For this cause have I laboured night by night with crying, my jaws are become hoarse; who is the man that liveth, knowing and understanding, delivering my soul from the hand of hell?

Marie-Louise von Franz, Aurora Consurgens, p. 57

In a talk about the story of Parsifal, Robert Johnson makes an essential comment about masculine psychology.

If one is to proceed with the healing of his Fisher King wound—I’m talking now exclusively about masculine psychology—he has to make a differentiation among at least four things, elements of his interior feminine world.
One is his actual flesh and blood mother. The second is his mother complex, well represented by this silly garment which he wears. Third, the mother archetype. And fourth, his own interior feminine side.
This is absolutely essential language for any male to make his way through the world. And we’re woefully ignorant of these things.

Robert Johnson, The Wounded Feeling Function at 31:42

According to the myth, Parsifal (whose name translates to “pure or innocent fool”) encounters a wounded Fisher King whose testicles have been pierced by an arrow or a poisoned spear. With such a wound, the Fisher King is left impotent, without access to the Grail Castle, and without the ability to produce an offspring. This condition prevents the Fisher King from enjoying life and yet it is not dire enough to kill him either.

This wound is an accurate description of the current state of masculine psychology if one can handle the symbolism of it. The generating principle (the testicles) is wounded, leaving the masculine in a wasteland without any access to the transcendent (without access to the Grail Castle), nor the ability to heal or renew himself (without the ability to produce an offspring).

The wound within man: the killing of the bull by Mithras, a representation of the violence necessary for the spirit to emerge over animal instinct.
Pay close attention to the scorpion heading for the testicles, reminding of the Fisher King’s wound.

In this limbo state between life and death, the masculine cannot thrive because the generative source of his libido is wounded.

But what happens to the libido itself? If the libido cannot be used in an extraverted manner, the libido has no other choice than to flow inwards. The introverted libido thus flows not towards worldly adaptation but towards the activation of the unconscious. Jung argues that this will eventually give rise to the symbol-making process (see Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par 88-113).

Thus this wounded state of libidinal repression brings about a domestication of the libidinal economy: the untrammeled primitive libido, that can be understood as sexual desire at its strongest, has been denied its nearest and most convenient outlet. The orgiastic group-minded bonding, more often than not of an incestual nature, has been blocked by severe sexual restrictions and now will flow compulsively towards culture, whose highest achievement is the creation of religious symbols.

Jung goes so far as to write that, “The secret of cultural development is the mobility and disposability of psychic energy.” (Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, par 17), which Paul Bishop translates as “The secret of the development of culture lies in the mobility of the libido, and in its capacity for transference.”

Anna Phoebe Traquair – The Red Cross Knight, left panel

Historically, it was the task of Mithraism and Christianity to start the repression of the unrestrained sexual drive coming from pagan orgies and other great mother cults, behaviors that were staunchly criticized by Saint Paul in his letters.

“Jung argues that, historically, Mithraism — and Christianity — provided the means not just to repress the libido but also to rechannel it into the projects and purposes of civilization, and he defines the function of Christianity and Mithraism as the ‘moralische Bändigung animalischer Triebe’ [‘moral restraint of animal impulses’]. Thus, Jung describes the historical function of Christianity in both negative and positive terms just as Nietzsche, in Zur Genealögie der Moral, criticises the ascetic priest for his nay-saying denial of the Will, but points out that the Will itself is nevertheless thereby saved: ‘lieber will noch der Mensch das Nichts wollen, als nicht wollen’ [‘Man would rather will nothingness than not will’]. First, and negatively, Jung claims that ‘Das Christentum mit seiner Verdrängung des manifest Sexuellen ist das Negativ des antiken Sexualkultus’ [‘Christianity; with its repression of the manifest sexual, is the negative of the ancient sexual cult’].” (Paul Bishop, The Dionysian Self: C.G. Jung’s Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche, pp.105-106, footnotes and sources of the quotations omitted)

If you’re anything like me, it can be quite hard to conceive how incestual bonding could be the source of so many problems for violent prohibitions to become a cross-cultural norm. In fact, it happens that the only thing more universal than the prohibition of incest is incest itself, as argued by Lloyd DeMause in The Universality of Incest.

