Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology

by C. G. Jung

The difference between mother and daughter amounts to 3·0.

With the exception of a few cases of married couples (where the difference fell to 1·4) these are the lowest differences. In Fürst's work there was a case where the difference between the forty-five year old mother and her sixteen year old daughter was only 0·5. But it was just in this case that the mother and daughter differed from the father's type by 11·8. The father is a coarse, stupid man, an alcoholic; the mother goes in for Christian Science. This corresponds with the fact that mother and daughter exhibit an extreme word-predicate type,[155] which is, in my experience, important semeiotically for the diagnosis of insufficiency in the sexual object. The word-predicate type transparently applies an excessive amount of emotion externally and displays emotions with the unconscious, but nevertheless obvious, endeavour to awaken echoing emotions in the experimenter. This view closely corresponds with the fact that in Fürst's material the number of word-predicates increases with the age of the subjects experimented upon.

The fact of the extreme similarity between the reaction-type of the offspring and the parents is matter for thought. The association experiment is nothing but a small section from the psychological life of a man. At bottom daily life is nothing but an extensive and many-varied association experiment; in essence we react in life just as we do in the experiments. Although this truth is evident, still it requires a certain consideration and limitation. Let us take as an instance the case of the unhappy mother of forty-five years and her unmarried daughter of sixteen. The extreme word-predicate type of the mother is, without doubt, the precipitate of a whole life of disappointed hopes and wishes. One is not in the least surprised at the word-predicate type here. But the daughter of sixteen has really not yet lived at all; her real sexual object has not yet been found, and yet she reacts as if she were her mother with endless disillusions behind her. She has the mother's adaptation, and in so far she is identified with the mother. There is ample evidence that the mother's adaptation must be attributed to her relationship to the father. But the daughter is not married to the father and therefore does not need this adaptation. She has taken it over from the influence of her milieu, and later on will try to adapt herself to the world with this familial disharmony. In so far as an ill-assorted marriage is unsuitable, the adaptation resulting from it is unsuitable.

Clearly such a fate has many possibilities. To adapt herself to life, this girl either will have to surmount the obstacles of her familial milieu, or, unable to free herself from them, she will succumb to the fate to which such an adaptation predisposes her. Deep within, unnoticed by any one, there may go on a glossing over of the infantile disharmony, or a development of the negative of the parents' character, accompanied by hindrances and conflicts to which she herself has no clue. Or, growing up, she will come into painful conflict with that world of actualities to which she is so ill-adapted till one stroke of fate after another gradually opens her eyes to the fact that it is herself, infantile and maladjusted, that is amiss. The source of infantile adaptation to the parents is naturally the affective condition on both sides; the psycho-sexuality of the parents on one side and that of the child on the other. It is a kind of psychical infection; we know that it is not logical truth, but affects and their psychical expressions[156] which are here the effective forces. It is these that, with the power of the herd-instinct, press into the mind of the child, there fashioning and moulding it. In the plastic years between one and five there have to be worked out all the essential formative lines which fit exactly into the parental mould. Psychoanalytic experience teaches us that, as a rule, the first signs of the later conflict between the parental constellation and individual independence, of the struggle between repression and libido (Freud), occur before the fifth year.

The few following histories will show how this parental constellation obstructs the adaptation of the offspring. It must suffice to present only the chief events of these, that is the events of sexuality.

Case 1.—A well-preserved woman of 55; dressed poorly but carefully in black with a certain elegance, the hair carefully dressed; a polite, obviously affected manner, precise in speech, a devotee. The patient might be the wife of a minor official or shopkeeper. She informs me, blushing and dropping her eyes, that she is the divorced wife of a common peasant. She has come to the hospital on account of depression, night terrors, palpitations, slight nervous twitchings in the arms, thus presenting the typical features of a slight climacteric neurosis. To complete the picture, she adds that she suffers from severe anxiety-dreams; in her dreams some man seems to be pursuing her, wild animals attack her, and so on.

Her anamnesis begins with the family history. (So far as possible I give her own words.) Her father was a fine, stately, rather corpulent man of imposing appearance. He was very happy in his marriage, for her mother worshipped him. He was a clever man, a master-mechanic, and held a dignified and honourable position. There were only two children, the patient and an elder sister. The sister was the mother's, and the patient her father's favourite. When the patient was five years old the father died suddenly from a stroke, at the age of forty-two. The patient felt herself very isolated and was from that time treated by the mother and the elder sister as the Cinderella. She noticed clearly enough that her mother preferred her sister to herself. Her mother remained a widow, her respect for her husband being too great to allow her to marry a second time. She preserved his memory "like a religious cult" and brought up her children in this way.

Later on the sister married, relatively young; the patient did not marry till twenty-four. She never cared for young men, they all seemed insipid; her mind turned always to more mature men. When about twenty she became acquainted with a stately gentleman rather over forty, to whom she was much drawn. For various reasons the friendship was broken off. At twenty-four she became acquainted with a widower who had two children. He was a fine, stately, somewhat corpulent man, and had an imposing presence, like her father; he was forty-four. She married him and respected him enormously. The marriage was childless; the children by the first marriage died from an infectious disease. After four years of married life her husband also died. For eighteen years she remained his faithful widow. But at forty-six (just before the menopause) she experienced a great need of love. As she had no acquaintances she went to a matrimonial agency and married the first comer, a peasant of some sixty years who had been already twice divorced on account of brutality and perverseness; the patient knew this before marriage. She remained five unbearable years with him, when she also obtained a divorce. The neurosis set in a little later.

No further discussion will be required for those with psychoanalytic experience; the case is too obvious. For those unversed in psychoanalysis let me point out that up to her forty-sixth year the patient did but reproduce most faithfully the milieu of her earliest youth. The sexuality which announced itself so late and so drastically, even here only led to a deteriorated edition of the father-surrogate; to this she is brought by this late-blossoming sexuality. Despite repression, the neurosis betrays the ever-fluctuating eroticism of the aging woman who still wants to please (affectation) but dares not acknowledge her sexuality.