Through a Jungian Lens

Magical Other – What is love?

Yes, what then is love? I know it exists and that it blossoms and often withers turning into bitterness, sorrow and even sometimes hatred. I that magical attraction in others, and even see it in birds and animals. And most importantly, I have lived the experience of love, and still continue to find myself held within its bounds. Is it simply chemistry? Or, is there more to it? Sadly, I don’t have the answers but I do know that love exists.

For a man, it is confusing, this thing called love. Perhaps it needs to be called lust, or need, or dominance, or perhaps simply just love. Because of my history as a child, and because of everyman’s history as a child, the Mother creeps in to claim her share, to voice her approval and disapproval, to give or withhold as we enter into relationship with a woman once we have left childhood behind. The mother-complex influences us, directs us, pulls at us within our unconscious. For us as men, we simply find ourselves fascinated by a particular woman, a stranger or someone we have seen often, but yet have never really seen. We don’t see the energy of a mother-complex at work. For us as men, we simply fall in love. We don’t need explanations or reasons. It’s simple. We fall in love.

“We say we love, yet we know not what it is. We say we love many things in many different ways. We borrow words from the Greeks who sought to differentiate these states of desire: eros, caritas, philos, storgé, agape. And yet we sense the shadowy beast behind our purest motives.” [Hollis, The Eden Project, p. 30]

But, it turns out not to be so simple after all. After time has allowed us to discover the real person beneath the fascination, with in turn that person discovering the real man beneath her fascination, we are faced with dealing with loss, real loss that demands that we go through the stages of grieving for what has been lost, that Magical Other. For some, time and effort allows a new kind of love to emerge. For others, the grieving becomes destructive of the relationship creating even more grief. And for more than a few, the desire for answers to pull us out of depression, dysfunction and confusion sends us into therapy. We need to find ourselves and know ourselves as we find ourselves lost in some dank and dark swamp. With loss of the Magical Other, we are left questioning our own identity. If only we would know then perhaps we could again be in relation with our Magical Other.

“So we bring ourselves to relationship. With scant knowledge of ourselves, we seek our identity in the mirror of the Other, as we once did in Mom and Dad. With all the wounds of this perilous condition we seek a safe harbor in that Other who, alas, is seeking the same in us. With the thousand adaptive strategies derived from the fortuities of fated time, fated place, fated Others, we contaminate the frail present with the germs of the past.” [p. 32]

Hang on, there is hope. There is a way out of the swamp.

Relationship as dance.

A child, such as the type of child that I was who either adopted or was thrust into the role of mediator or go-between within the family, internalizes the idea of being the good child of the family, one who carries the shadow, the families secrets as a personal burden. I found out early that I was different from everyone else. Others could be messy, but my being special carried the responsibility of cleaning up the mess. Rather than going to a parent, siblings came to me with their problems for that is what my parents did. Not knowing any better, I took on that burden rather than shouting out, “But I’m just a kid!” That’s the problem with magical thinking. Powerless to avoid the burden, one comes to believe that this is the way it is supposed to be, that this is the kind of person one really is.

Typically, a child that takes on this role will engage in relationships with others in school and in play that reinforces the patterns.

“Thus the problem of powerlessness subtly works its way through the life of an individual. One may even go so far as to choose – if that is the right word, for it is surely and unconscious choice – to have relationships only with weak or wounded persons so that the template of care-giving is served.” [Hollis, The Eden Project, p. 25]

When one becomes of an age, one finds that one is being attracted to some young women, but not others. As I reached that age in high school, I found that my female friends as well as my male friends were the obviously wounded souls, those who were rejected by their peers – consciously and unconsciously rejected. Of course, I didn’t understand what was going on within me and within them; all I knew was that with these friends, I was important. I held their trust, their pain, their secrets without divulging anything from my own past. All that existed was the fact that I was there for them as I was for my siblings and my mother.

