The Devouring Mother Archetype(jungian) And the Watchtower Corporation's Self Identification As Mother And Jehovah As Father

by Brokeback Watchtower 31 Replies latest watchtower medical

  • Brokeback Watchtower
    Brokeback Watchtower

    The devouring mother must be always listen to and obeyed it is the negative side of the anima image and it rules over the Watchtower Corporation. Jehovah(corporation's imaginary sock puppet) is the father figure with his masculine macho swagger he gains victory over every detractor and his huge narcissistic personality demands exclusive devotion from everyone or it's the death penalty, he suffers from an inflated ego and has a very dark and evil shadow due to denial of his dark nature/Satan(scape goat).

    The children or rank and file pee on dedicated members of the corporation must now engage in worthless pursuits to satisfy a mood swinging domineering mother and a murderous self righteous father all the while being shown a very contemptible form of conditional love, accompanied with constant death threat reminders and a carrot on a sting to keep them focused on such and busy with worthless pursuits for a hopeless cause. A real master piece of manipulation.

    A truely non functional family if ever there was and lets not talk about mistreatment of the grand children who are farmed out to work in a mom&pop business of selling books,cheap magazines, and construction work even while a dedicated minor.

    http://www.carl-jung.net/anima.html

    The most known anima image is the mother archetype. It rules over the mother-son relationship. Therefore it is projected onto the mother image. We know of such female figures from the cultural and religious themes. Virgin Mary or Mother Earth and other such mythical figures may lead us to the mother archetype.
    Just like any archetype, the mother archetype has a positive as well as negative side. Her positive side is the birthing, nurturing and care giving, the comfort she brings to all souls as the Holly Virgin. She is ready to sacrifice her life for the sake of her child. Or she is the savior of the decayed men - The Sophia or the Wisdom of God from the Gnostic mythology.
    The other side, the negative one, is the devouring mother, depicted in such images as animals of feminine nature such as Gorgon. A few words about the Gorgon:
    In Greek mythology, a Gorgon [...] is a female creature. The name derives from the ancient Greek word gorgós, which means "dreadful". While descriptions of Gorgons vary across Greek literature and occur in the earliest examples of Greek literature, the term commonly refers to any of three sisters who had hair made of living, venomous snakes, as well as a horrifying visage that turned those who beheld her to stone. Traditionally, while two of the Gorgons were immortal, Stheno and Euryale, their sister Medusa was not, and she was slain by the demigod and hero Perseus. (From Wikipedia)
    Gorgons lead also to the seductive aspect of mother-son relationship. This is a very dangerous situation as the son will never be able to free himself from his mother eros thus being doomed to the psychological death or the loss of his capability to evolve, from child to mature person.
    Carl Jung used to illustrate the destructive mother figure reminding us of She(That Must Be Obeyed), the heroine of the Rider Haggard's well-known novel.
    Let me conclude with the phallic mother, a figure closer to the girl psychological history. She is the one who gave her daughter the envied penis. As such she appears in the daughters' dreams and fantasies.
    In relationship with the boy this figure represents a mixture of father and mother archetypes. Its constellation may be linked with the missing of the natural father in the son's life and the compensation it should bring.

