Jung said something disturbing about this complication. He said that when the son is introduced primarily by the mother to feeling, he will learn the female attitude toward masculinity and take a female view of his own father and of his own masculinity. He will see his father through his mother's eyes. Since the father and the mother are in competition for the affection of the son, you're not going to get a straight picture of your father out of your mother, nor will one get a straight picture of the mother out of the father.
— Robert Bly
Bly is describing a structural problem, not a personal failure — and it helps to hold it at that level rather than letting it collapse into blame. What the mother transmits is not malice but a genuinely felt world: her experience of the masculine, shaped by her own history with it. The son inherits that world before he has any independent ground to stand on. The difficulty is not that the mother is wrong, exactly, but that her view is hers — partial, relational, built out of what she needed and what disappointed her. The son who receives masculinity through that lens receives something pre-interpreted. He does not first encounter the father and then form a view; he encounters the view and then, much later, meets the father.
What Jung's observation opens — and what Bly is circling throughout the book — is the question of how that inherited interpretation ever loosens. It does not loosen through rejection of the mother; that only drives the image underground. It loosens, if it does, through encounter with the actual masculine — not the idealized or the condemned version, but whatever is really there, with its limits and its weight. The son has to develop his own disappointment, his own respect, from contact rather than inheritance.
Robert Bly·Iron John: A Book About Men·1990