by Connie Zweig
In this chapter, we will explore four of the many possible patterns of development that can occur as a result of shadow-making in families: father’s son, father’s daughter, mother’s son, mother’s daughter. Our portraits may appear to be oversimplified, but in life each has many versions, such as an Artemis- or Athena-style father’s daughter, or a Hephaestus- or Hermes-style mother’s son. These stories, based on our clients’ lives, serve to illustrate how identification and repression work together to shape ego and shadow, respectively. As a result of this developmental process, the rejected qualities reappear as characters at the table with their respective shields. Each pattern is an attempt to meet the challenges of personal development in a given family. Each has its gifts and its limits. And each has a destiny that unfolds later in life as an individual’s patterns of ego, shadow, and soul emerge in romance, friendship, and work.
The title of the Ursula Le Guin story mentioned at this chapter’s opening, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” reveals her conclusion: From time to time, when a young adult visits the abandoned child and witnesses its plight, that individual may not go home again. He or she may walk away from Omelas and just keep on walking, perhaps to find another home, one that has not sacrificed a child to maintain its happiness. This individual can no longer consciously live with the betrayal. It is often the very wound to the soul itself that becomes the catalyst for the developmental leap away from the family and toward a more authentic individual life.
What aspect of your soul has been sacrificed? As a parent, how have you sacrificed your child’s soul?
THE FATHER’S SON: RECLAIMING FEMININE SHADOW
In a story from the oral tradition surrounding the Old Testament, Abraham’s father sold ceramic religious idols to support his family. One day the father asked his son to tend the shop for him. Abraham obeyed, but while he surveyed the idols before him, he became angry at his father’s hypocrisy for taking money for the false gods. In his rage he smashed them all, except one. His father returned and, outraged, demanded to know what his son had done. Abraham lied: He said the one remaining idol had smashed all of the others. But his father replied, it has no power; it’s only a statue. So Abraham told his father the truth. And in that moment of smashing his father’s idols and revealing the hypocrisy, he sacrificed his childhood obedience and his unconscious bonds to his father complex, becoming an individual perhaps for the first time.
In Western post-industrial society, the pattern of the father’s son stems from the boy’s unconscious ego identification with his father and the masculine world over his identification with his mother and the feminine. Supported by the heroic ideal of a patriarchal culture in his same-sex identification, he becomes a boyish boy, primarily interested in trucks, sports, and competition. If his childhood is traditional, it is in many ways like a hazing for manhood. If he observes physical abuse of his mother by his father, he is more likely later to abuse his wife than a son of nonviolent parents. If he himself is physically abused, he may perpetuate the pattern with his children. If he enters the armed forces, he is encouraged to learn how to kill or be killed. Even if he is not abused or drafted into the military, a father’s son may absorb patriarchal attitudes toward women and other men from the hypermasculinized men around him.
Like his dad, he banishes the more sensitive, nurturing, vulnerable qualities into the shadow. In this way, his persona may become rigid, angry, dogmatic, and resentful in an unconscious effort to appear strong, independent, and heroic. The father, whose soul was sacrificed to his father/god, requires the same sacrifice of his son, and an innocent child loses his capacity to be gentle or dependent. We do not wish to imply here that a father’s son cannot be kind, generous, or supportive. Rather, we wish to emphasize that his greatest fear is weakness and dependency.
Our client Wayne, thirty-six, told his individual version of this universal story. As European immigrants, his traditional parents had an arranged marriage when his father was thirty-two, his mother eighteen. His strict, authoritarian father worked hard to support the family and took charge of the money and of the emotional atmosphere in the home: He permitted no sign of weakness in his son, disdaining incompetence and shaming uncertainty. He permitted no talking at the dinner table so that he could watch the evening news. He permitted no display of emotion among family members, except for his own Poseidon-like explosions of rage, which created trembling aftershocks in other family members. And he disliked music, so it was forbidden. Whenever Wayne asked for an explanation, his father slammed his fist on the table and replied, “Because I say so.”
Wayne’s father was highly influenced by the archetype of the senex, who in its positive aspect represents the wise old man and moral sage, but in its negative aspect represents the old, rigid, castrating king, a conservative, cynical figure who is cut off from youthful idealism. One archetypal image of the senex is Cronos, or Father Time, and, synchronistically, Wayne’s father worked as a watchmaker. He also ran every aspect of his life on clock time, tyrannizing his wife if dinner was not served at six o’clock and punishing Wayne if his chores were not complete on schedule. The father’s relationship to time was transmitted to his son, who came to feel that he could never be productive enough because there was never enough time. Unlike Demeter-style time, whose seasonal, organic cycles have a natural rhythm and serve as our ally, Cronos-style time is mechanical and contrived; it creates a life of busyness and devours its subjects, so that it comes to feel like an enemy, even like the Grim Reaper himself.
Wayne remembers that, as a young boy, his job was to go to school and perform well to make his parents proud. He played sports, although he was not particularly coordinated and felt no passion about the games. He pushed his body through the motions of football, treating it like an object that needed to learn to obey his mind. By the time he was twelve, he had broken both arms and legs.
