeper change concerned her re lation to her analyst, onto whom she had projected the archetypal image of the mother, wh ile at the same time she recogn ized her as an individual too.
The dreamer ‘ s relationship to her analyst had been qu ite ambivalent at first;
sometimes it was positive, at others distrustful and even hostile.
But gradually this had changed. She became able to give up her an imus attitude and accept her own femininity .
As a resu lt her re lation to her analyst became estab l i shed, and
she found she cou ld accept her loving feel ings for her without demanding that
the analyst m ust love her first and in the particular way she w ished.
The image of the archetypal parents that had dominated Nora ‘ s psyche in a
negative and destructive form had been overcome.
In its place, she experienced not only the positive parental images in her re lation to her two analysts-one a m an and the other a woman-but she also learned in the final active imagination that this value did not come from the analyst but from a gu iding and protecting elem ent that would now function from within herself.
She had at last found and recognized the Great Mother with in and, at the same time, had found and recognized her own femininity as a value to be prized and relied on .
Such a transformation corresponds to the culmination of the myth of Demeter
and Kore, when the young woman, the Kore, represented by Persephone, the
daughter, becomes Demeter, the mature m aternal goddess who w i l l herself rel
i ve the myth w ith a new Kore.
A simi lar process is shown in the pictures on thewal l s of the initiation chamber in the Villaa dei Mysterii in Pompeii , as previouslymentioned.
In Nora ‘ s case, th is transformation took place in her analysis.
The father- image, too, was transformed.
This i s a woman’s psychology, so while the stone-like mother- image had become human, the father-image had changed in a different way.
The rock that represented him had been shattered by a bolt of lightning, and a fragment of the rock had been marked by the fire from heaven .
Nora was told to take this stone with her as a guide.
The father had thus
become spirit, but spirit sti ll embedded in stone.
Thi s means that the ass imilation of spirit into her own psyche was not yet fully accomplished, and the reconciliation to God as Father-that is, in his aspect as the positive masc u line spirit, or Logos-was still represented for her by the marked stone, rather than coming to her as an inner voice.
But the stone, as the voice of the fantasy told her, would act as a touchstone by which she could determ ine what was true and what was false in the spirit realm.
And so Nora would no longer need to depend on the magic-producing an imus for guidance.
The pathological inj ury which the parental image had su ffered in this woman
was healed.
The archetypal image of the parents had been recon structed and the hero ‘ s struggle for release from the positive parents now confronted her.
The way was open for the next step in her development, namely the search for a new symbol that m ight represent and contain the supreme value that was no longer
carried for her by the parental image.
Th is next step would inev itably involve a new injury to the archetypal image,
corresponding to the one inflicted by the youth who frees himself in order to
depart on his own adult adventure .
But this is a normal injury.
For obviously, where there is no longer a child then the role of parent is nullified.
The value the parental image carried, and its energy, must go e lsewhere and find a new expression.
Th is necessity recalls Christ ‘ s statement about the new revelation he brought: “Neither do men put new wine i nto old bottles : else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out . . . but they put new wine i nto new bottles . ” (Matt. 9: 1 7)
The old form of the parental image is inev itably injured by the growing-up
of the child, but this injury is necessary and normal, and the child’s act of disobedience, corresponding to the overcom ing of the parents by the hero, is the felix culpa, the fortunate crime.
In her quest for individuation, Nora had accomplished this much.
She would now have to undertake the next stage, one that would free her from dependence on the emotional support and wisdom of her analyst.
Th is task corresponds to the exp lo its of the myth ical heroes who, like Marduk, fight and overcome the parental monsters who would hold them forever in bondage.
If we transpose the hero myth into the terms of our own inner myth , we see
that the God-image in its primal or infantile form m ust be overcome by the
young person who would truly become an individual.
Those who are successful become heroes, who can then step out into their own reality, their own individual relation to the world.
No longer w theilly be restricted by the rules the parents made, nor supported by them.
For better or for worse, the gods of the first beginn ings no longer rule their lives.
Desirable as this freedom may seem, to ach ieve it involves a life and death struggle, not only against the parents but also against one’s own infantility-a struggle in which only some are victorious, and others are defeated.
Th is inner battle for freedom and for one’s own individual ity takes p lace in
stages .