    nn





  • Brokeback Watchtower
    Brokeback Watchtower

    http://whatthehellisthis.net/tag/devouring-mother/

    “The telephone is ringing, is that my mother on the phone?” wails Andy Summers of The Police, like a man having a breakdown, on their calliope-from-hell Synchronicity track Mother. “Telephone is SCREAMING, won’t she LEAVE me alone?” His unmelodic howls are the sound of a child being consumed by Kali, or perhaps Medusa, mythical Devouring Mothers.
    No doubt anyone with a distant, indifferent, or downright cruel mother will think that what I’m about to expound upon is a self-indulgent non-problem, and that I’m a horrible, ungrateful child. But those who grew up with mothers who behaved in an over-involved, invasive, controlling, or obsessive manner, all in the name of love, will know exactly what I’m talking about. And know exactly what Summers was yelling about. “Oh mother dear, please listen, and don’t DEVOUR me!”
    Far on into life, the umbilical cord is still wrapped around our necks, and we’re suffocating.
    **
    Psychology that makes use of myths and archetypes, particularly Freudian and Jungian psychology, posits as one of its primary characters the dark counterpart of the loving, nurturing Good Mother: the devouring, engulfing annihilator of identity Jung called the “Terrible Mother.” Terrible not necessarily in the colloquial sense of “bad,” but powerful and demonic: a woman driven by fear, anger, and/or insatiable emotional hunger, seeking to overpower and bind her offspring to her forever.
    How confusing for a child to be presented with both mothers at the same time. Love becomes confused with control and manipulation; independence and individuation become like a major insurrection. This is actually not too far afield of the characterization of God that Bible-believing Christians are required to worship. I am the personification of love, so it goes. If I love you, I must control you; if you separate from me, in your selfishness, I will pursue you and blot you out. The destruction is not literal in the case of the Mother (as it is with the Father-God), but more of a smothering of the separate self.
    Boys are forced, in the process of becoming men, to separate more decisively from Mother than girls are, an initiation that can prove emotionally crippling and affect all of their later relationships…but girls often have what are called “merged attachments” with their mothers that aren’t exactly healthy, either. Mutual over-identification can result in a claustrophobic lack of boundaries and the snuffing of any conflicting differentiating thoughts or desires. (What gets snuffed, and stuffed, however, doesn’t go away — it just winds up in the pressure cooker of repression, slowly turning to rage that may one day blow the lid off.)
    While sons may sacrifice relationship to become autonomous adults, daughters will sacrifice becoming autonomous adults to maintain relationship.
    **
    I’ve been experiencing bouts of rage, and falling into ancient feedback loops in my brain about the futility of trying to live my own life as an adult, ever since my mother joined Facebook and began hovering over my every move. Not only does it cramp my style and inhibit my self-expression, but I’ve been bombarded with messages inquiring about my cryptic status updates and making judgments about my subject matter. She writes on my wall and comments on my posted items. (My friends, in the meantime, fall silent, and the ones from whom I most want to hear say nothing for weeks.) She even downloaded a photo from my page, blew it up, and began obsessing about whether or not I was eating enough. (What doesn’t make sense is that it’s like pulling teeth to get the smallest financial assist from my parents, but she can waste hours and hours of a day fretting herself into a lather about my imaginary starvation.) She hasn’t said anything publicly humiliating, at least not yet. Most of her public comments sound like the quintessential supportive mother. And she does have those Good Mother qualities: when I was completely dependent and undifferentiated, she was completely loving and nurturing.
    But she has become, in effect, my stalker.
    There are several good reasons why I moved two thousand miles away from my family of origin. One was to stretch the apron strings to the breaking point, which worked, mostly, for a while, at least in terms of minimizing fresh incidents. But now, thanks to the miracle of the Internets, my mother can pick up where she left off twenty years ago, and virtually micromanage me to her heart’s content.

    C

    **

  • Brokeback Watchtower
    Brokeback Watchtower

    The dis functional family where suppressed evil through denial is never acknowledge and the brain function atrophy through lack of use and rigid thought control and question supression. Listen and obey or else scorn and dissatifaction are heaped on the children to satisfy corporate greed and dissolution of one's own individuality and become just a faceless wheel in the machinery meat for the grinder unrecognizable from its natural form:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=302&v=YR5ApYxkU-U

  • fulltimestudent
    fulltimestudent

    Imbuing something that is non-human, with the characteristics of a human is fraught with risk. Few people seem to think that Yahweh's organisation is as kind and loving as a human mother is commonly imagined (Galatians 4:26)

    Aside from the harsh treatment that many here have experienced at the hands of their 'mother,' there's the not so small problem, tha, in the imagination of Christians 'she' is shortly going to kill billions of people.

