One could say that whenever a man escapes the whole problem of relationship by a wrong kind of spiritualization, he is still in the clutches of the devouring mother, and, what is much worse, he turns all the women in his surroundings into devouring mothers. What else can happen? If he doesn't relate, he can only be eaten! That is naturally the wrong thing, but it is a kind of involuntary and automatic reaction in a woman. The more the man refuses to accept relatedness, the more she feels that she has to imprison him, catch him, eat him up, forbid him to move around. So he calls up the devouring mother in every woman, and then it is a vicious circle. He is disappointed because every woman turns out to be a devouring wolf. Then he says, "There you are! That is what I always said," and walks out on the woman. Actually, his flightiness has constellated her devouring side, and for this reason he is caught in the vicious, destructive circle again. Because he does not relate, she comes with her trap and a box to put him in. Because he has no love, he summons her power complex. So you can say that a man with that attitude towards feeling finds the devouring mother everywhere within and without.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Von Franz is describing a circuit, not a character flaw — and that distinction matters enormously. The man who spiritualizes his way out of relationship is not simply avoidant; he is running a specific promise, the one that whispers that if he ascends high enough, remains free enough, keeps the encounter light enough, he will be spared the full weight of another person. Spirit functions here as insulation. The tragedy is that insulation does not neutralize what it shields against — it activates it. Every woman in the vicinity reads the refusal correctly, at a level beneath conscious interpretation, and responds to what is actually being communicated: *you are not safe to love.* The devouring quality she then exhibits is not projection in the simple sense; it is a real response to a real withdrawal, called forth by it.
What von Franz is tracking is how the mother-wound perpetuates itself through exactly the strategy adopted to escape it. The ascent, the lightness, the refusal to be pinned — these feel like freedom and function as re-capture. The circle closes because the logic was never going to open it. No amount of elevation dissolves the gravitational fact of another person standing in front of you asking to be met. The puer discovers the devouring mother everywhere because he carried the conditions of her appearance with him from the beginning.
Marie-Louise von Franz·Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood·1970