To better understand how severe this issue is, we have to reach back in time and confront without idealization the reality of sexual deviancy among tribal people. There, we discover endless stories of heinous child abuse that have been documented in Lloyd DeMause’s gut-wrenching “The Origins of War in Child Abuse“. A single paragraph from Chapter 7 will suffice:

“Because of the constant brutal abuse, all schizoid tribal personalities are so insecurely attached they are extremely uncertain about their genders, and most of their adult lives replay the early gender anxieties produced by their parental incest/rejection experiences. New Guinea boys begin this replaying of embedded alters at seven, when men conduct fellatio on them, forcing their penises into the boys’ mouths and anuses the same way their mothers earlier used them both in incest and forced feeding. This oral rape begins by blaming mothers as “evil defilers” of the boys who have “polluted and weakened their sons” with their poisonous menstrual blood. This supposed pollution is countered by forcing the boys to suck the semen of men daily for years, saying, “It’s the same as your mother’s breast milk” but it will “make you a STRONG man” and will prevent them from growing into females. That raping boys orally can “make them hard” and “prevent them from being soft” may seem bizarre, but believed in wholeheartedly nonetheless.” (ibid., read online)

Such horrifying stories are nevertheless not exclusive to the past or tribal people. In 2012, the Australian authorities discovered a family who has been engaged in incest for over four generations. The Colt family “grew to nearly forty members ranging from grandparents to mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, nephews, brothers and sisters, all engaging in various forms of incest. Many of the children suffered from deformities and medical problems. School attendance was transient and happened only when welfare officers visited the family, and children needed remedial teaching once there. Some children tortured animals, mutilating their genitals, as a pastime.”

What is even more perplexing to discover is that incest—or at least its symbolic equivalent—is a foundational concept of depth psychology. The Oedipus complex, as it was introduced by Freud to the public at large, describes a dual desire: the child experiences rivalry towards the parent of the same sex and incestuous desire towards the parent of the opposite sex.

If the proposition that such a thing as the Oedipus complex existed was accepted by Jung, he did eventually distance himself from its Freudian interpretation.

“Following his letter to Freud of 3 March 1912 in which he made his ‘Declaration of Independence’, as Freud later termed it by quoting Zarathustra’s dictum ‘Man vergilt einem Lehrer schlecht, wenn man immer nur der Schuler bleibt’ [‘One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil’], Jung presented his revised view of the incest-taboo in four letters to Freud of 27 April, 8 and 17 May and 2 August 1912.
In successive steps, Jung distanced himself further and further from the idea that the incest-taboo relates to any literal sexual desire for the mother — the classic Freudian view — and instituted, in place of the figure of the forbidden maternal object, the figure of the mythical Mother. On 2 August 1912 Jung wrote to Freud: ‘Das Tatsächliche am Inzest ist doch nur die Regressivbewegung der Libido und nicht die Mutter […) Das Phantasie heißt unter Umständen, in der Regel meistens, Mutter’ [The salient fact is simply the regressive movement of libido and not the mother … In certain circumstances, indeed as a general rule, the fantasy object is called “mother” ’]. In other words, by August 1912, Jung had clearly stated that, in his view, the object of incestual desire was not the flesh-and-blood mother, but a phantastic or archetypal Mother in a sense more akin to the Mothers of Goethe’s Faust and the Primal Mother(s) (‘Urmutter’/’Mutter des Seins’) of Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie[.]” (Paul Bishop, The Dionysian Self: C.G. Jung’s Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche, p.92, sources of the quotations omitted)

Following Jung’s lead, the mythological motif of incest of the Oedipus complex must be understood as part of an archaic and universal pattern that represents the regressive movement of the libido and its longing towards the Great Mother. Thus the function of the incest drive is to reunite the ego with its own maternal background, namely the unconscious.

A similar argument can be made for the murderous rivalry of the Oedipus complex: it describes the competing attitude of the ego towards the Great Father, the Wise Old Man, a personification of the masculine spirit that endlessly calls for more individuation (see the discussion about Mercurius in my Paranoia Agent: Stories of Failed Individuation (Part Two)).

