Happy Devouring Mother's Day
https://bridgie.substack.com/p/happy-de ... rs-day?s=rhttps://twitter.com/bridgietherease/sta ... 7391296514 Oedipa Maas 19 hr ago
With the leak of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, made public just in time for Mother’s Day, complexes about the feminine are on lurid display all over social media. Many others are doing a fine job covering the material effects of abortion policy, but what are its broad psychological effects, particularly on the archetypal patterns people use to make sense of the world?
I’m going to use some of Carl Jung’s terminology and ideas, but I always hesitate to call anything “Jungian” — he just provides some of the most useful vocabulary and framing around this psychological patterning. One thing I especially value about his approach is a relative neutrality toward these living images, and when I speak of dark feminine archetypes, I don’t exactly intend this in a judgmental sense. People consider them dark for a reason, but every archetype has a shadow aspect and both must be taken together in order to see things as they are in reality, without repressing these aspects into the unconscious where they can run roughshod without supervision and dangerously affect our unconscious behaviors and attitudes.
One of his most useful and enduring concepts is the anima, a man’s unconscious feminine aspect; in women, the corresponding archetype is the unconscious masculine animus. The way he relates to this aspect will pattern his relations not just with women, but with his very ability to experience his own feelings, intuitions, and spirituality. Among other things, it is heavily influenced by the images formed in childhood by his female relatives, most particularly his mother.
What psychological effect does it have on a woman’s children when they are confronted with the idea of abortion when they are young and still forming these images? It brings children into contact with a dark feminine archetype which was previously only explored at that age through fairy tales about evil witches and stepmothers. Young girls’ identification with the mother creates a different effect than for young boys; girls identify with the mother and understand that this is their future. If their mother centers this practice in her political and even emotional life, then it must be of vital importance to them, too. But for young boys, the effect is much broader and impacts their entire idea of the feminine, not just their ideas of motherhood.
https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/15234893 ... ame=mediumJung sketched out four rough stages of anima development in men, referred to as Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia. In the Eve stage, a man relates to women solely as an object of desire. For a child, that desire is for love, nourishment, and protection from the mother; as they grow older, the desire shifts to others and moves into base sexuality and fertilization. In the Helen stage, as in Helen of Troy, a man relates to women as capable agents who may lack virtue, but demonstrate worldliness, skill, and cunning. In the Mary stage, women become spiritualized — not just mothers as in the Eve stage, but sacred in this role, capable of attaining virtue and righteousness. Finally, in the Sophia stage, a man is able to see women as having wisdom, being equal and fully human, possessing both positive and negative qualities just as he does, not as any kind of object. There are four equivalent stages of animus development in women as well, moving similarly from base physicality to worldliness to spirituality to wholeness and wisdom.
These stages are not exactly intended to reflect a man’s opinion about women as they exist in the world, though they probably do; rather, they color his perception of every woman he meets as he projects this image onto her. If he is unconscious of this, he responds not so much to her personally, but to her degree of congruence with that figure. A man whose anima image is closer to Eve will simply not notice traits of women that fall outside of his anima image, and he will largely relate to them within those confines. These archetypes don’t only influence his relation to women, but also to his feeling and intuition, personality functions which are associated with femininity. Both are necessary functions for a whole person, just as thinking and sensing are for a woman, but a man who associates them with a lower or darker anima image may not be able to access them productively in his own life or may even be at odds with them in a way that harms him and cuts him off from vital aspects of himself.
However, these named stages may be slightly misleading in that they are largely positive. As Jung’s colleague Marie Louise von Franz put it, “every personification of the unconscious — the shadow, the anima, the animus, and the Self — has both a light and a dark aspect.... They can bring life-giving development and creativeness to the personality, or they can cause petrification and physical death.” A young child who hears his mother passionately speaking in defense of her pro-choice abortion rights may be prematurely brought into contact with the dark aspect of the mother, and this can have serious effects on the way he relates to women for the rest of his life.
The dark mother archetype has plenty of representation in fairy tale, mythology, and religion. In Hinduism the goddess Kali is the personification of this image, frequently depicted holding a severed head, deadly weapons, chalices of blood, etc. Just like many other gods and goddesses whose power comes from the mystery of death — psychopomp figures like Óðinn, Anubis, or Hermes — she is not to be taken as a purely evil figure in that religious context, but as a figure that transcends and thus has power over the boundary between life and death. More straightforwardly, this dark feminine often takes form as the “evil witch” in European fairy tales: she lures children into her hut and bakes them in ovens, as in Hansel and Gretel. In Snow White, she is the evil stepmother (though in some early versions she is actually the girl’s biological mother), driven by her jealousy of youth and fear of aging and death to destroy her daughter.
