The Parental Image as Source and Container of Life
Behind the individual part of the psyche, which we speak of as the personal unconscious, with its center, the shadow, there lies a deeper stratum of psychic nature that is common to all human beings.
Indeed, it is the common substratum of psychic life, much as the instincts form the basis of physical life. The layers of this collective psychic realm are general to all, but they are influenced in their form and functioning by the personal experience of the individual.
They are also modified considerably by family and ancestral factors; that is to say, determinants of a phylogenetic as well as those of an ontogenetic nature enter into the inner experience and motivations of each individual.
Indeed, the psychic structure of the human being is based on and determined by underlying patterns, as Jung has demonstrated in his essay “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.”
He showed that these determinants correspond roughly to the patterns that underlie the instincts, and like them are invisible and unconscious. Nevertheless, they are inherent in all of us.
They are types or patterns of psychic functioning imprinted in the structure of the psyche . They are ancient, indeed archaic, and Jung speaks of them as archetypes.
The term archetype is not new. It occurs, as Jung points out in that essay, as early as Philo Judaeus, who refers to the Imago Dei (God- image) as an archetype.
Jung cites many other classical writers who have used the same term for the unseen patterns that exist in the psyche.
The archetypes are eternal. We cannot conceive of psychic activity apart from them. They are energic systems of a psychic nature, producing and determining the form of psychic experience.
Obviously they can neither be defined nor even described from the conscious point of view, for they res ide not in consciousness where they might be seen, but in the unconscious . Yet the conscious psyche is itself always determined by them.
Our ways of understanding, our categories of functioning and consequently of thinking, are determined by the archetypes. We are immersed in the structure of the unconscious as a fish is in water.
Only a minute segment of the psyche, which we call consciousness, has as yet risen above the surface of the ocean, and from this tiny vantage point we try to understand both the world about us and the inner psychic world.
Human experience is dependent on and expresses the pattern s imprinted in the psychic structure of the individual. And so it follows that life unfolds accord Jung to a pattern, and although there are many differences in human lives and h u man fates, the working out of the archetypal patterns is clear.
We say, for instance, that a novel or a drama is true to life or not, showing that we have an instinctive sense of whether a life story is real, that is, whether it follows or violates the archetypal pattern.
The archetypal patterns are even more cl early expressed and recognized when they are stripped of personal factors and appear in quite general form in myths, legends, fairy tales and folklore, and above all in religious symbols and dogma.
These representations give the general picture of those particular archetypal patterns that are active in a group of individuals, or in a society as a whole.
But beyond this, the individual has a personal “mythology,” expressed in the dreams, visions and fantasies that pass, often hardly noticed, through the background of his or her m ind.
These reveal the archetypal forms currently activated with in this particular individual. The archetypal images, whether expressed in general form in a religion or a mythology, or occurring as the subjective experience of an individual, are the man infestations in consciousness-the incarnation, as it were-{)[ the archetypal themes.
The forms they take for the individual will vary in relation to one ‘ s conscious attitude. If the attitude is generally moving toward growth and the fulfillment of one ‘ s particular life, the archetypal images will encourage this movement.
But if in conscious life one is deviating from one ‘ s own true way, the images will become more challenging. The Chinese would express this psychological fact by saying that one is in Tao when one ‘ s attitude corresponds to the archetypal situation, but that, if one is not in Tao, then everything goes against one.
When one is in Tao one experiences psychic well-being, expressed as a sense of grace. Jung describes this situation most vividly in his account of his early encounter with a psychic power stronger than his ego.
We might almost venture to say that one’s fate and well-being depend on the symbols of value that motivate a person. And one can go even further than this, for the fate and history of civilizations also seem to follow a
simi lar law, as Arnold Toynbee has demonstrated in A Study of History.
Throughout the ages the function of religion has been to express these patterns in living symbols that not only guide the life of the people, but also have the power to release the energies of the unconscious for conscious life.
But when a religion dies, one is cut off from the connection with the source of energy in the unconscious, and the civilization, unless it can find a new expression for its life energy, is threatened with extinction.
It is as if the symbols formerly expressed in the religion have been injured and so have lost their power to guide and safeguard us in face of the dynamism of the unconscious.
Now, the archetypes of the unconscious cannot actually be injured . There is nothing psychic, so far as we know, beyond the archetypes, that could injure these eternal psychic patterns.
But at times they express themselves in a person’s inner feelings no less than in one’s outer life experience, in images of injury, loss or decay.
These situations have recurred countless times in the hi story not only of individuals but of cultures as well. And so it is not surprising to find images, legends and mythologems that deal with this general human experience.
For instance, in Judea-Christian culture the picture of the paradisiacal state, the nursery of mankind, was marred by the theft of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
After that act of disobedience, one part of God ‘ s creation was no longer obedient to the law and so was no longer upheld and nurtured by it.
Humanity became alienated from God and consequently God no longer appeared as the wholly beneficent creator. Instead, God was perceived as threatening and punitive. So we may say that the image of God as good was injured.
The paradisiacal state pictured in the story of the Garden of Eden corresponds to the mother-world. The garden is a protected space, a container of the immature and helpless child, a psychological womb.
An adult should escape from this mother-world by a new birth, but sometimes the mother attraction is so powerful that youth cannot proceed to gain the freedom of maturity.
Th is situation is represented in many myths, and it may occur also in lived experience when the actual mother cannot let her child leave to become an adult.
