The Motherload

My analyst once said that trying to define 'archetype' is like trying to define 'soul'. Just as you think you have it, it shifts and you find you haven't even scratched the surface.

This has been my struggle lately. The more I steep in the question, "How do I explain archetype," the further I feel from its core.

And so I succumb to hazy mental paralysis and Facebook.

From an archetypal perspective, I have been swallowed by the Negative Mother. My phallic initiative crumbles leaving me with a milquetoast tea drinker for an inner motivator.

Resistance is not only futile, it makes things worse. So I’ve decided to turn my attention squarely on the old hag and see what we both come up with.

Like hinduism, which is understood as a monotheistic religion with the many gods being aspects of a single God, a single archetype can appear in many forms. Here are a couple of mine.

#1 The unkempt ‘Southern Cracker’ woman. She wears a garish floral-print housedress fighting a losing battle against bulges of fat that persist from her moon face right down to her tiny lace-up circa 1940 shoes. She is the devouring clinger who keeps all her chickadees bound and drowning in thick cream gravy. Passivity, emotional blackmail, and need are her weapons. “You’re killing your mother” is often heard around this one.

She's not too bright but her saucer eyes conceal a deadly scorpion sting meant to disempower. She’ll gush about how wonderful having babies is (“You’re not really a woman until you’ve given birth”) to the woman who has just found out she can’t have any. Then she’ll sigh, sip her tea and utter some token pleasantry about adoption. She’ll wonder aloud what’s going to happen to her when her children leave and may even get cancer when one finally flies the coop.

Mother's milk has turned to gall (whatever that is). What was intended to nurture has been perverted so that her ‘food’ or ‘love’ violates the children while feeding her own need. For her, love equals dependence, so her children are caught in a sticky web of guilt: being independent means you don’t love mom anymore. Conversely, in order to be loved, you have to be dependent, less than you are, amputated. Either you're self-denying or you're a bad person.

Her children can't grow up. As adults, they are not mature sexual beings, they can't fully express their creativity, and they can't stop worrying about how claiming their independence might hurt someone else for long enough to get on with their own lives. This can show up as horribly codependent marriages with the ghost of a spark looming in the distant past. Avoidance of real relationships is another way to go: serial dating or near isolation.

In film and literature, examples include the mother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.

Negative Mother #2 is tall, taut-skinned, and angular. She wears tweed and a high-collared polyester blouse. I think of her as the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe crossed with Nurse Ratchet as a schoolteacher rewritten by Clive Barker. She gets pretty dark.

This one HATES spontaneity. Whereas the Southern Cracker uses emotional blackmail, this one dominates with rigid power and control. Any natural impulse is wrong. Fun is absolutely not allowed. Her child-slaves are beaten and starved, constantly punished for the crime of being children. They are expected to think and feel like adults, set tasks they can’t possibly do and pushed into a hopeless spiral where they can NEVER get it right. Everything leads to failure and punishment.

Your own creativity doesn’t hurt her, it’s just evil. Your existence is a filthy mess she has to monitor to protect her hair’s width notion of acceptability and make sure you don't offend society with your inherent inappropriateness. Mistakes are crimes against humanity. And you must always remember that whatever happens, it’s all your fault.

This woman’s ego is so frail that whatever falls outside her petrie dish of understanding is experienced as tremendously threatening and must be destroyed. From her perspective, as from the perspective of many child abusers, she is the victim.

The mother in Harold and Maude is a good toned-down example.

In all her forms, the Negative Mother does not want you to be happy or fulfilled. She wants you to be her numbed-out plaything, her pretty vapid doll, her castrated son-lover. She keeps you drugged, stoned, drunk, in a food coma, depressed, addicted to internet, worried about the cat, watching crap TV... anything to keep you away from your real life. She might also make you her puppet, going to all the right schools, saying all the right things, having the perfect career, utterly unaware that you hate yourself and your life. Instead you drink, have empty sex, buy toys and forget that the smile you wear isn't really yours.