Anna Phoebe Traquair – The Red Cross Knight, center panel

With these elements at hand, we can finally understand why Jung discusses symbolic incest in the following terms:

“Whenever [the] drive for wholeness appears, it begins by disguising itself under the symbolism of incest, for, unless he seeks it in himself, a man’s nearest feminine counterpart is to be found in his mother, sister, or daughter.” (Carl Jung, The Psychology of the Transference, CW 16, par 471)

Once we start attuning to the needs of the unconscious, a process of enlargement of the personality will take place which, if the process is not derailed by positive or negative inflation, will result in more wholeness. Ultimately then, the purpose of the incest drive is a marriage of the ego and the unconscious, fertilized by the introverted movement of libido.

Incest thus is a psychic task of uniting the opposites not in matter, nor in spirit but within man himself.

“The conflict between worldliness and spirituality, latent in the love-myth of Mother and Son, was elevated by Christianity to the mystic marriage of sponsus (Christ) and sponsa (Church), whereas the alchemists transposed it to the physical plane as the coniunctio of Sol and Luna. The Christian solution of the conflict is purely pneumatic, the physical relations of the sexes being turned into an allegory or—quite illegitimately—into a sin that perpetuates and even intensifies the original one in the Garden. Alchemy, on the other hand, exalted the most heinous transgression of the law, namely incest, into a symbol of the union of opposites, hoping in this way to bring back the golden age. For both trends the solution lay in extrapolating the union of sexes into another medium: the one projected it into the spirit, the other into matter. But neither of them located the problem in the place where it arose—the soul of man.” (Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 16, par 106)

The discussion about incest is really then at what level incest is appropriate, if any. The outer form of incest is inarguably destructive and pathological but can the same be said about the inner form of incest?

In his paper “The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype“, John Laylard argues that the incest taboo had to be introduced for a two-fold purpose.

The manifest purpose of the incest taboo was the expansion of society. When marrying one’s sibling became unacceptable, cousin marriage was introduced which favored a state of mutual cooperation among historically larger and larger kinship systems. The obligation to search for a wife or a husband further than one’s blood relatives thus became an imperative towards more peace—or at least less hostility—towards foreigners.

Second, the latent purpose is what Laylard calls “the realization of the anima within”. The prohibition of incest forced the incestuous desire into an external search beyond the primacy of the mother or the sister. This unfulfilled longing was then projected onto the first cousin or second cousin. In larger kinship systems such as the one we are living in, this longing has taken the form of “the search for the one” among complete strangers.

What I am talking about is that the longing of incestuous desire has acquired the modern name of anima (or animus) projection: when “the one” is found, we fall in love and enter a frenzied state towards the other person. As Robert Johnson would say, our 110-volt love turns into a supercharged 10,000-volt love that is not manageable, nor sustainable.

This frenzy will eventually dissipate and reveal beyond our initial idealization a real person underneath it, with its flaws and eccentricities that we have been blind to. At this point, the relationship will usually break because the enchantment is gone. And even when it does not, the incestuous longing will return and will be projected once again onto another person, who will have to be claimed as an illicit lover.

This phenomenon will repeat again and again and again, creating a series of disastrous heartbreaks and failed marriages, unless one seriously wisens up. What one needs to discover is that the common element to all these 10,000-volt love is the involvement of a psychic element.

In other words, we are not really looking for another person with all its imperfections and unique traits as such—otherwise the magic would not dissipate when the person reveals more of themselves. What we are looking for is a hook in the other person onto which we can hang a psychic projection. When the other person is a close enough approximation of this hidden psychic factor, then the projection can take place and restore a momentary intimacy that we have lost and can’t live without.

This repeated experience of heightened but provisional love is not only meant to put us in contact with more reality but also to promote a specific kind of self-knowledge, namely the realization that what we have been after is something qualitatively different than a flesh and blood person. What we are looking after is really a piece of ourselves that got lost somewhere, somehow, and can only be found temporarily at the heavy price of idealization.

Anna Phoebe Traquair – The Red Cross Knight, right panel

What I have attempted to describe above is how the search for the ideal partner, the anima without, leads to the realization of the anima within. The idealness that one is looking for in a partner is in fact the projection of an inner autonomous factor that should not be sought outside but rather recollected within. Becoming aware of this essential differentiation between matter and psyche is the ultimate goal of the prohibition of incest.

