Mother Complex of the Son

The son’s mother complex is structurally distinct from the daughter’s because the son cannot identify with the mother across the difference of sex. Jung’s catalogue in CW 9i §162 names three typical effects — homosexuality, Don Juanism, and impotence — and one mythic limit, the Cybele-Attis ideology of “self-castration, madness, and early death” (Jung 1959). In each case the son’s libido fails to detach from the maternal source.

Because the mother is the man’s first feminine encounter, “she cannot help playing, overtly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously, upon the son’s masculinity” — and the anima crystallizes within the maternal field. Jung’s note in Aion §20 names “the enveloping, embracing, and devouring element” as the projection-making factor — the Eastern Maya, the spinning woman whose dance is illusion (Jung 1951). The son who cannot withstand the gravitational charge of the maternal archetype is, in Neumann’s terms, “swallowed up” (Neumann 1955).

Marie-Louise von Franz extends this developmentally in The Problem of the Puer Aeternus: the puer-aeternus is the son’s mother complex turned upward — flight, soaring, refusal of incarnation. The cure is the same one Jung names in Symbols of Transformation under “The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother”: the hero’s struggle to wrest libido from the source without annihilation (Jung 1952).

Relationships

• mother-complex
• puer-aeternus
• anima
• devouring-mother
• jung-symbols-transformation

Primary sources

• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959, §162)
• jung-symbols-transformation (Jung 1952, ch. VI)
• problem-of-the-puer-aeternus (von Franz 1970)