Mother Complex and the Anima

A consistent finding across CW 9i, Aion, and Symbols of Transformation: in the masculine psyche the mother-complex and the anima are not separable. The mother is the man’s first feminine encounter, and the anima crystallizes within the maternal field. Jung writes that in every masculine mother-complex, “side by side with the mother archetype, a significant role is played by the image of the man’s sexual counterpart, the anima. The mother is the first feminine being with whom the man-to-be comes in contact” (Jung 1959, CW 9i §162).

In Aion §20 Jung names the same fusion in another register: “the enveloping, embracing, and devouring element points unmistakably to the mother, that is, to the son’s relation to the real mother, to her imago, and to the woman who is to become a mother for him. His Eros is passive like a child’s; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured” (Jung 1951, CW 9ii §20). The “Spinning Woman” — Eastern Maya — names the projection-making factor as feminine in this archaic, mother-fused mode.

The implication for differentiation work: the man does not detach from the mother by analyzing the mother. He detaches by recognizing the anima as her own figure, with her own claims, distinct from the maternal ground in which she first appeared. Failure to make this distinction is one common form of the chronic mother-complex in the male — the puer who keeps falling in love with mothers (cf. von Franz 1970).

Sources

• carl-jung: the masculine mother complex is structurally entwined with the anima (CW 9i §162)
• carl-jung: the “enveloping, embracing, devouring element” of the mother fuses imago and anima (CW 9ii §20)
• marie-louise-von-franz: the puer’s serial mother-fixations are anima-projection mediated by the unresolved mother-imago (von Franz 1970)