The criterion of being "grown up" is that the individual is led out of the family circle and initiated into the world of the Great Life-Givers. Accordingly, puberty is a time of rebirth, and its symbolism is that of the hero who regenerates himself through fighting the dragon. All the rites characteristic of this period have the purpose of renewing the personality through a night sea journey, when the spiritual or conscious principle conquers the mother dragon, and the tie to the mother and to childhood, and also to the unconscious, is severed. The final stabilization of the ego, toilsomely achieved stage by stage, has its counterpart in the final dispatch of the mother dragon in puberty. Just as the detachment of the anima from the mother is effected in real life at this point in ontogenetic development, and the mother's importance is eclipsed by that of the soul-partner, so this time normally sees the conclusion of the fight with the mother dragon. The reborn is reborn through the father principle with which he identified himself in the initiation. He becomes the father's son without a mother, and, inasmuch as he is identical with the father, he is also the father of himself.
— Erich Neumann
Neumann is describing what he takes to be a developmental necessity — the severance, the conquest, the rebirth into a world stripped of the mother's gravity. And there is something accurate in it: something does change at puberty, something does demand a different orientation to the unconscious, and the imagery of the night sea journey is not arbitrary. But notice what the passage enacts even as it describes. The "reborn is reborn through the father principle." He becomes "the father's son without a mother." The goal of maturation is, quite literally, to arrive somewhere the mother is gone.
This is not only a developmental model. It is a wish. The ratio running beneath it is the oldest one — the one that promises that if the soul ascends far enough into spirit, into the father-principle, into logos, the mess of the matrix will no longer reach it. The mother dragon is not simply the regressive pull of infantile attachment; she is also what is wet, suffering, entangled, resistant to hierarchical resolution. To dispatch her "finally" is not integration — it is the pneumatic program dressed as heroism. What the passage cannot imagine, and what the soul's actual development tends to produce instead, is a grown person still in contact with what she guarded. The dragon is not finally dispatched. She changes her form.
Erich Neumann·The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton·2019