Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

by Murray B. Stein

Men may buy and sell women, treat and mistreat them, but the one that truly deadens the animus of a woman is the mother.

Not the good mother, the nurturing and loving mother, the caring mother, but the mother who sells out, who is silent when the daughter is physically or emotionally abused, who will not stand up to the man who says to her daughter that he likes to see women on their knees.

The mother shapes the daughter, and the daughter’s central struggle is to become freed from an identity with

the controlling mother within. In

This transformation of the servant-girl ego into the authority of the Queen comes about through making contact with the animus within and through redeeming him. When this is done, the animus comes into contact with the creative instinct, and the woman can become spiritually creative. She has inner authority.

This severe negative mother complex will block individuation until it is resolved. It is the stuck place in patriarchal culture.

The complex has a will of its own—one that is often stronger than the ego’s capacity to resist.

Active imagination, however, is an activity that is undertaken in solitude, by oneself, rather than in the presence of another. It works on the vertical axis rather than the horizontal, and its function is to constellate a Hermetic psychic space within the individual.