Instead, her affectionate attachment will seem restrictive and even hostile. This is an almost inevitable result if the mother is possessive and clings to her child out of need. It can also occur when the mother is not possessive but is loving and protective-overprotective.
In the myths that portray this situation the mother is usually represented as a goddess who loves her son dearly and will not let him leave. Rather, she tries to keep him with her as her lover. Usually she succeeds in this and he becomes the son-lover of the mother.
In some cases the son remains content with this situation, but in others he rebels or falls in love with a mortal woman. Then either his jealous mother kills him, or in despair he castrates himself, as Attis did when he fell in love with the daughter of a king and his mother Cybele struck him with madness.
This is a not uncommon outcome that occurs not only in myth but also in art and in real life. A son too tenderly loved by his mother may remain psychologically enclosed with in her love, quite unable to make a life of his own. He may reel completely blocked and fall into despair or even take his own life.
This is really the story behind many cases of adolescent suicide, where the boy was the darting of his doting mother. It is usually the most promising, the most brilliant or artistic youths whose lives come to such a tragic end.
Their values have been fostered by the mother’s love and devotion , but often behind her love lies an inordinate need and possessiveness; the mother cannot make the necessary sacrifice of herself, and so her son becomes the sacrificial victim .
There are other myths in which the son does not die; instead he suffers from a wound that never heals usually inflicted by an enemy who represents instinctive nature, the very element that has been repressed in loyalty to the maternal figure .
The classic example of this situation occurs in the Grai l legend where Amfortas, the guardian of the symbol of the feminine spirit-namely, the Grail-is vowed to perpetual chastity in its service.
But he is enticed into a sexual embrace by Kundry, a half-human embodiment of the snake in Paradise. She represents the underside of the feminine principle, the opposite, as it were, of the Grail, and she embodies Amfortas’s own instinctive nature, which also surely comes from the mother.
Amfortas is discovered lying with Kundry and is wounded by Klingsor, her uncle. His wound will not heal; it breaks out anew every time he celebrates the ritual of the Grail.
This legend reveals a different aspect of the mythologem of injury. Here the figures mother and son are both injured. The Grail, representative of the mother, is injured because its priest can no longer perform its due serv ice, and the son is wounded because of his inner conflict between nature and spirit.
In daily life a similar situation can come about through a mother’s overindulgence of her son, resulting in his identification with her. It use a pathological situation, but, in conformity with the myth, just may be a necessary step on the path to individuation.
The Grail legend is the story of man’s redemption as well as of his failure. So we see that over-indulgence on the part of the mother can produce serious injury, not only to the character of the child but also to the notion of motherhood that he carries unconsciously within his psyche.
There is also another pattern of injury that can occur to the maternal image the child bears within. It is of a quite different character and results from the experience not of a loving mother, but of the lack of one.
Some children have never known mother-love, have never had the experience of being wanted and valued in their own individual personalities. Naturally such children suffer in the conscious development, and in the unconscious the maternal image is negative and destructive. It is as if for them the earliest image of the maternal has been injured.
The very pattern of “mother” is distorted-hostile instead of friendly, cruel instead of kind, death-dealing instead of life-giving.
Children who have suffered in this way live in a pathological inner state, for the relation of a child to its mother is of paramount importance in one’s development, and when this is negative the child ‘ s growth is dwarfed and distorted.
It is indeed of the greatest importance for the welfare of the individual that as a child one should have a strong relation to the nurturing aspect of the mother.
Only as one’s relation to the personal mother mirrors, as it were, the archetypal Great Mother can one develop in the most favorable way. About this subject Jung writes :
The mother-child relationship is certainly the deepest and most poignant one we know . . . . It is the absolute experience of our species, an organic truth as unequivocal
as the relation of the sexes to one another. Thus there is inherent in the archetype, in the collectively inherited mother-image, the same extraordinary intensity of relationship which instinctively impels the chi l d to cling to its mother.
With the passing of the years, the man grows naturally away from the mother provided, of course, that he is no longer in a condition of almost animal-like primitivity and has attained some degree of consciousness and culture-but he does not outgrow the archetype in the same natural way .
. . . I f consciousness is at all effective, conscious contents will always be overvalued to the detriment of the unconscious, and from this comes the illusion that in separating from the mother nothing has happened except that one has ceased to be the child of this individual
woman . . . . Separation from the mother is sufficient only if the archetype is included, and the same is true of separation from the father.
The development of consciousness and of free will naturally brings with it the possibility of deviating from the archetype and hence from instinct. Once the deviation sets in a dissociation between conscious and unconscious ensues, and then the activity of the unconscious begins.
This .. . takes the form of an inner, unconscious fixation which expresses itself only symptomatically, that is, indirectly.
The importance of this statement is not immediately apparent because of Jung’ s concise and rather abstract way of expressing his thought. He speaks of the separation from an individual ‘ s own parents and the psychological implications.
This separation can take place either through the growing-up process, resulting in the young person’s going away from home, undertaking work in the external world, and in course of time marrying and setting up a home of his own.
That is, the separation can be accomplished voluntarily. But if for any reason this task is shirked, then the separation w ill take place involuntarily and eventually it will befall him in the ordinary course of events, for instance when
the parents die. But psychologically, as Jung notes, this is not enough, unless at the same time the young person succeeds in separating from the archetype of parent, which corresponds to the childish desire to be cared for and loved. ~Esther Harding, THE PARENTAL IMAGE: Its Injury and Reconstruction 13-16
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
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