So she tells you you'll never make it out there. The world is a dangerous place. Everything you do is a failure, so why bother? Why can't you be more like x? You can't do anything right... you've always been such a disappointment. And everyone's gonna laugh at you.

In depression, we are 'pressed down' under her. She is the 'stuckness,' the hazy veil that keeps us from being fully present. She is the enemy of initiative, spontaneity and fun.

She undermines the healthy aggression necessary to propel us into life. In men, she castrates their belief in themselves as autonomous beings. This leads to a constant inner threat of being overwhelmed by women and the man-child phenomenon. In women, she castrates their animus, their inner masculinity. The woman remains in mother's thrall by being depressed or not claiming her own feminine power for fear of outshining and therefore hurting mom. She may never quite have her life together and be the one everyone rolls their eyes about when they hear about the latest stupid thing she has done. Think Rachel Getting Married.

On the other hand, her enraged animus may turn against her and make her overly driven, critical and unrelated to her sexuality aside from it being a means to an end.

I have so much more to say about this. In facing the negative mother, my animus has jumped to life and wants me to lay it all out on the table. But Wisdom, the patient, feminine yin principle is playing, "You gotta know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em..." And so for now I yield to Kenny Rogers.

Almost... Is this next bit necessary or the mark of a manic animus ungrounded by a good connection to feminine wisdom? I don't know. But I do know that I'm free to play and to make mistakes and the worst that can happen is you get bored.

If anyone reading this suspects that I am 'mother bashing', you may be experiencing a bit of the negative mother right now.

Take a moment to sense your body. Anything clenched? Any worries?

We WANT to love mother as much as we think we should. Mother, our personal mother as well as our idea of mother is the giver of life. But she is/was human and flawed. Also, the Archetypal Mother is within us. Her form is influenced by our experience of our actual mother, but there is more to it than that.

If we allow ourselves to look at her honestly, to see her flaws clearly, and how we have been hurt or even crippled, have we betrayed her? It's amazing how easily we confuse honesty with disloyalty. That is the negative mother at work. If we can't think or feel clearly, if guilt and undeserved loyalty keep us from seeing our own truth, we are hers. And if we choose to cut the cord, will we survive? These are some of the conscious thoughts that emerge from the inner reality I have been describing.

Each archetype is both positive and negative. The flip side of the Devouring Life-Draining Mother is the Positive Nourishing Mother.

And we have all had a taste of both, hence the image at the top.

Close your eyes and feel, see, smell, taste, hear, Positive Mother. What comes up?

I get:

warm, nurturing, food, safe, abundance, home, love, fertility, creativity, holding, hug, calm, peace, comfy, soft, accepting, unconditional, relax, curvy, nonlinear, subjectivity, interconnection, community, nature, mercy, wisdom

The Positive Mother supports and holds us so that we go out into the world with an inner sense of security. We have a fundamental sense of OK-ness. We step onto life's stage with few jitters and are grounded enough to know what's really us and what doesn't fit. When everything falls apart in the outer world, there's something within us that takes care of us.

We love ourselves. The cord is cut and we find that we were just fine all along.

Thanks to Amy for finding the photo.

Archetype: The dictionary's red-headed stepchild

In the last post I mentioned your personal myth: If your life were a bedtime story, what would it be?

Archetypes are the building blocks of that myth.

They are powerful undercurrents that pulse across cultures, ancestry, art, and our most personal experiences.

The word 'archetype' is usually shoved between its more popular siblings, stereotype and prototype amid vague muttering about Platonic forms. In the ‘type’ family, it is the slightly bipolar creative one everyone wishes would try harder to 'be normal,' like prototype. Whereas stereotypes oversimplify, archetypes invite complexity. A stereotype is a teflon image we use to avoid seeing someone else’s humanity. An archetype is a raw truth common to all humanity.

Great.

Let me start with a disclaimer: This is a kind of prequel to a trilogy. In this post, I'm setting the stage with broad dramatic statements that aren't as relatable as I'd like them to be, but this is a work in progress.

