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“Woman needs man and man must have his mate”
-Herman Hupfeld, As Time Goes By
“Woman always stands just where the man's shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two.”
-Carl Jung, Women in Europe
The nature of relationships between men and women has fascinated psychologists and songwriters for decades. The idea of woman as animus originated with Carl Jung, who believed that the remote unreality of the mother was a model for the child’s subsequent idealization of women.
Why do some men seem always to choose the same type of woman, regardless of the woman’s suitability for him? Jung, believing that the love we receive as infants from our mother is the root of all the growth and change we experience through the course of our life, deduced that the mother represents the totality of life, in which we are but a small part. Only by regaining the mother can we return to the great silent from which everything originates and everything ends.
Is romantic love, then, as simple as falling in love with the first mother image we encounter, and repeating this encounter throughout the whole of our sexual life? It is not that simple. Our experience of a mother’s love is too profound for an erotic substitute to be satisfactory. Therefore, goddesses are created, which both eternalizes and humanizes the idealized mother figure.
Since the middle Ages, man’s psychological relationship to women has been expressed in the collective worship of the Virgin Mary. This impact of idealizing a shared image resulted in the devaluation of flesh and blood women. This Goddess figure, born in the collective unconscious, activated the collective libido of Western man, transforming the humble mother into a terrible witch who held the fates of men in her malevolently mutable heart.
Thus, the loving mother, symbolized in the pure and stainless eternality of the Mother of Christ, became the siren, the femme fatale, the symbol of death-in-life and life-in-death. And every man was destined to meet, confront, and resolve his relationship with his mother through the awakening of a primordial and eternal image of the mother for whose sake everything that embraces, protects, nourishes, and helps assumes maternal form, from the Alma Mater of the university to the personification of cities, countries, sciences and ideals.
The more remote and distant the mother was, the stronger will be the yearning of the son to reconnect with her on these volatile platforms. Chances are, he will have no idea this is what he is doing during the stages of his serial polygamies with the women who share the characteristics that unconsciously bind him to a maternal memory. These relationships will likely begin in a romanticized love that issues at first sight, then degenerates into domestic squabbles that are likely to be replays of the unforgotten conflicts between his mother and father during his childhood. If he realizes he is taking on the characteristics of his father, self-hatred is likely to result, ending in sexual dysfunction that may be alleviated through sado-masochistic role-playing.
The concept of negative destiny arises from the impossibility of these conscious relationships to coalesce with the unconscious stimulus of the mother love that has given them inception. Infantile man is bound to his cruel anima by a dissociated libido projected upon and external object. One might as well attempt to write a happy ending to Hamlet as to imagine a way out of this erotic conundrum. Jung writes that “the whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, and carbohydrates.”
So it seems that man is destined for a series of entanglements with an idealized and temporal love object that he attempts to force into the lost memory of a primordial and eternal mother image. Were it not so, we would not have Rick obsessing over Ilsa in “Casablanca.” Ilsa would not be encouraging Sam to play “As time Goes By” at the piano, and Rick would not be saying, after gritting his teeth and accepting the inevitable, “If she can take it, so can I.” We wouldn’t even have the song, or the hundreds of thousands of songs that keep re-iterating the same theme of man’s need for woman and the desolation that is so often the result of that need.
The worst case of this entanglement results in what Jung termed ‘anima possession,” a state that he believed should be prevented at any cost. He defined anima possession as a state wherein the anima is forced into the inner world, where she functions as the medium between the ego and the unconscious, as does the persona between the ego and the environment.” It is the presence of such a medium that leads to personality breaks, and all hell is unleashed.
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