It is not ach ieved in one supreme effort.
The child emerging into adolescence begins to criticize the parents, seeing that they are not infall ible but often make mistakes.
At first the child complains or berates them for their inadequacies, but later understands that they are not gods but simply human.
In 1959, in a filmed interview, Jung told of the way in which th is experience came to him.
One day he seemed to step out of a m i st and suddenly become conscious of himself, he was separate frkom his parents, and for the first time he was able to
evaluate them a s individuals.61
When consciousness thus dawns, one looks around and sees that “things” did not come into existence by themselves, that they were not always and forever
there.
The realization dawns that someone, some human agency, must have created
and ordered them.
Unfortunately, this is an achievement, an enlightenment, that is not always
accomplished even by grown m en and women .
More than once I have heard an adult assert, “But life owes me that ! ”
We are not surprised that the infant merely cries for food when hungry and that its cry seem s to produce milk, because it knows noth ing and cares nothing for the history of its arrival, all n ice and warm in the breast or bottle.
The infant’s concern is simply and solely w ith the comfort or discomfort in its stomach.
The ten year old return ing home from school and calling out, “Mum, is dinner ready?” has little more awareness of cause and effect and of the mother ‘ s work than does the infant, though intellectually able, perhaps, to tel l you how food is produced and cooked.
But psychologically the child is naive. Dinner just is, a fact respondent to one’s needs.
Consciousness is so dim that it cannot penetrate beyond subjective acts or feelings.
At adolescence one begins to rebel against parental control, demanding freedom
w ithout real izing its rel ated responsibil ities.
Indeed, this demand usually includes the expectation that one has a right to the family assets (such as the car).
Th is unconscious demand often pers ists through college and even beyond.
Usual ly, however, on leaving college the young person will have to start out
independently and w ill then be confronted, as Marduk was, with the unordered
multiplicity of the world.
It becomes necessary to capture or exploit the riches of the environment, and to order and control them in the interests of one ‘ s personal life.
In the greater world a person is j udged by what she or he does. Excuses are
not acceptable.
Th is is often espec ial ly difficult in the emotional sphere, where a high price is exacted for indulging in moods.
Marduk did not cel ebrate his victory w ith an orgy, nor did he consider that he
had the right to rest on his laurels.
He immediately started to make laws to control himself as well as the gods.
We are told that he invented many “cunning” plans to take care of all the situations that pressed upon him once the old order had been di spersed.
And just so, in the personal h istory of each one of us, after
we have freed ourse lves from the parents suffic iently to have at least a glimpse
of their real ity as individuals, we must begin to find a place for ourse lves in the
world as separate persons, taking responsibil ity for our own loves-earn ing a
liv ing, adapting to society, marrying, bearing and rearing children, and assuming
our share of the collective burden of a civil ized society, which also in turn ministers
to our needs.
Th is is the task of the first half of life, and it may be regarded as the usual way of development, though m any people fail in it, partial ly or completely.
We find many childish adults who still unconsciously live in a father-m other world.
They are the puer aeternus type of man and the an ima type of woman ,62 and
they form a consi derabl e proportion of the people who seek analys is in the first
half of l i fe, when the major problems are concerned with winning freedom from
the parents and making an adequate adjustment to life.
We must not make the m istake, however, of taking these goals merely in their
external aspect.
To l eave home and get a job, even to be successful in a worldly sense, does not necessari ly mean that one has freed oneself from the parental world.
It is possible to be outwardly free wh ile remaining inward ly contained in
the family.
In such cases the analysis of the problems belonging to the first half of life m ay have to be carried out w ith older persons too.
With young people it may be sufficient to help them gain their outer freedom, leaving the deeper task to be accomplished later, when life itself will have brought home to them the real izat ion that everyth ing is not in order.
But w ith older people this is not enough. Analysis of persons in the first half of life, or of those who have carried the problems of youth unresolved through the years, will be concerned first of all with this issue.
Its resolution is usually accomplished through the projection of the parental image onto the analyst, where the difficulties due to the analysand’s unresolved fixation-to the parent and to one ‘ s own infantility-can be worked on and overcome. ~M. Esther Harding, The Parental Image, Page 119-123