An archetype is a specific potential energy. It is an image/feeling/sense that we associate with what's basically a stock character or story line. Some examples include: mother, father, Self (or God), eternal child (the man-child, or female puella that we’ll have fun with later), the senex, crone, maiden, femme fatale, warrior, queen, king, shaman/priest, child, hero, heroine, etc.

If you've seen it in a fairy tale or Greek myth, you've seen a representation of an archetype. Opera, soap operas, film, celebrity gossip, and our own lives all have more or less the same cast and follow the same patterns. “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”. If archetypes teach us little else, it’s that we're not terribly unique. What's more important is that these characters and stories keep repeating and still have meaning. They resonate with something true inside us.

Case in point: Brangelina continues to fascinate even though it's one of the oldest stories ever told. Angelina plays femme fatale brilliantly while Jen has held onto ingenue even into her 40s. And the women duke it out over a rudderless man-child looking for a more compelling anchor to justify his existence as his beauty fades. As Carrie Fisher noted, it's Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Fisher, and Tony Curtis all over again.

Archetypes are similar to the philosopher Immanuel Kant's "categories of the understanding": pre-existing categories of thought that organize our experience in a specific way so that we have a shared reality. So that we more or less know how the story will end.

These lumps of psychological clay sit at the molten core of our collective unconscious, home to the sum of human psychological and emotional experience. They are given form by our genetic, cultural, ancestral, and personal history. We imprint them with our personal experience and from there comes our sense of what ‘mother’ or 'lover' feels like.

You know you’re in the presence of archetypal energy when you feel it.

This is important:

You SEE a stereotype, but you FEEL an archetype.

Certain people affect us, fascinate us, repel us for reasons we can’t quite explain. Art, music, a story, or a fictional character may grip us so strongly that we feel transformed by it.

Falling in love is a perfect example.

When it happens, we've been swallowed by an archetype. Much more on that later.

How does this help you?

The more aware we are of how archetypes work in our lives, the looser the chains that bind us to the wheel of fate or karma.

Less mystically, ‘fate’ is a natural result of our learned and inherited patterns of gut reactions, memories, feeling, and beliefs. It is written into our muscular and nervous systems as well. These patterns are called complexes - you’ve probably heard of Freud’s oedipal complex... just the beginning.

Archetypes are the core of the complexes that keep us locked in everything from blandly unimaginative to horrifyingly self-destructive patterns: watching a bunch of CSI reruns because you have no idea what you really love, convincing yourself you're happy in a job/relationship/marriage, settling for less than you deserve, demanding more than you deserve because you don't know how to give to yourself, and on and on.

Worst of all, we are blinded to the tremendous creative potential that lies within each of us.

The moral of Oedipus: consciously trying to avoid your fate doesn't work. Saying, "I'll never be like my mom" is pretty much a guarantee that in some way you didn't see coming, you'll end up just like her. As long as your point of reference is mom, you're still in chains. NOT being like mom is an entirely different thing than claiming the space to find out and be who you ARE.

Recognizing archetypes and archetypal patterns builds our capacity to be alert observers of our own lives. We can then make the most of the bits of choice we are given. Addressing this point, one of my grad school profs said, "You've got more power than you think, but less than you want." Hopping off the wheel is the difference between living a regular novel and a Choose Your Own Adventure. Possible outcomes are still limited, but at least you've got options.

So wait, are archetypes friendly building blocks for our heroic personal myths or treacherous sirens luring us to the imprisonment of passionless mediocrity?

Ummm... they're both. That's why they get four posts.

In these next few posts I’m going to break what I've written down. First, I’m going to go deeper into the experience of archetypes in their positive and negative form: a handbook on how to spot an archetype in everyday life. Then I’ll get into how archetypes infuse cultures and permeate the collective psyche: I'll use the man-child example 'cause its fun. And then I'll start to join archetypes with projection and dive into the wonderfully brutal world of love.