    So most here have come to picture their supposedly loving 'mother' as just another vicious, wicked old bitch!

  • Oubliette
    Oubliette

    BrokebackWatchtower, I don't know if you saw my reply to your reference to Jung on another thread (you didn't respond), so I'll repeat it here:

    Although, Jung’s work has made some contributions to mainstream psychology, generally modern psychologists do not employ his ideas into their theories of personality and mind. In particular, they do not give much credence to his theory of archetypes.

    Ernest Jones (Freud’s biographer) wrote that Jung “descended into a pseudo-philosophy out of which he never emerged” and to many his ideas look more like New Age mystical speculation than a scientific contribution to psychology.

    You might find this article written by Saul McLeod informative:

    Simply Psychology: Carl Jung

    -

    Similar things can be said about Freud

  • Brokeback Watchtower
    Brokeback Watchtower

    The mother figure in mythology has both a dark side and a good side if we apply this anima/feminine figure to be our mother in the minds of the indoctrinated she good and nurturing(good mother) to the unindoctrinated and unbiased she is the mother from hell that will throw her kids under the bus to save herself.

    The same applies to the animus figure or father.

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freudian-sip/201103/jung-dummies-animus-planet-0
    Long before I knew about Jung, I knew about "animus". I didn't know what the name was, but I had known my animus for YEARS. There was the dark animus who had harassed me since I was ten. In my nightmares, this faceless man had chased me and threatened me and insisted I didn't look at him. I thought, as most would do at 10, that he was my bogeyman and it certainly didn't occur to me that he was a psychological complex and/or an archetype. Years later there were positive animus figures who showed up in my dreams and they completed me. With them, I felt strong, self-confident, smart and loved. Then I would wake up, crushed and completely lost without him. The details of some of my positive animus dreams have stayed with me longer than memories of actual men I have dated.
    Just in case you don't know anima from anime, let me try to break this down for you. The first task of individuation, consciousness or just not being an unconscious git is to pull back our projections(link is external)(link is external) and become aware of our shadow(link is external)(link is external). Once we have done that, we then need to integrate the inner opposite gender aspect of ourselves. In fancy terms, we need to integrate our unconscious contrasexual nature, or we haven't become all we can be (I didn't intend to quote an Army commercial but my animus-inspired Muse made me do it). Men have anima figures that function as their soul, and women have animus figures.
    The anima is something each guy has; no matter how butch or bad ass or unevolved he may be, he has an inner feminine even if he is completely disconnected from it When you think of anima, think of Dante's Beatrice, Jerry McGuire and the gal who completes him or the other one who makes him jump on the couch like it was a trampoline at a kid's birthday party, or that Twilighty vampire guy and the human he loves too much. These are literary versions of what happens internally. Dante needed his anima, his soul, or he was in hell. Jerry needed Renee Zellweger or he was just a soulless agent. Vampirey guy has no soul and so he needs Anima figure to get one (he also needs sunblock but that is a different post). And women have animus figures; this is really at the core of every romance novel. Heroines often explain of their hero, "He completes me." But the he that completes you is in fact an inner he; he is your animus.
    Note to reader: please read the following passage from Jung in your head or out loud in a thick Swiss accent.
    Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or "archetype" of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman-in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man.
    "Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925) In CW 17: The Development of thePersonality. P.338
    The animus, according to Jung, is both a personal complex and an archetypal image that exists within all women. This is not easy stuff to boil down, so let me have my good friend Carl Gustav Jung say it for himself (and no he doesn't have a blog and you can't friend him on Facebook).
    The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman's ancestral experiences of man-and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being, not in the sense of masculinecreativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might call . . . the spermatic word.["Anima and Animus," CW 7, par. 336.]
