ionship can be so devastating to a man. It is the loss of a side of him that he has kept external.
Every time there is an extreme love or fantasy or entanglement, the anima is at work in both sexes. She does not care for an orderly life, but wants intensity of experience - life, in whatever form. The anima, like all archetypes, may come upon us like fate. She can enter our life either as something wonderful or as something terrible – either way her aim is to wake us up. To recognize the anima means throwing away our rational ideas of how life should be lived, and instead admitting, as Jung puts it, that “Life is crazy and meaningful at once”.
The anima is profoundly irrational – and yet she carries great wisdom. When she comes into your life it may seem like chaos, but it is only later that we are able to divine her purpose.
The Mother archetype takes the form of personal mother, grandmother, stepmother, mother in law, nurse, governess. It can be fulfilled in figurative Mothers such as Mary Mother of God, Sophia, or the Mother who becomes a maiden again in the myth of Demeter and Kore. Other Mother symbols include the Church, country, the Earth, the woods, the sea, a garden, a ploughed field, a spring or well. The positive aspect of the archetype is Motherly love and warmth, so celebrated in art and poetry, which gives us our first identity in the world. Yet it can have negative meaning – the loving mother or the terrible mother or goddess of fate. Jung considered the Mother the most important archetype because it seemed to contain all else.
When there is an imbalance of the archetype in a person, we see the Mother 'complex'. In men, the complex may give rise to 'Don Juanism', which can make a man fixated on pleasing all women. Yet a man with a mother complex may also have a revolutionary spirit: tough, persevering, extremely ambitious.
In women, the complex can result in an exaggeration of the maternal instinct, with a woman living for her children, sacrificing her individuality. Her husband becomes just part of the furniture. Men may be initially attracted to women with a mother complex because they are the picture of femininity and innocence. Yet they are also screens onto which a man can project or externalize his anima, and he only later discovers the real woman he has married.
In other forms of the archetype, a woman will go to any lengths to not be like her biological mother. She may carve out a sphere of her own, for example becoming an intellectual to show up her mother's lack of education. A choice of marriage partner may be to antagonize and move away from the mother. Other women in the hold of the archetype may have an unconscious incestuous relationship with the biological father and jealousy of the mother. They may become interested in married men or having romantic adventures.
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Jung noted that in evolutionary terms the unconscious came well before the development conscious thought. Yet in its youthful enthusiasm the conscious mind feels it can defy or deny its deeper counterpart; it is all-powerful while the unconscious seems a murky irrelevance. Yet he believed that “Man's worst sin is unconsciousness”. We project everything we internally don't like or can't accept onto the world, so that we wage war instead of studying ourselves. It is a case of 'anything but self-knowledge' – but in the end we pay the price, whether as individuals or collectively.
Why is psychology as a science so young? Jung suggests it was because for most of human history it simply wasn't necessary. The wonderful imagery and mythology of religions was able to express the eternal archetypes perfectly. People feel a need to dwell upon ideas and images relating to rebirth and transformation, and religions supply these in abundance for every aspect of the psyche. The Catholic Church's strange ideas of the Virgin Birth and the Trinity are not fanciful images but packed with meaning, Jung wrote, archetypes of protection and healing that administered to any ruptures in the minds of the faithful.
The Protestant Reformation reacted aga