Wayne’s father unknowingly betrayed his young son in several ways: He was emotionally abusive, shaming the boy’s vulnerability and neglecting his authentic feelings; he was intrusive, controlling Wayne’s bodily rhythms and cutting him off from his own instincts. In effect, Wayne was emotionally neglected; his father was present but deprived him of deep contact and of a rounded image of the father. Like Abraham, another image of the senex archetype, the father sacrificed the son, whose tender, vulnerable soul had gone into hiding.
Wayne’s mother did not object to her husband’s dominant style; she presented a calming, understanding presence in their traditional home. Whereas the father was the provider of security and order, she was the provider of family feeling.
Unknowingly, Wayne identified with his father’s position of power in the home and created the persona of a responsible, superior man (character 1). He remained in graduate school to become a professional until he turned twenty-five, dominated his women companions, asserted his opinions with a forceful logic, and acted as if he were invulnerable like his hero, James Bond. But internally he felt powerless, inadequate, and unworthy of his own standpoint.
Wayne lived in a black and white universe in which his father’s critical senex voice (character 2) told him that any feeling of uncertainty made him look inferior and any trace of vulnerability made him look feminine, which formed another shadow character (character 3). Like Hamlet, the voice of his father’s ghost haunted him for many years. Wayne remembers the few times that he felt deeply, all instances when he saw his mother cry.
In addition, Wayne struggled with secret sexual compulsions (character 4). Like the child in the basement demanding to be fed, he fantasized constantly about anonymous sex with women. But he felt too unattractive to approach them. Wayne met Roberta in grad school and became sexually involved without much emotional contact. But after six months he believed that he had real feelings for her and proposed marriage because he thought it was the right thing to do.
He became, like his father, a responsible, goal-directed provider who from time to time felt overwhelmed by what he believ
ed to be feelings of love. But he gave his young wife no intimacy; he had no sense of how to reach her when she became moody and cried. Cut off from his natural bodily eros, their sexuality remained mechanical and without feeling. Their conversations remained dry and aloof, so he withdrew further into his own mind.
When Roberta asked for a divorce, his world shattered. He trusted her and never questioned her commitment; he had never really thought to question her about anything at all Suddenly and with great intensity, Wayne felt overcome with grief. He sobbed uncontrollably and could not get out of bed to go to work. Like his father, Wayne was struck by Poseidon, god of earthquakes and the ocean depths. His persona as a father’s son was reduced to rubble; his towering facade could no longer hide his secret wishes. His forbidden feeling came flooding in with the force of a tidal wave.
His psyche flipped to the other side of the archetype—the puer. He quit his job, left his hometown, and joined a spiritual community for the next fifteen years, which closed the door on responsibility but opened the realm of possibility. He experimented with psychedelics, explored intimacy with women, and learned to speak his mind with lovers and friends. Finally, he broke the stranglehold of Cronos when, through resting when he felt tired and practicing yoga to enliven his body, he discovered his own natural timing and began to live by his own rhythms. Having lived out his father’s pattern without fulfillment, he then lived out his father’s unlived life.
Without knowing it, Wayne was doing shadow-work by exploring those qualities that he had banished as a father’s son. It would, however, be several years before he understood that flipping to the other side of the archetype—from senex to puer—is not the answer; rather, he would need to become the father of a young daughter to uncover his own way of holding the opposites, of being a stable provider and an emotionally available husband and dad.
THE MOTHER’S SON (THE PUER): RECLAIMING MASCULINE SHADOW
Other men, who do not identify with an overly masculine father, may begin their lives as a puer, or soft male. In his first therapy session, Charles, twenty-eight, disclosed that he felt as if he came from another planet or at least as if he were born into the wrong family. He had suffered all his life from feelings of isolation and alienation; he often had dreams of flying high above the earth, free and unattached, soaring away from the limits and responsibilities of daily life.
Mythologically, the one who flies high over the world is the puer (or, in a woman, puella) aeternus, the eternal youth who will not or cannot grow up. Under the controlling influence of the dark side of this archetypal pattern, a man may suffer tremendously from an inability to mature in socially conventional ways, such as an inability to commit to work or relationship. He may remain innocent and childish, caught in fantasies of spiritual perfection and unable to accept the limits of mortal human life. Or he may be seduced by drugs and alcohol into living on a constant high. On the light side, this divine figure, when in its proper place at the table, can keep an individual connected to ideals and lead him to a genuine spirituality.
Charles was raised by a depressed, emotionally intrusive mother who turned him into her confidant and caretaker. His childhood purpose became to cure his mother’s wounds. When she felt upset, he would make her tea; when she felt lonely, he would listen to her speak, sometimes for hours. Charles learned, even as a boy, that if he had separate outside interests or became willful, his mother would belittle him and tell him that she felt depressed. In effect, Charles was a victim of emotional incest.
Charles’s father, a welder, seemed to be a quiet, introverted, ineffectual man who drank vodka at night and disappeared into his room. He also remained close to his own mother, which created conflict with his wife, Charles’s mother.