As a male leaves childhood and youth, there is usually also a time for leaving the home and his mother. However, regardless of the distance travelled from home, and mother, a male can never leave his mother-complex. The complex buries itself deep into the psyche, into the unconscious where it lays dormant. And when does it show up? Typically, when one falls in love. One finally meets that one special person who allows all the self-beliefs, conscious and unconscious, to be held by her, held unconsciously. Jung calls this the dance of projection and hooks, a dance that goes in both directions at the same time. One doesn’t fall in love by accident. Somehow, the psyche senses the presence of a psyche with which it can mate, that is, have a hook which is prepared to catch certain kinds of projects. A man needing to be in control, finds a woman who needs to be fathered. A man needing to be nurtured, finds a woman who needs to mother. It isn’t as simple as all of that – but then again, it is really that simple if one could just set aside thinking and the illusion that one is really in control of the self.

“Many therapists will recognize this common pattern in a relationship, a ballet of approach and avoidance, where one partner needs reassuring closeness and the other is more comfortable with distance. One draws close, seeking assurance, while the other, feeling invaded, draws back, raising the anxiety level of both. In the latter’s need for protective space is the desire to do what the child could not do, that is, keep the intrusive Other at bay and preserve a fragile psychic integrity.” [pp 25-26]

It sounds kind of messy. And I know from living this dance, that it is very messy indeed. At some point, someone has to wake up and see what is going on in the relationship. And when that happens, the relationship as it was, is no more. I quickly must say that it isn’t the end of the relationship, necessarily, it is the end of the relationship as an unconscious ballet of approach and retreat.

A Great Kiskadee in flight

“. . . the capacity to suffer wounding and learn to adapt to it is crucial to the development of self. . . We have wounds, and the clusters of energy that accompany them, because we have a life history. The deeper question is whether we have the wounds or they have us.” [Hollis, The Eden Project. p. 21]

The wounding – are we victims of our woundings; or, do we use these woundings to craft the unique individual we are?

So, getting back to my own story which is not so unique as all men have a story that includes a mother-complex, it is important to note that how a man is wounded has a huge impact on how one responds to life and to relationships to life, particularly to the women in our lives. Our mother-complexes exist because we have parental imagos, that is, we all have images of parent – mother and father – regardless of ever having had a particular relationship with one’s unique biological parents. Present or absent, a relationship exists within the psyche. Positive or negative experience, presence or absence, too muchness or not enoughness – all help to colour that image we unconsciously build of parent and of our future relationships to both men and women.

“Children are driven unconsciously in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything that was left unfulfilled in the lives of their parents.” [Jung, CW 17, par 328]

To understand the unconscious image we build of mother and father, we not only include our experiences, but as Jung tells us. we have all the unconscious inheritances of those images within those we engage in familial relationships. The unlived lives of parents influence their way of being with their children. All this and more all mixes together in an unconscious mess, a shadow image that becomes our foundation for what it is to be mother and father. As well, it serves to create the roadmap for relationship.

My story of being a child to a woman who was also wounded as were her parents allows me, at this point in my life to understand and accept better the wounds inflicted unconsciously. That said, I was a child.

“If I have found myself essentially powerless against the Other, and what child has not, then how am I to comport myself in order to manage this distress? If I have routinely been invaded by abuse, verbal, emotional, sexual, or have more commonly been at the mercy of the moods and emotional vagaries of the parent, so I am inclined to identify with the Other.” [Hollis, p. 23]

Identifying with the Other, in my case my mother. James Hollis, in his book, The Eden Project, exposes the raw truths and how response to wounding makes its way into relationships and life in general. With abuse, one either learns to be controlling or to be pleasing. I fell into the pleasing mode of managing my response to abuse.

“Since the child felt powerless in the face of the Other who was yet the source of well-being, so it learns to be pleasing, to be mollifying or overly responsible for the well being of others. What is called co-dependence is one such anxiety management strategy. If I am responsive to the needs of the Other, the, possibly, the Other might be there for me. “ [Hollis, p. 24]

As I read these words, I was shocked. How had Hollis got inside my head? These words exposed me, left me feeling naked and vulnerable. I thought, “Now everyone will know the truth about me, that I am a defect, not really a caring person at all, but someone who acts this way simply to keep the darkness of abuse barricaded. As the eldest child, I was the one who brothers and sisters would go to for help. I became the alter parent. I took care of my mother’s needs and found that what I did was never enough as more and more was needed. As an adult I became the trusted “go-to” teacher, the one to whom others would tell their sad tales knowing that I cared and would support them. I was the mediator between students, between staff and even for others in the community. I took it all on yet somehow knew that it was never enough. My childhood survival tactics translated into the tactics that I would use as an adult. And, as to be discovered in another post, into the tactics that I would bring to relationship to the woman who became my Magical Other.”