Who the @*$&! is Chiron and Why Should I Care?

Chiron is the archetypal wounded healer.

For those of you who have never had much to do with depth psychology, that sentence meant nothing.

I know.

That’s why I’m here writing this.

Who is Chiron? What is an archetype? And ‘wounded healer’?

What next, “Buy my dreamcatcher?!”

No.

Psychology so often and so easily becomes an expensive intellectual exercise or it invites itself to be dismissed as new age fluff.

For all the talk of complexes, boundaries, autonomy, self-soothing mechanisms, family dysfunction, and codependence that therapists bandy around, what we often miss is the need for deep personal relevance. It's interesting and fun, and helps us spin comforting stories about why that cute guy in the grocery story didn't call us (he was disgusted by guava: obvious mother issues), but does it MEAN anything?

Ideally, therapy stirs the pot, makes us profoundly uncomfortable and provokes these kinds of questions:

How do I truly come to know myself beyond the knowledge that I struggle with this or that complex or have a boundary issue with person X?

How do I connect to myself deeply with an unwavering anchor?

Can I truly know my own pain, grief, shame, humiliation, fear, and rage, not just talk around it?

Do I feel at home in my own body?

Is my creativity flowing?

And am I aware that with everything I say and do, every choice I make, I am creating and reflecting my personal myth?

Which leads me back to Chiron.

Chiron was a mythical centaur famous for his ability to heal others and for his uncommon integrity. Centaurs, the frat boys of Greek myth, were not known for their intelligence or strength of character, and so Chiron was unique among his brothers.

He had a rough start. Both parents abandoned him. After raping Mom, Papa Saturn took off. And Mom, a nymph, was so disgusted with her hideous half horse son, she left him to die.

Luckily, baby Chiron was adopted by Apollo, and learned his healing and prophecy skills from the mighty sun god.

For all his skills, though, when he was accidentally wounded by his good friend Hercules, he was unable to heal himself. Being half god, he couldn't die either. So he lived in constant agonizing pain. Eventually, Hercules worked out a deal that allowed Chiron to end his suffering by becoming mortal.

In depth psychology, Chiron, the 'wounded healer' archetype is an important reminder that therapists are also wounded just as patients are also healers. It is a caution against professional arrogance, forgetting our own humanity and assuming the 'expert' role while pathologizing clients just because we are too afraid to see a similar flaw or wound in ourselves.

Chiron did not carry a clipboard.

He KNEW his patients’ wounds because he had lived them himself. He healed with the wisdom of someone who has scraped the rust off his own incurable suffering and found a reason to keep going.

So, why am I writing this?

I believe that therapy can be an incredibly transformative experience. It can also be a total waste of time. What you get out of therapy depends largely on the therapist, but it depends just as heavily on you. How seriously do you take it? Do you let it permeate your life, or is it a separate walled-off exercise that doesn’t touch your ‘real life’?

I think that the reason we can all so easily turn into psychobabble spewing wankers is twofold:

First, the jargon and the concepts run from awkward to ivory tower alienating. The language is so cumbersome that we lose touch with the grit and gore that I believe therapy is really about.

And that’s a loss for everyone, because buried under the layers of talk is some real gold.

You and I are not made of clean lines and catchy phrases, so why would we talk about ourselves that way?

Second, and more to the point, jargon keeps us safely removed from our emotional core. If I say I have a boundary issue, it’s two steps further away from me than if I let myself feel the anguish of being the needy, unloved, and unworthy person I truly feel myself to be.

If therapy is going to ‘work,’ it can’t be safe. It’s got to be messy and confusing and, yes, painful.

Like Chiron, each of us is wounded, and each of us has the capacity to heal. Being tooth-grittingly honest with ourselves about our woundedness cracks open the door to our healing.

Part of my mission in this blog, is to strip away as much jargon as I can and get to the meat of the matter. I hope to take a few stones out of that ivory tower's foundation so more of us feel a little closer to our personal myth.

I hope that Chiron Speaks will speak to you.