But the simultaneous appearance of that power over death with the mother archetype is much more uncomfortable for most than when it appears in the context of a father. People tend to be more accustomed to men exercising the power to mete out death and think of the feminine solely as producing life. Óðinn*,* after all, is both the Allfather and the chooser of the slain. But of course both of these contain their own opposites: the feminine power to create life gives a woman agency in its use, and the masculine power to cause death grants a creative power to influence what takes the place of what he has killed.
While this might be a palatable or even beneficial understanding of mythological figures who help us to understand the broad forces that shape our world and the unavoidable cycle of birth and death, they are terrifying archetypes for a child to confront in one’s own personal parents, particularly when they are too young to defend and care for themselves. Modern parents increasingly seem to feel that it’s right to confront children with difficult and dark ideas as early as they can comprehend the words, but this often seems to serve more of a narcissistic function for the parents and is done without heed to effects on the child’s long-term psychological development.
A child who is confronted by these dark aspects of the mother figure before he has fully internalized her warm, nurturing aspects may grow up to have lifelong difficulty relating to the feminine, both in other women and in his own personality. A mother who makes it known to her child that her highest political priority is her ability to have the right and ability to end a life in her womb with ease, whether by reading him a “children’s book” as in the tweet pictured above or casually discussing these politics at the dinner table, has in fact conveyed something deadly serious to that child, who presumably knows where he came from if he’s capable of comprehending what she’s saying. It seems particularly pernicious if she couples this idea to her enjoyment of her career, implicitly communicating an ongoing sense of her priorities to a child whose life depends on her.
This is not to say that a mother has to sacrifice her entire being to her children — every parent makes decisions about what to share and what to keep private, and all have mixed feelings about many aspects of parenthood — but rather that this person who is too young to take care of himself depends on you, both physically and psychologically, in a way that inherently entails great responsibility and sacrifice. A mother casually informing her child that being able to have ended their life is of great and central importance to her is perhaps not meeting that psychological responsibility.
The effect on girls may arguably be less drastic due to her identification with the mother — it doesn’t automatically color her every interaction with the opposite sex, though the often comorbid idea that men just want to enslave her through family certainly may — but it will effect her view of pregnancy and having children of her own in a way that will only deepen through modern sex education with its emphasis on how having children when she’s young will ruin her life. I speak from experience when I say that women growing up surrounded by these deeply emotional messages about the danger and undesirability of pregnancy may struggle to shed them even once it has become appropriate to have children, and they may neglect traits that are important in a father when choosing partners. They may see motherhood and its warm, nurturing qualities as less worthy of respect, a death sentence for their intellect and independence, weak and exploitable aspects that must be sacrificed on the altars of sex appeal and success.
But boys growing up with these messages about motherhood may struggle to attain even the first level of anima development, remaining stuck on an unspoken Level Zero with the image of the devouring mother who he unconsciously sees as capable of desiring his murder. His childhood object of desire — the bearer of warmth, nurture, love — might be unconsciously viewed as only conditionally or superficially available to him, and his attachment may be insecure at best. The dark side of the Eve archetype matures into a sexually maladaptive position; the devouring mother is a murderer, the womb of his counterpart is rotten and defiled. He may grow up to see women as untrustworthy and dark, capable of providing simulacra of these desires but never fulfilling them: McDonald’s instead of real nourishment, OnlyFans instead of a wife.
Even worse, women who have grown up with these messages to see warmth and nurturing as “lesser” traits that will hamstring their success and make them less worthy of respect will likely provide very suitable hooks for this anima projection, preventing him from even noticing women who might be capable of providing what he needs and transforming his anima image. Even if he notices them, his bitterness and anger might make him frightening to people who otherwise could have been suitable partners.
Men and women with these hangups will not be capable of having an adult public conversation about the responsibility of giving and taking life, and indeed this is what I see on social media. Ideally this conversation would take the tone of a husband and wife discussing the most difficult edge case with each other to come to a mutual decision that lives up to their morals and their deep love and consideration for one another, not shying away from the dark aspects that inherently come with such important decisions but still trying to do right by each other, their children both born and unborn, and the world. When people project these fully developed opposite sex archetypes onto each other, they will tend to see their interlocutors through this lens and the conversation can be productive. Instead I mostly see men screaming at women they see as whores and babykillers for more love, women screaming at men they see as slavers and tyrants for more love, both of them locked into a dark vision of the other that they can’t help but see but blind to everyone who does not fit the pattern they expect.
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] When the doctor saw the magnetic resonance image of the man’s brain, he was stunned. In fact there was not much of a brain to be seen. Most of the skull cavity was taken up by fluid, with a smattering of brain tissue lining the inside of the skull. The man should have been severely resulted, and yet he was not mentally disabled, holding down a job as a civil servant.