The Great Mother as the Mother Church

I am ready to go on with what I had begun last day, looking at how my Mother Complex makes its appearance in my life and how it influences my relationships. Though I do find myself going on and on about the technical stuff, the ideas and words that I have learned through my study of Jungian psychology, I do so so that as I present my case study, I will have in place a foundation to understand and present the case study. As expected, any case study must begin with the child and the mother. Since it is the child who will have the mother complex, the central focus shifts to that child, through the lens that the child uses to decode and understand the world. Now, to be fair, one has to realise that a child is just a child and does not have the mental faculties needed to objectively analyse the world. So, what will emerge through the lens of a child is just a version of reality. Of course, that version of reality does have its roots in the experiences that the child has in relationship to his or her mother, and for this particular case, the relationship that I had with my biological mother.

For the next part, I will relate some of the known story. My mother was a young teenager when she became pregnant with me which resulted in her having to get married to my father before I was born. Becoming pregnant resulted in her being tossed from her home, a quiet Protestant anglophone home, and having to learn to live in a boisterous and rowdy French Catholic home. She didn’t know the language or the culture. She had been rejected and thrown away by her own culture, her own father (and mother). Not long after the marriage, my father left to chase his dreams in the wild west, hoping to become rich and famous in the process. The scene isn’t a pretty one in which a young teen-aged girl/woman could feel confident and positive. So how does this find its way into the psyche of a young infant?

“. . . the infant reads the world in other ways to figure out what it is saying. As early as six weeks, infants have been fount to mirror their parent’s face, emulating fear, depression, joy and so on. In this process, the child not only seeks its own grounding in some elemental reality, but also assumes the emotional reality of the Other. . . “ [Hollis, The Eden Project, p. 19]

My mother was depressed, often withdrawn into herself as the world swirled around her in what she could only see as chaos. It’s not the best way to bring a child into the universe, but as someone important to me is prone to say, “Shit happens. Get over it and get on with life.” Life indeed goes on and the process of building a mother-son relationship continues. Now, it is important to understand that children are prone to magical thinking, thinking that not grounded in reasonably in reality. This magical thinking sees the child interpreting the world as centred around him or herself. I will give an example: Dad went away and left Mom alone and sad – something I must of done or said or not done or not said made Dad leave Mom. The child is not old enough to be able to understand the bigger picture, but has no doubt that since he or she is at the centre, he or she must have caused the negative result. But time, changes all of this. An infant becomes a toddler and then a child ready to participate in a larger world, larger than the hot-house of the biological family.

“In addition . . . there are other experiences that have a huge impact on future relationships . . . the wounds of too-muchness and not-enoughness, engulfment or abandonment.” [p. 20]

It seems that no matter what we do as parents, what children experience is some sort of wounding of the psyche.  The best that we can hope for as parents is to be “good enough.” Perhaps good enough is good enough. Was my mother good enough? Before I answer that question, I do have to say that she, like every woman that becomes a mother, could only do as well as she could. It is a rare, extremely rare woman who doesn’t do her best possible to be a mother. Now, as I experienced and interpreted being mothered, I would have to say it wasn’t good enough. I don’t blame her. She did her best.

“But it is nonetheless inevitable that the prime source of wounding to the child will be the parents. Since we are human, our less than perfect nature will necessarily impinge upon the child and leave its imprint forever.” [p. 20]

And it is this imprint that we carry with us that will influence our relationships to men and women in our adult lives. And, it is vital that wounding does occur as it is through wounding that one is pushed to learn and adapt and survive and perhaps even thrive as individuals. So, I don’t blame my mother. But that said, there is still the issue of a mother-complex to uncover.