    The animus in women isn't so much a soul figure, as the anima is in men. The animus is more of an inner guy who is loaded "with fixed ideas, collective opinions and unconscious a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth. In a woman who is identified with the animus (called animus-possession), Eros generally takes second place to Logo(link is external)(link is external)s." I was, prior to lots of work, such a gal. I had a serious animus complex. I tended to idealize the masculine and logos over the feminine and feeling. The animus is also a bridge to the Self (yikes, me trying to explain the Self (link is external)(link is external)could take a while. Suffice it to say the Self is what you are after in Jungian psychology and it is the more transcendent/trans-personal part of yourself). Here is what my dead and somewhat sexist friend and the Father of Analytic Psychology has to say on the subject:
    Like the anima, the animus too has a positive aspect. Through the figure of the father he expresses not only conventional opinion but-equally-what we call "spirit," philosophical orreligious ideas in particular, or rather the attitude resulting from them. Thus the animus is a psychopomp, a mediator between the conscious and the unconscious and a personification of the latter.[Ibid., par. 33.]
    That is the last I am going to quote Jung for a while because he had some serious issues about women with large animus figures. Really, it is almost unbearable to read his writings on the subject without wanting to cast aspersions on his manhood and suggest he get asports car and a Costco size vat of Viagra. I think it is safe to say that Jung he had a very small, ahem, *animus*. Truly, for a guy being surrounded by super smart women he had some serious biases about women. I know it was the time in which he lived, but it can still be hard to read his theories on women without occasionally wanting to throw out the Basel-born Jung with the bath water.
    Differentiation is the key in working with animus. The animus tends to be bossy and opinionated and has answer for everything...mine certainly did/does. What one wants to do is differentiate the messages that come from you (the ego) and those that come from the animus; that way, you are conscious of where these messages come from and that gives you more freedom to take or leave the Old Testament truths that the animus likes to impose.
    And since my animus was unusually large (before I learned to differentiate my animus), I had a hard time being around groups of women. This made attending grad school in my chosen field a little hard(as of late, Psychology has become a mostly female profession) and made it harder still to attend a conference given by Marion Woodman(link is external)(link is external), the grand poobah of Jungian Femininity, on the Feminine in which all of the attendants were garbed in shawls and gypsy skirts and Goddess necklaces. My animus was repulsed by the idea when I suggested we attend.
    "Are you kidding me?" My animus asked. "This isn't for us. This is too touchy-feely. Where is the intellect? Where is the logic? Hell no, we won't go," it shouted in a chant of self-preservation.
    There was a big part of me that agreed with my animus and wanted to hightail it out of the Hilton Ballroom in which this estrogen-rich event was set. However, I knew that my animus had been running the show for far too long, and at the time I was trying to learn about mothering, as most of my practice had been filled with college-aged girls who had mother wounds and my mother wound had left me feeling like it was MUCH better to identify with the masculine. I knew that Marion Woodman had something to teach me about the feminine. So I did some differentiation work with my animus. In my imagination, I booked my animus a suite at Caesar's Palace. I gave him cigars and booze and chips and gift certificates to steak houses and strip clubs. I told him to leave me alone for the weekend so I could get to know myself independent of him and that I would be back for him on Monday. My animus agreed. And it worked. This was the beginning of me differentiating from my animus. I began to see what thoughts, ideas and feelings were mine and which were from the animus. This was big and it was totally worth being a part of Shawl Fest 2006. That said, I am still pretty identified with my animus--only now my animus is more positive and not the dark one that so long tormented me.
  • Brokeback Watchtower
    Brokeback Watchtower

    Oublie,

    Yeah I read your other post. Jungian psychology is still practiced today it has not been discredited just type in Jungian analyst with your zip code and you will find it is still use in psychoanalysis.

    Thanks for the link I don't see anything in the link that would even suggest that his form of analytical psychology has been out dated.

