Breaking Dependency on the Symbolic Mother: Marie-Louise von Franz on How It Was Traditionally Done

Would you tell us some of the rituals which primitive societies had to break that  dependency on the symbolic mother? All the big transitions in life, in all societies,  have been accompanied by what Van Gennep calls "rites of passage," rituals of transition to help  people make the step over the threshold. Now, the most famous one, which has been studied mostly  by ethnologists, is the ritual of initiation, where the young men are initiated into  the secrets of the tribal law and into the secrets of sexuality.

They have to  leave their mothers and their homes; they are secluded in the bush, symbolically  devoured by a maternal monster, and then time, they are instructed in the secret law  of the tribe and the religious traditions. If a young man has undergone this ritual  of transition, then he is afterward a full member of the tribe; he is a man. In many  tribes, they say of those who are afraid or, for some reason, not initiated, "He is not  initiated, he is an animal," meaning he has remained completely unconscious—he has  not really made the step to being human.

Are there any societies where  there is no rite of passage, where men remain in that state of dependency  on the mother, where they stay animals? Well, we do not have many sociological  matriarchies, but I once read a book about a South American Indian tribe where there was an actual  sociological, not religious, matriarchy. There, the women were happy, fat, and ordering the  men about, and the men were lean, submissive, nervous creatures who planted the fields and did  the work for the women—kind of porter figures.

Positively, the world of drives, sexuality, and  earthly happiness was blossoming; negatively, there was no spirit whatsoever—a world of  total stupidity, so to speak, of only living very agreeably but not thinking or having any  ideas or spiritual realizations at all. The men, accordingly, were unhappy, submissive,  and rather poor creatures. But generally, these things balance back and forth. 

There will be another generation of men who will protest and try to  restore things to a middle position. It seems the ideal is not that either  the men dominate or the women dominate, but that there is a kind of equal  relationship, a balance of opposites. And this demon woman, this devouring mother, how does she come together in a  man's unconscious in the first place?

The devouring mother, on a personal level, would  be represented by many women who are over-caring for their children, trying to keep them back  from life. It begins with being anxious: "Don’t do that, it’s dangerous; don’t go play with  the boys, you could fall and get hurt. " By trying to keep the children too much in their clutches,  we speak of devouring mothers.

Such mothers also have trouble when their sons or daughters begin  to date. They may say, "I’m very much wishing you would marry, and I’d be glad, but that girl  you brought home—no, no, she’s not the right one for you," or, "That boy isn’t right for you. "  They try to keep their children in their clutches.

But that is only the foreground of a  woman who has exaggerated her maternal protective qualities. There’s also  an archetypal background. When a man idealizes a woman and projects his anima  onto her, he gives her tremendous power.

Why is it dangerous for women to  identify with that projection, or like Marilyn Monroe, to become the  love goddess and live out men's desires? As we know from the life history of Marilyn  Monroe, she did not live her own life. She acted out the anima of men.

Generally, there  are women—and this is ultimately due to the power drive—who discover that if they are  beautiful, they can exert a magic power over men. Then they take to acting the anima  all the time. We sometimes talk about anima women—these are women who find out how to act  the anima to men.

But because this is not love, but pure power drive, it is destructive to both  the men and the women. It’s using the guise of love for worldly power. Such women want to rule  men; they want men to be all at their feet.

Naturally, they are unhappy  because they don’t feel loved. I remember when I was young, sometimes  when a man projected his anima onto me and was pursuing me, giving me presents  and so on, I had the distinct feeling, "But that fellow doesn’t know me at all. He’s  chasing an image.

" I wanted to look back and ask, "Who is he chasing? It’s not me, not me  as a human being. " He doesn’t see me.

So, if a woman falls into the trap of acting out the  anima, she can exert tremendous power over men, but at the same time, inwardly, she’s frustrated  because those men love her image—they don’t love her. So, she’s really very lonely underneath, and  that’s what caught up with poor Marilyn Monroe. Does this woman who’s playing  the anima just fulfill a man’s needs—anything he wants, she  does?

Or how does it work? It works as long as it is an adventure  or a love affair, then she fills out his needs. But when he has to live with her—if  he marries her and has to live with her in everyday life—then comes the trouble.

She will  play the anima to all the other men as well, and he’ll not like that. Secondly, he’ll suddenly  discover that underneath that beautiful mask, there is no human being. There’s no warmth,  no possibility of a human relationship.

