The Nanny State and the Eternal Child
This week I read The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, a series of transcripts from lectures given by Marie-Louise von Franz on the topic of the eternal child (puer aternus). Her thesis is that some young men develop a mother complex, which is a fixation on the mother image, the archetype of solace and security. Every man has a mother image, but in some men something knots in childhood, and the image becomes obsessive. It is not necessarily the fault of the human mother, though it often is; it can just as well be caused by the absence of a mother as by an overbearing mother. Daryl Sharp says that “at the heart of any mother complex is an image, on one hand, of nourishment and security, and, on the other, of devouring possessiveness.” Most young men afflicted with strong mother complexes struggle to grow up: they remain pueri aeterni.
Von Franz calls the preponderance of pueri aeterni a problem of her time. She says the mother complex interferes with a man’s sexuality, either leading to Don Juanism (the search for the mother image in a succession of women, creating a succession of disappointments) or homosexuality (when the man’s heterosexuality is tied up exclusively with his mother). A trend toward both these qualities was incipient when von Franz spoke in 1960; I would say both trends have since accelerated.
The mother complex draws men back. Where they might advance boldly into life, the mother complex pulls them backwards to the warm safety of childhood. It tends to paralyse a man, causing him to doubt himself and feel incapable of forging his own path. It is linked to addiction, and the inability to express emotions healthily, leading to suppression and/or outbursts. On the other hand, a pronounced mother image (which is the mother complex) can lead to tremendous emotional sensitivity and compassion, a capacity for friendship, a deep spirituality, a near-heroic idealism, curiosity, and the urge to change the world; a puer aeternus retains the sparkle and creativity of childhood into his adult years. But that creativity generally remains abstract: like the writer who prefers dreams to novels, the puer never lets his fantasies be sullied by their own realisation. He lives what Jung called “a provisional life,” and is always trying to escape definition. Nothing, and no one, is ever quite good enough for him to commit to fully. He never finds the dedication to learn anything through and through. He wants other people to solve his problems for him. He feels increasingly worthless, and may escape this feeling by chasing highs. He resists the urge to grow. He insists on remaining abstract.
But enough of my clumsy Jungianism. My point is that an overbearing mother can cripple a young man. At the very least, she leaves a wound, the healing of which may create beautiful qualities. My second point is that not all mothers are human. Just as we are raised by our parents, we are also raised also by our schools, governments, ideologies, and media. We are raised by the State.
Von Franz says that every mother must walk a thin line between loving her son unconditionally, and also letting him be free. She says the first freedom, and the most fundamental, is the freedom to fall, and be hurt. It is the freedom to fall off a skateboard and break your arm, it is the freedom to fall in love and have your heart broken, it is the freedom to try something bold, and fail. Von Franz says the first step to becoming a man is learning to withstand pain. A man who remains afraid of bruises is never really free.
It seems to me, increasingly, that the government wants to protect its children from all forms of pain. We must wear seatbelts in cars, we must wear helmets when we ride bikes; we must not light fires on beaches, we must not go to Woolworths without a mask. Perhaps each of these measures is rational in itself, but one upon another, they add up. Bars close at 1am so no one gets punched, people get fined for not swimming between the flags. Every day I see an ad trying to guilt me out of walking in the sunshine. We have safe spaces, participation awards, and trigger warnings. In the last week, both Scotland and Canada passed laws limiting what people can say online. The legal threshold for hate speech has historically been that words must not incite violence; year by year, that threshold is sinking towards a new definition that words must not give offence.
It seems that the principles of safety and freedom have become divorced in the public mind, and we do not realise that every time the government makes us safer, it is also makes us less free. Of course, the threat of tyranny grows with each restriction of the individual’s freedom, but it is up to history to say whether we will fall prey to tyrants. What is clear, right now, in front of our faces, is the effect of too much safety on the young. Almost every time I meet a young person in Australia (especially in the cities), I am struck by how Japanese they seem to me. They have such tension in their shoulders, such childish and rigid movements of the arms, they shuffle when they walk, they always seem to be looking at the ground; they suffer from a constriction, both physical and emotional, the severity of which I cannot recall in my own generation. It is a lack of vitality, an emotional impotence, the inability to roar. They are a hissing pot of bubbling suppressed emotion that occasionally lets out a choreographed, memetic squeak. There is such little individuality, and such fragility, as though a slap or a harsh would shatter them like glass. I cannot imagine my grandparents’ generation being so childish. I also cannot imagine my grandparents’ generation being as emotionally aware or as intellectually flexible; but I certainly cannot imagine them being as downcast and frail.
Our lives are becoming too cushioned. We spend too much time in padded rooms, taking stress pills and checking Instagram. Some years ago, when I moved to the country, I authored the Johnston Theorem of Neurosis, that people are neurotic in inverse proportion to the amount of time they spend with their feet in the grass, or the sea, or a stream, or on a mountain trail. When you live in concrete, your thoughts bounce back at you; when you live with nature, the earth makes you fresh. On a practical note, von Franz says that the solution to the problem of the eternal child is just to work: to take up some task, and work at it, even when it bores you, even when you find it hard. To work at a job, to work at a relationship, to work at your education, to work at your art. Many of us live too rigidly, and have lost the ability to melt into a moment. Equally, many of us (and there is tremendous overlap between the two groups) do not know how to bend the world to our will. Miss von Franz says the solution is simply to start, and then to persevere.
Peter Pan
From Undergrounder