Full transcript. Hi and welcome to the Sovereign Mans Academy or SMH podcast. Men cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
The abyss of the unknown must be traversed for anything new to be created or discovered. In the 1940s, Marie Louise von Franz, a Swiss psychologist, created the phrase, the eternal child, to explain men in body but who are stuck in adolescent orientation, psychologically stunted in the maturation process.
Like Peter Pan, refusing to grow up and embrace manhood, and in reality not knowing what manhood calls for. The man child lives from their adolescent psychology, coupled in nature with greater dependence on the mother.
Whether in real life or a psychological habit, a hangover from their own parenting. After all, who else do we learn stages of development from, other than our parents, our elders in the hierarchy and our first primary caregiver - the mother.
The bond starts early in the womb. Von Franz predicted that in the coming decades, what she called the problem of the man child would spread across the world and affect more and more individuals and society in general in a negative manner.
Today we see men en masse feeling a sense of no meaning, purpose, disconnected spiritually, experiencing hopelessness, despair, or its bedfellow numbness, the addiction to the trivial, the shallows of the mind, going through the motions, slaves in a system, afraid, not standing up, addiction to substance, disconnected from the feminine, no connection to eros…where lust and heart are embraced in worship of the beloved, acting out against those they should protect.
Comfort, the familiar, the known, the pursuit of pleasure becomes the trap and the way to ease their suffering. But too much comfort rots. Too much pleasure weakens; playing small, hiding, Going through the motions undermines deep meaning, fulfillment and achievement...but for many men in man child mode, there is no map for traversing the unknown.
The purpose of this podcast is to provide a solution to those who suffer from this problem, and in reality, we all do; there is no escaping our need to clean up what is childish, what is adolescent in our psyches as we deepen into our hearts mission and purpose.
To help solve this problem, we are going to provide an in-depth psychological analysis of the man child based on insights from Carl Jung. Let's start by looking at how a strong mother complex stops or limits development and the maturation of a man moving from adolescence to psychological adulthood.
Throughout the history of evolutionary development, mothers and fathers have played different parental roles. Mothers have interacted with their children more than fathers; they maintain more physical and emotional contact and are more nurturing, comforting and empathetic to the physical, emotional pains and needs of the child.
The mother is the emotional protector and nurturer of the child. Obviously, there are outliers to this, and in many cases, but not all, when the mother has not played that role, it is due to psychological wounding from her own family upbringing.
This extremely intimate and close relationship with the good mother figure creates in the child the lasting emotional mark or a highly resistant psychological bond psychologists call a mother complex.
Think about the womb, its warm embrace, and then years with mom nurturing us and keeping us safe from the perceived dangers of the world. Fathers do not create the same bond of dependency with the child.
Instead, their role has traditionally been to provide the developing child with resources and protection, but just as importantly with guidance.
The role of the father has been to help the child break free from their childish bond of dependency with the mother, to prepare them for the rigours and challenges of the world, typically starting in adolescence, to help him emerge into the world as an independent, capable and functional adult, capable of killing the dragons that comes his way. In most cultures throughout history, individuals transition from adolescence to adulthood with the help of initiations.
Cross-culturally initiation was used to separate the youth from his mother, first physically and then psychologically. These rights were performed shortly after the onset of adolescence and managed by the elders, the respected males of the culture. A typical initiation has the adolescent forced into the unknown, away from the mother, from nurturing, from comfort, support and pleasure.
Instead, he experienced real and imagined challenges, hardships and ordeals. This was the last time the youth would see his mother, sometimes for months. The early initiation stage represented the symbolic death of the youth's childhood, the loss of paradise, childish fantasies, the nurturing support of the mother, of pleasure, and the joys of irresponsibility.
The second stage of initiation unfolding, a rebirth into self-sufficiency, independence, capacity, capability, skills, self-assuredness and proven completion into a more mature state of being. Imagine what the adolescent gains alone, hunting, fishing, camping to stay alive.
Moving from adolescence state to man state. This initiation engages the hero archetype. Note, ancient initiations across cultures understood the need to separate the adolescent from the mother, setting challenges the boy had to overcome before seeing him as a man.
The closest we come to these initiations today, for the most part, happens without the wisdom cultivating the initiation. Young lads learn to play rugby as an example, moms worrying about them being hurt, and dad insisting it's good for their male development.
Often the hierarchy males in these modern forms of initiation are stuck in the adolescence stage themselves. Today we have no group initiation processes, where the entire tribe of males were a boys role model for a developed man. Instead, young men must turn to their own fathers to provide them with initiation into adulthood, but unfortunately, not all fathers can supply their children with this guidance, for to do so, the father must be strong and independent himself and emotionally present in the child's life.
He must be able to show by example that there is something worth seeking, standing for and struggling for in this world. That display successfully encourages a young man to break from the comforts of childhood, he needs to be convinced there is somewhere worth going, with challenging oneself for.
The father needs to be a role model of how to be in the world, how to treat people, women and children, How to bounce back from adversity, how to do the right thing. But many boys did not get this support, this modelling.
Many young men are expected to leave the comforts of home to overcome their mother complex and to sculpt a life worth living without the psychological support of a father, embodied within their Psyche or in the real world.
When I mention embodied in the Psyche, I mean the quality father character that develops within one's own Psyche after modelling the real quality father. Many men are expected to leave the comforts of home to overcome their mother complex and sculpt a life worth living without the psychological support of a father.
The father activates the son's instinctive masculinity both by outer modelling and by direct affirmation. On the other hand, when there is a potent mother complex playing out between the son and the mother, it will inhibit the boys' instinctive masculinity.
I have observed in my clients that this active inhibition of the son's instinctive masculinity increases when the mother dislikes males. The son learns from the male disliking mother that they need to feel guilty for their maleness.
We see this - man shaming - playing out in a modern culture where there is a move from distinct portions of the population against the male. Is it any wonder that the problem of the man child is so prominent in our time with many men-child being fathers?
But the effects of a man-child father are worsened by the impact this situation has on the mother. The mother tends to become more authoritative in her parenting to compensate for the lack of a masculine figure in the child's life. Secondly, a failure on the part of the father to provide the mother with the love and support creates in her an emotional hunger, which she attempts to satiate through her relationship with her child.
This situation creates the perfect storm whereby the mother becomes what Jung called a devouring mother. She overprotects and smothers her child and becomes involved in every aspect of his life.
Despite having the best intentions, the mother unconsciously manipulates her child into remaining dependent on her well into adulthood, and it is often the case that the child willingly complies.
In my own family, I saw something similar to this play out where my wife, of Italian heritage, facing losing her role as mother, when my boys were leaving home, and facing the move into the next stage of her life which confronted her, was unconsciously undermining the boy's independence and moment into manhood so she could stay in the safe role, the known and enjoyable role of mother.
This is the secret conspiracy between mother and son that Jung wrote about and how each helps the other to betray life. A child brought up in this manner and thus never granted the opportunity to venture out on his own to stand up for himself to fail and fix his own mistakes or to make decisions for himself will develop into an adult crippled in his capacity to endure, evolve and overcome the inevitable challenges and struggles of life in pursuit of noble goals.
The healthy approach to overcoming fears, stresses, challenges and pains to create something greater and nobler will be replaced by his desire to bond with his mother, real or Symbolically. Symbolically meaning comfort, solace, peace and nurturing, addiction, pleasure, numbness etc.
In other words, when a boy emerges into adulthood with a strong mother complex, he will not seek to develop his independence and evolve his consciousness, but rather will seek the womb of comfort, symbolically speaking.