So, to marry an anima figure is most  disappointing. These women who play that role are called by the French  *femmes fatales*—women who ruin men. If a man has this mother complex, then  how does he experience women in real life?

If a man has a too-close tie to his  mother, especially a positive one, then he tends to idealize women. He sees in  every woman the Beatrice of Dante, so to speak, or the Virgin Mary. Such men cannot approach  women sexually or in ordinary human life, or they have a split anima situation.

They admire  a lofty, beautiful girl from afar and satisfy their sexual desires with a prostitute, unable  to bring the two ends together. They cannot put the princess and the prostitute together, so  to speak, in their psyche. This is generally due to a too-close tie to the mother in the  man.

He has to free himself from the mother. That’s why, for instance, in one of the  famous examples of such a princess in the tower—Rapunzel—she’s imprisoned by a witch.  It’s the mother figure behind the scene that brings forth the constellation, and both lovers  cannot meet on Earth.

Only when Rapunzel comes down to Earth, and he has wandered around in the  desert in misery and pain, can they finally meet. Some men find their devouring mother out in life, in corporations, universities,  or institutions of some kind. I think one element of the devouring mother  archetype is what one could call inertia.

All big institutions have the tendency toward  a certain inertia. They are not flexible, and therefore, they are, so to speak,  material blocks—situations that are just so. As far as men have a mother complex, they  feel.

. . well, universities were even called "Alma Mater," the benevolent mother, in the past. 

We see that whenever you have an institution, people tend to be infantile and to suck that  institution for money, asking for loans and stipends, using it as a benevolent mother. So,  the mother can easily be projected onto a plant, a big organization, or an institute or university.  They even have feminine names.

In former times, they represented the *alma mater* as a fat  woman, and America is still represented by a fat woman holding up a light—at least she’s  holding up a light, which makes it a bit better. But is there a light on top of that fat old woman? Everywhere I look, I see the principle  of mother-relatedness breaking down.

The institutions that once contained  us—the church, family, marriage, even the economy—no longer provide that  security. Where do you see the light? Well, I would say, through the panicky feeling  of the danger of nuclear war, for instance, you see that people—and through the sudden  realization of the problem of pollution—there has been a basic change in many, mainly the young  people.

But also, I think my generation was fully aware that we will have to change our way of life  in some way. There is still a lot of quarreling and discussing how and why and in what form, but  I think everybody agrees we have to find some way to live peacefully together and not destroy each  other by nuclear war. We have to deal differently with nature than we have done up till now, and  we have to change our too-rational mode of life.

I would say that is going through. If  you think of the book *The Aquarian Conspiracy* by Marilyn Ferguson, you see  that there is—this book only gives the absolute surface of things, the only superficial  aspect—but you see that everywhere there is a parallel change of attitude, which, in German, one  expresses as *zeitgeist*, the spirit of the time. In history, this is well known.

For instance,  if you look at the art of the 13th century compared to Renaissance art, you see how  much the spirit of the time changed in those few hundred years. Suddenly, as  if collectively, the whole of mankind had a different outlook. In medieval art,  everything is concentrated on the divine— there’s no perspective, no landscape, no  representation of animals, trees, or worldly things.

Then, in the Renaissance, there’s suddenly  a switch to covering nature, the human body, the perspective of space, and different building  styles. Now, that is a very striking change, which everybody knows in retrospect, but such a striking  change seems to me to be constellated again today. That’s why naturally, keenly interested  intellectual people cannot avoid asking the question, "What is the change  of our time?

What is our situation, especially under the threat of nuclear war,  which preoccupies practically everyone’s mind? " There is a kind of desperate look at the  sky, asking, "What does it mean? How could we change?

What is coming? What is ahead of  us? " This kind of anxiety is everywhere.

We are still living in an age, or at the end of  an age, where the opposites—Jupiter and Saturn, good and evil, spirit and instinctual physical  drive—are in great opposition. We are torn apart by opposites, which in political terms would  amount to any minute having a war. On one side of the Iron Curtain, you have an anti-Christian  principle ruling, and on the other side, still a Christian outlook.

The Iron  Curtain is dividing Jupiter and Saturn, so to speak. That’s only the earthly image of what is happening on a much deeper level in  the human psyche of every individual.