Caught between the ephemeral energies of masculine and feminine.

“As no popular culture has built itself upon the idea of romance more than twentieth-century [and 21st] America has, so no one has founded itself on more shifting ground. A necessary corollary, then, is that no culture has more set itself up for disappointment than the one which seeks its affirmation in projection, illusion and delusion.” [Hollis, The Eden Project, p. 45]

As I have said a number of times before, Romantic love for a man is projected love, a love based on one’s response to one’s personal mother and to the activated anima archetype that represents the feminine, the archetypal lover and mother and whore. Beneath this gossamer web of projection lies a real woman who either accepts and joins in the fantasy of Romantic love, or rejects it and walks on in her life in search of her Magical Other. When all aligns as it will and should, two souls are joined as one, similar to the images of sun and moon together or the yin-yang which has the two in a perpetual dance always reaching and retreating at the same time.

This image has blurred edges that face each other, barely discernible faces in dialogue with each other while the self lives oblivious to the presences of shadow and anima, the unknown masculine and feminine archetypes that pull and push. With time, the pushing and pulling forces a man to begin to question himself and his Magical Other who is also suffering the tidal forces of her shadow and her animus. First one, then the other feels betrayed as their Magical Other becomes less magical and more human.

 ”the public face that hides a thousand cuts. For how many couples grow roughly in the same direction at roughly the same pace? Seldom do both perceive life at the same level of consciousness or possess equal capacity to process difficult matters. More often, one partner has outgrown the unconscious premises of the relationship while the other clings to the original implicit bargain. The former feels frustrated, depressed; the other feels anxious and controlling. My experience has been that most often it is the woman who seeks change and growth.” [Hollis, pp 44-45]

And whether it is the man or the woman, the sense of being alone again, like this young palm tree above, is brings the pain of loss; a loss of the Magical Other and often a corresponding loss of the marital partner. When the marriage holds together in spite of the loss, the face of the marriage rarely betrays that loss. Rarely does the public face of a marriage match the psychic reality beneath that surface when projections fall away revealing the scarred, scared and complexed individuals that have been joined in the marriage.

Magical Other captured within the body of a woman I love.

“Everything, everything, seems to ride on this thing called love. We love nature, we make love, we fall into and out of it, we pursue love and ask it to save us. Romantic love, by which we mean that élan, that heightened ardor, that intense yearning for the Beloved, that frantic grappling, that profound sorrow when the Beloved is lost, that anxious uncertainty about the fixity of the Other – all this and more is both the greatest source of energy and the chief narcotic of our time . . . one may even suggest that romantic love has replaced institutional religion as the greatest motive power and influence in our lives.” [Hollis, The Eden Project, pp 42-43]

I met this woman more than forty years ago. It was love at first sight for both of us, the classical tale of Romantic Love between two strangers who cross each other’s life paths not even searching for love. Whatever plans and dreams that had been in placed disappeared as all of our energy shifted, all of our individual histories vanished as if by magic. Hollis has it right, for both of us, Romantic Love was our ticket of escape from childhood and youth woundings. We looked to Romantic Love to save us from our own histories, to open a doorway into a Garden of Eden where love is everything, and love would last rever.

Tristan and Isolde – Edmund Blair Leighton

Unlike the tragic stories of Tristan and Isolde/Iseult, or Romeo and Juliet, My love and I survived our unconscious submission and submersion into Romantic Love. Like all who fall in love and get married, there was (and remains) an implicit contract that this love must last and stay as the foundation of the marriage. The differences that brought us together, a magnetic attraction of opposites, and not just opposites in terms of gender, were not seen. Each of us was caught in private projections which kept the real person hidden beneath a veil.