Charles expressed disappointment that his father did not teach him sports, so he did not feel a sense of belonging with other boys at school. He tried to compete academically but received only mediocre grades. With some of the more traditional masculine traits buried in his shadow, he developed other gifts, such as artistic interests. But, sadly, they were devalued by both his parents and teachers, who betrayed his creative spirit. Socially, Charles felt awkward and shy. He was too ashamed to bring friends home because he did not know when his father would be drunk. And he was too frightened to approach girls because unconsciously he felt that his mother would feel abandoned. In this way, she betrayed his independence.
After high school, his parents encouraged him to become a welder, following his father’s footsteps and taking over the family business. An obedient son, he heeded their request. But after five years, he felt dry and depressed. He suffered from sexual impotence and had suicidal thoughts and feelings of emptiness.
Unlike Wayne, whose adaptation as a father’s son fit his more remote, analytical nature, Charles, as an emotionally sensitive, artistic mother’s son, could not adapt to the overlay of the traditional male role without great suffering. His sense of inferiority stemmed from this lack of fit between the family and cultural expectations of him—“buck up and act like a man”—and his own gentle nature. His critical inner voice, a shadow figure absorbed from these sources, told him that he was not masculine enough, assertive enough, or potent enough to be a real man. Tragically, having identified with the parental voice, he learned to devalue himself as he had been devalued by his parents.
Doing the slow, daily tasks of shadow-work, Charles uncovered his devouring mother complex and his consequent terror of women’s power. Eventually, he learned to separate out her voice from his own and her needs from his, thereby finding the gold in his dark side: his own unique style of independence and masculinity. Working with his flying dreams, he found within himself a deep spiritual longing, which led him to a meditation teacher, a substitute father for the one he never had. In time, Charles returned to his passion for the arts, studying design and becoming reinspired with life. He found work as a graphic designer and later became head of the art department for a major fashion company.
In addition, Charles joined a men’s group and found the support and reinforcement for his particular style of masculinity that he never felt at home. In these untraditional ways, over a period of several years, Charles uncovered his authentic nature as a sensitive artist. Gradually, his self-respect began to return as he reclaimed his rejected vulnerable soul.
There is debate in the Jungian community about how to interpret the appearance of the puer archetype. Analyst Marie-Louise von Franz focuses on the dark side and characterizes puers harshly as immature, ungrounded men who are unable to make commitments. She believes that they have excessive spirituality and a head-in-the-clouds attitude, which can blind them to shadow issues. This problem, she says, stems (for men) from an excessive attachment to the personal mother and a failure to separate from her, which leads to an inability to make other attachments. Von Franz points out that the puer receives from his mother a feeling of being special, which in turn evokes an inferiority complex because he can never live up to her expectations. For those in the grasp of this character, she prescribes shadow-work to avoid hubris and to help face the disappointment of lost ideals.
James Hillman, on the other hand, focuses on the light side and assesses the puer positively, claiming that it represents “the spirit of youth and the youth of spirit.… It is the call of a thing to perfection; it is the call of a person to the Self.” Therefore, he says, the puer is not meant to walk but to fly.
It’s only from the point of view of the ego that the puer is a problem, Hillman says. The ego wants it to adapt, succeed, be powerful and heroic. For this reason, all the influences of socialization collude to clip its wings. Therefore, Hillman continues, the puer should not be seen solely as a pathology with its basis in the mother complex. His solution: The puer needs to pair up not with the mother but with the father in an imaginal relationship. He does not mean here the personal father, but the senex or wise old man.
Poet Robert Bly has also explored a version of this pattern, which he calls the “n
aïve male” and identifies by several traits: The man assumes that others are sincere and fair, without seeing their shadows. With this kind of blindness, he has special, prized relationships only with certain people. In addition, he may be passive in relationships, not aggressive. Typically, he responds to the troubles of others in a nurturing way rather than by saying what he wants, which may cause trouble. Finally, he may lose that which is precious to him, “giving away his gold” because of a lack of boundaries.
The archetypal story of the puer appears in the Greek myth of Icarus. Daedelus, father of Icarus, was jealous of one of his helpers and killed him. Forced to flee from Athens to Crete, Daedelus then offended the king while in exile and was imprisoned with Icarus. In his solitude Daedelus designed two pairs of wings to enable them to escape across the waters that surrounded the prison tower. He cautioned his son not to fly too close to the sun because the wax that held the wings together would melt. But once in flight, the boy disobeyed his father and arrogantly soared off to the heights. As the father watched in horror, Icarus’s wings melted and he plunged into the sea.
Today, we see an epidemic of puers among people living on the margins of mainstream culture, especially in more growth-oriented or spiritually based subcultures. From the point of view of the larger senex-oriented culture, the puer appears naïve and childlike, too internally oriented, and dangerously disinterested in the work ethic. In addition, he or she seems to carry fantasies of specialness or grandiosity.
In their dreams, puers fly over the sea without constraints. This flight represents their rejection of human limitation, their love of spirit, high ideals, and open-ended possibilities. Like Icarus, they may have been divinized by a mother or father and given wings to soar above others. They, too, may have lost their connections to the body and the earth.