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Daimon-Lover

Daimon-Lover

The daimon-lover is Marion Woodman’s name for the malignant father-lover complex in a woman whose early somatic bonding with the mother has failed. Donald Kalsched preserves Woodman’s most explicit formulation: “at the core of that father-lover complex is the father-god whom she worships and at the same time hates because on some level she knows he is luring her away from her own life. Whether she worships him or hates him makes no difference, because in either case she is bound to him with no energy going into finding out who she herself is. So long as she can fantasize her love, she identifies with the positive side of the father-god; once the fantasy is crushed, however, she has no ego to sustain her and she swings to the opposite pole where she experiences annihilation in the arms of the god who has turned against her” (Woodman 1982, p. 136).

The structure is a self-care system in donald-kalsched‘s sense — an archetypal defense that protects what little self survived early relational injury by spiritualizing and sexualizing the woman’s “deeper chthonic nature” (Kalsched 1996). It is the inner figure that stands between a woman and any actual man in the outer world. In Woodman’s clinical reading the daimon-lover is the affective spine of addiction-as-distorted-religion: the longed-for divine partner the addict pursues in food, in alcohol, in the perfect lover, in the dream of perfection that cannot be filled in matter because the metaphor at its root is spiritual.

The daimon-lover stands beside Linda Leonard’s “perverted old man” and clarissa-pinkola-estes‘s “innate predator” as the feminine-side elaboration of an archetypal pattern that the wider post-Jungian literature also names the ghostly-lover and the natural-predator.

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