“Many marriages simply evolve beyond the implicit terms of the invisible contract. Whatever complexes or programmed ideas of self and Other may have inspired the marriage, the psyche has moved to another place. It is not so much that people fall out of love, but that the original controlling ideas have waned in favor of others – or the complex has decided that the Other cannot meet the expectations of the original agenda.” [Hollis, p. 44]

So this is the answer which perhaps explains why more than forty years later – the psyche has stayed in the same place for both of us. In spite of being different in just about everything that can be compared, we still meet each other’s expectations of Other. That and the fact that in bumping into each other over and over again, we dared face the realities and contradictions which forced us to continually re-evaluate the Other. The shock and pain of withdrawing projections didn’t result in a withdrawal of love. Rather, the withdrawal of projections allowed us to discover newness in each other. With all this newness, we remain awed by the magic of the other, still looking to each other for salvation, for safety, for love.

Eros, god of love and desire and the yearning for “Other”

“Jungians view the psyche not as a monarchy, as the ego would have it, ore even as a central intelligence agency, bur rather as an entity that is polyfaceted, polymorphous, polysemous, polytheistic. So there are many voices, many intimations, many directives, some heard, some not, but all persuasive. Which voice is mine? ego asks. All of them, Self insists. . . .

So we bring ourselves to relationship. With scant knowledge of ourselves, we seek our identity in the mirror of the Other, as we once did in Mom and Dad. With all the wounds of this perilous condition we seek a safe harbor in that Other who, alas, is seeking the same in us.” [Hollis, The Eden Project, p. 32]

As I am a man, I am no different from other humans who seek to be in a relationship with a significant Other. Like most men, I found that significant Other, a woman. It isn’t necessary for this significant Other to be a woman, nor is significant other limited to one other person. If I go back to what Hollis is saying, this significant Other holds the mirror in which we “seek our identity.” That said, this yearning for “Other” in whom we find the needed mirror in which to find ourselves is rooted in eros – the desire for connection. And like other men, I filled this significant Other with my projections, all unconsciously, and saw in this woman my soulmate, my Magical Other.

I fell in love with this woman whom I had never seen before. It was love at first sight. What did I see in this stranger who had captured my heart and soul only moments after we had met? What did she see in me to have the same life-altering tumble into love? That was a question never asked then nor for so many years to follow. Both of us fell in love, became entranced, almost bewitched with the power of Eros. We both knew in an instant that this Other was the One who would answer our unknown and unasked questions. She became my Magical Other.

“The other great false idea that drives humankind is the fantasy of the Magical Other, the notion that there is someone out there who is right for us, will make our lives work, a soul-mate who will repair the ravages of our personal history, one who will be there for us, who will read our minds, know what we want and meet those deepest needs; a good parent who will protect us from suffering and, if we are lucky, spare us the perilous journey of individuation.”   [Hollis, The Eden Project, p. 327]

Of course, when it happens to you, you don’t take time to think it over. Remember, it is an unconscious response rooted deep in our personal histories, our complexes, our woundings, and our unconscious needs. So, now that I have finally recognized what happened more than forty years ago, what next?

The mystery of a woman doesn’t get resolved with time.

She knows I am taking her photo and she knows that she is loved regardless of reason. Reason doesn’t seem to enter into this at all. If anything, reason interferes with any hope of understanding. I married this woman 42 years ago. The journey of a marriage, of my marriage, is a curious journey that teaches so much about self and about other. As I mentioned earlier, this series will turn often to James Hollis’ book, The Eden Project. I bring his words here:

“A marriage vow is a guarantee of nothing certain, but it purports to be an expression of intentionality which is serious. long term and in depth. One of the implicit demands of marriage is that issues are to be faced and worked through, rather than evaded.” [p. 13]

This sounds rather straight forward and filled with common sense. But unsaid in the statement is the fact that much of what needs to be faced is not even recognised by either party. So much of what takes place and causes disruption and disconnect lays beneath the surface in the unconscious contents of both individuals as well as the dialogue of unconscious between the two.  This makes the task much, much more difficult. Hollis goes on to say:

“the quality of all of our relationships is a direct function of our relationship to ourselves. Since much of our relationship to ourselves  operates at an unconscious level, most of the drama and dynamics of our relationships to others and the transcendent is expressive or our own personal psychology. The best thing we can do for our relationships with others, and with the transcendent, then, is to render our relationship with ourselves more conscious.” [p. 13]

And this is where it gets most difficult, especially for me. It takes a lot of rearrangement of my thinking to accept that to do right for my marriage, I must devote a lot of energy to understanding myself. My patterns and habits have always focused on devoting time and energy to understanding my partner (not a great lot of success there since she still is a mystery woman to me) and to using every trick in the book to figure out what is needed and wanted (often contradictory). I function best as a caretaker, as a giver. Spending time on my own needs has been difficult, though necessary during the past few years as I am always feeling guilty about stealing time and energy from my partner, from the marriage.