“It has been my object in it to establish the two-fold purpose of the incest taboo by first demonstrating its manifest content which is the expansion of society, and then indicating its complementary opposite latent content which is the fulfilment within the psyche of that which the taboo forbids us so stringently in the flesh, namely the union with the uncontaminated mother-principle represented by the spiritual return into the womb. The words of the Salve Regina addressed to the Virgin Mother, “and after this our exile, show us the blessed fruit of thy womb Jesus” describe the process better than any. For on this level the incest taboo is the exile, which cuts mankind off from the object of his most intense desire in order that, through exile from it in the flesh, he may rediscover it in the spirit, and, having re-entered the womb, be born again.” (John Laylard, The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype, p. 307)

Learning to differentiate the inner psychic partner from the flesh and blood partner is a required step to the healing of the Fisher King.

As long as the extraverted libido does not become aware of this difference, we are falling prey to a negative state of participation mystique where one will act out incestual desires literally, creating great harm around us. On the other hand, if one is able to recollect the projections and work with the inner partner within, then the inner form of incest, ubiquitous in mythology, folklore, and alchemy, opens up and becomes a psychological reality.

“Question: would I say something more about the incestuous quality which the world utterly condemns and which has become a nasty and a dirty word in our culture?

It’s as simple as this: something which is in essence divine, the incestuous flow of energy, if taken in the right way—that is on the right level—brings the greatest flowering of Athens which the world has ever seen. Taken in the wrong way, invested outwardly—and most people in our modern world only know the outer dimension of reality and don’t know its inner dimension—becomes absolute destruction. So what I’m talking about is the level upon which something is to be taken.
If one misfires, if one misinvests this quality we are calling incestuous. If he lives it out outwardly then it is the near insoluble mess punishable by death which the world hears about. There’s no taboo more strictly enforced than the taboo of incest. But it is exactly that, it is exactly that capacity in the human bosom which brings the finest flowering of culture and of the spirit.
We’re not talking so much about incest as we are talking about the level upon which incest is useful. One hardly ever hears about the rightness of it but there it is in our myth! People hear and study the Oedipus myth and rarely get past the literal expression of it. And the Oedipus complex has come to be synonymous with the misuse of the incestuous energy. What I’m saying is that there is a correct level for it. A private, interned, interior use which is absolutely the highest form of culture.
Doctor Jung has said, “There is no culture, there is no consciousness by any other way than the incestuous investment”. Now this is the first time you’ve heard of any of this; you have to go off and live with it for quite a while and sharpen your capacity for differentiation so that you will know the difference between the inner use, which is divine, and the outer use, which is pathology.” (Robert A. Johnson: Femininity Lost and Regained, at 1:21:40)

In this article, I have hoped to show that we are at the tail end of an exceedingly long development. The compulsive development of culture that started through the Fisher King’s wound and the incest taboo has become grotesquely self-destructive. It must now be healed by the recollection of psychic contents that are lost in matter, among which is a part of our own soul.

The discussion of this topic is continued in the next article: The Psyche Lost in Sexuality.

A longer and more differentiated version of the quote that opens this article can be found in Robert Johnson’s He.

“There are six basic relationships a man bears to the feminine world. All six are useful to him and each has its own nobility. It is only the contamination of one with another that makes difficulty. These difficulties are central to a man’s passage through life. The six feminine elements in a man are:

• His human mother. This is the actual woman who was his mother, she with all her idiosyncrasies, individual characteristics, and uniqueness.
• His mother complex. This resides entirely inside the man himself. This is his regressive capacity which would like to return to a dependency on his mother and be a child again. This is a man’s wish to fail, his defeatist capacity, his subterranean fascination with death or accident, his demand to be taken care of. This is pure poison in a man’s psychology.
• His mother archetype. If the mother complex is pure poison, the mother archetype is pure gold. It is the feminine half of God, the cornucopia of the universe, mother nature, the bounty which is freely poured out to us without fail. We could not live for one minute without the bounty of the mother archetype. It is always reliable, nourishing, sustaining.
• His fair maiden. This is the feminine component in every man’s psychic structure and is the interior companion or inspirer of his life, the fair damsel. It is Blanche Fleur, one’s lady fair, Dulcinea in Don Quixote, Beatrice to Dante in the Comedia Divina. It is she who gives meaning and color to one’s life. Dr. Jung named this quality the anima, she who animates and brings life.
• His wife or partner. This is the flesh and blood companion who shares his life journey and is a human companion.
• Sophia. This is the Goddess of Wisdom, the feminine half of God, the Shekinah in Jewish mysticism. It comes as a shock to a man to discover that Wisdom is feminine, but all mythologies have portrayed it so.” (Robert Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, The Mother Complex)

As I finished writing this article, I felt the need to add two important remarks.