    For those that are interested I provide this link about archetypes:

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/20/jung-archetypes-structuring-principles

    Jung took the inner life seriously. He believed that dreams are not just a random jumble of associations or repressed wish fulfilments. They can contain truths for the individual concerned. They need interpreting, but when understood aright, they offer a kind of commentary on life that often acts as a form of compensation to what the individual consciously takes to be the case. A dream Jung had in 1909 provides a case in point.
    He was in a beautifully furnished house. It struck him that this fine abode was his own and he remarked, "Not bad!" Oddly, though, he had not explored the lower floor and so he descended the staircase to see. As he went down, the house got older and darker, becoming medieval on the ground floor. Checking the stone slabs beneath his feet, he found a metal ring, and pulled. More stairs led to a cave cut into the bedrock. Pots and bones lay scattered in the dirt. And then he saw two ancient human skulls, and awoke.
    Jung interpreted the dream as affirming his emerging model of the psyche. The upper floor represents the conscious personality, the ground floor is the personal unconscious, and the deeper level is the collective unconscious – the primitive, shared aspect of psychic life. It contains what he came to call archetypes, the feature we shall turn to now. They are fundamental to Jung's psychology.
    Archetypes can be thought of simply as structuring principles. For example, falling in love is archetypal for human beings. Everyone does it, at least once, and although the pattern is common, each time it feels new and inimitable.
    Hence, Cleopatra was the lover of both Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, though Caesar fell in love with her when she appeared from the folds of a carpet, whereas what worked for Antony was her appearing resplendent in great state on a barge. "When an archetype is constellated, our whole body is engaged and its emotional arousal focuses and motivates us with a force that is very difficult to resist," writes John Ryan Haule.
    A related feature of archetypes is that, while they shape our perceptions and behaviour, we only become conscious of them indirectly, as they are manifest in particular instances. It is rather like Schopenhauer and Kant's notion of the inaccessibility of the "thing-in-itself", upon which Jung drew: you can't experience archetypes directly but only when they are incarnated. This would explain why, for example, Buddhists tend not to have visions of Jesus, and Christians tend not to have visions of Siddhartha Gautama. Instead, religious believers relate to the archetype of the wise man via the images available to them in their culture (given, for the sake of argument, that wisdom is what Jesus or the Buddha represent).


    The theory of archetypes is controversial, and Jung did not help himself in this respect. For one thing, he is not very consistent in his definition of archetypes – though he can perhaps be forgiven as he explicitly called himself a "borrower" of models and insights from other fields of knowledge, in his attempts to grapple with his own. Archetypes have also variously been accused of being Lamarckian and superfluous, on the grounds that cultural transmission provides an adequate explanation for the phenomena that Jung would put down to psychic universals.
  • Half banana
    Half banana

    Brokeback, I’ll settle for the archetype of the ’terrible devouring mother’ figure of the JW org leadership. I'm certain they feel a warm glow as they congratulate themselves in their self attribution as the "mother organisation." How far this is from the reality!

    In practice it insists on 'grooming' and demanding absolute unthinking obedience of its putative children but its motive is not maternal in the human sense of devoted care. It is the reverse; it is to profit from its would-be offspring, to maintain a stranglehold and to keep their charges in an infantilised state to feed off them... Nice!

  • doofdaddy
    doofdaddy
    Create another Fbook account and pm all who you want on it and set it to private. I too enjoy Jung's theories. As far as his conclusions, don't take anything written by a Freudian seriously. Freud wanted Jung to take over his egoistic empire and when Jung refused, Freud banished him. Yes very similar to being disfellowshipped and his minions have continued the hate ever since....
  • Xanthippe
    Xanthippe
    However, Jung’s work has also contributed to mainstream psychology in at least one significant respect. He was the first to distinguish the two major attitudes or orientations of personality – extroversion and introversion. He also identified four basic functions (thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting) which in a cross-classification yield eight pure personality types.
    Psychologists like Hans Eysenck and Raymond Cattell have subsequently built upon this. As well as being a cultural icon for generations of psychology undergraduates Jung therefore put forward ideas which were important to the development of modern personality theory.

    This is the conclusion of Saul Mcleod's article which Oubliette cited, showing Jung's contributions to mainstream psychology which are far from trivial; extroversion, introversion and personality types utilised by Briggs and Myers.

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