I know that I am not alone in responding like this; many of us are tired of all the “me, me, me” that we have heard from other mouths. Most of that “me, me, me” has not been about doing the work of “I” or “self;” rather it is all about trying to satisfy needs and wants for which we don’t have the foggiest notion. Trying to feed the “me” is a losing proposition for we mistakenly take the desires and instincts at face value. The extra food, that more expensive car, the next husband or wife is not really about what had been there before being wrong or insufficient. All this wanting is a desperate act of trying to fill an emptiness within ourselves, an emptiness that we download onto others and for which we blame others. So, I have to re-think this business of getting to know the ins and outs of who I am, my psychology if I am to escape that forever repeating cycle of failure.

I look again at the photo of my wife and smile. The work behind and ahead is worth all of it.

Mothers and sons – Cosmic womb

“Through the bloodweb of our mothers, we start out connected to the pulse and rhythm of the cosmos. And then we are torn from the Mother, separated from the cosmos, separated from the gods, separated forever.” (Hollis, The Eden Project, p. 11)

Beginnings – we could easily get lost in the debate of which came first, a man or a woman without ever arriving at a satisfactory answer. For me, and for all humans, our first contact is with the woman, our mother. It is a contact that began in the womb. The relationship was physical and psychologically unconscious for each of us within the womb. We had no sense of self, no sense of separation, no sense of other. It was all one.

And then I, and you, were born. Our births began with a separation from our mothers. The cosmos within which we existed pushed us out. That initial universe died for us. The pulse and the rhythms vanished. Unconsciously, as we enter into a new universe in which we will again become engaged in relationship, we feel afraid. We have already learned loss and abandonment.

For me, like for all men, mother became the new centre of the cosmos. As we grew to sense that we were separate beings, mother became a magical being, an omnipotent being. Mother  became our magical other.

Man in the moon - son in the mother

I have been spending a lot of time going over and over James Hollis’ little book called The Eden Project and have been fascinated at that quest to return to the Garden of Eden, that place before consciousness that as humans we somehow project onto our significant others. Of course, as a man, I look at this dynamic and understand it viscerally as a return to womb, not the physical womb of mother, but the womb of soul that is embodied by the Great Mother.  I realise that I, as a man that carries this unconscious desire to connect with and be subsumed in soul gets played out in my relationship with my wife. Of course, there is a lot of magic in this and therein lies the biggest danger, disappearing into this web of magic so that I forget who I am and who my wife is.

Following the thread of the quest for wholeness that is the theme of Hollis’ book, I turned to James Hillman’s book, Senex & Puer in hopes of perhaps finding something there that would shed a little more light on the topic. I had expected to find something of clarity but found instead a whole new arena of confusion and messiness to consider, that of the larger nature of the Great Mother:

“We are so used to assuming that the some of the great mother appears as a beautiful ineffectual who has laid his testicles on her altar and nourishes her soul with his blood, and we are used to believing that the hero pattern leads away from her, that we have lost sight of the role of the Great Goddess in what is closest to us: our ego-formation. The adapted ego of reality is in her “yoke,” a meaning of Hera, just as the words hero and Hera are taken by many scholars to be cognate. When outer life or inner life is conceived as a contest for light, an arena of struggles, success versus failure, coping versus collapse, work versus sleep, pleasure vesus love, then we are children of Hera. And the ego that results is the mother-complex in a jockstrap.” (Hillman, Senex and Puer, p 141)

The Eden Project thus takes on a deeper layer for me, one that goes beyond relationship and projections, a mythological level that defies neat and clean answers.