First, I never intended to imply that matter has no spirit in and of itself, or that matter only has a spirit when a projection is taking place. Rather, I am arguing that the idealizing power of projections blinds us to the more subtle, nonverbal clues around us. Matter has an uncanny tendency to interact with human consciousness if one is able to catch it.

Second, this article has been written specifically with anima projection in mind, and yet the problem of projection and recollection exists with every other archetype. In fact, I would argue that any drive that goes from 110-volt to 10,000-volt should be a source of introspection.

More importantly, this article needs to be rewritten from the perspective of feminine psychology where the Oedipus complex is replaced by the Electra complex, the Fisher King’s wound is replaced by the Handless Maiden, the anima by the animus, the mother complex by the father complex and so on and so forth.

“Feminine wounds are almost always cured by being still. A man, or the masculine side of a woman, generally has to take an outwardly heroic stance with his problems. Our mythology is full of the heroic man who mounts his white horse and goes galloping off to do the heroic deed, which is his way of addressing the wrongs of life. We are all aware of the masculine ideal of heroism which has been ingrained in us from the medieval world to our own times—from the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table to Star Trek. But woman’s genius is quite the reverse. When a woman is aware of her problem, the healing comes spontaneously and from the depths of her nature. Solitude is the feminine equivalent of masculine heroic action.

He fights; she reconciles. More accurately, these are the masculine and feminine ways whether they are found in a man or in a woman.” (Robert Johnson, The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden, The Handless Maiden)

If it appears that feminine and masculine psychology can be applied to a man or a woman interchangeably, there are also distinctions to be made between male and female psychology. For instance, animus projection is defined as a female phenomenon whereas anima projection is a male phenomenon. Outlining a psychology that distinguishes and/or reconciles these two perspectives is a task reserved for the future.

The technique that I use for recollecting projections is a variant of this guided meditation by Richard C. Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems.

A guided meditation by Richard Schwartz

Similarly to the guided meditation, I set up a safe environment made of two rooms separated by a one-way glass mirror, such as the ones used in interrogation rooms.

Then, in a meditative and relaxed state, I focus on the symbol that I believe carries a projection. I imagine it to be present in the other room, behind the glass. This symbol can be a real person but a digital or fictional character works as well.

Separated by the mirror, I observe the symbol and I ask myself, “How do I feel towards this symbol?”

I aspire to reach a neutral state towards it, one that is best described by the 8 C’s of IFS: Compassion, Creativity, Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, Calm, Connectedness, Clarity.

This means that I ask myself, “Do I feel compassion towards this symbol?” then “Do I feel curious, connected, calm towards this symbol?” or “Do I feel confidence, courage, clarity, and creative towards this symbol?”

As long as the answer to any of these questions is no, it means that an emotional drive is engaged and prevents the ego from being in a safe relationship with the symbol. If this happens, I would recommend not going any further before addressing these emotions first. This can range from trying this exercise in a safer setting, learning to work through overwhelming emotions, or having to be assisted by a therapist.

Once this neutral state is reached, move your attention away from the symbol and start observing the room around you. You should be able to sense one or many presences.

These presences are parts of the psyche, or complexes, that are related to the symbol.

These parts need to be engaged with respect. They all have played an important role so far and have something to say. Acknowledge them and listen to them like you would listen to your best friend. Let them tell you why they are so concerned about what’s behind the glass.

The dialog that one needs to have towards these parts requires great maturity. One must leave aside any and all manipulative tendencies. Only by doing so will one be able to build intimacy towards these parts that have been protecting us for extended periods of time. It’s worth repeating that, in this delicate work of relating properly to parts of the psyche, nothing can be guaranteed unless one is acting with honor, love, and gratitude.

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