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<p>Psychodynamic approaches to pastoral counselling and spiritually integrated therapy with boys and men often attend to the mother complex and its influence on spiritual and religious beliefs and experiences. While Freud himself pointed mainly to the paternal and paternalistic aspects of religion, Freud’s brief discussion of the mystical “oceanic feeling” in <i>Civilization and Its Discontents</i> opened the door to the maternal aspects of religion, which Jung had already explored in his seminal <i>Symbols of Transformation.</i> This paper is an appreciative expansion of Donald Capps’s Freudian theory of male religious melancholy, which supplements Capps’s view of the mother complex using the work of Jungian therapist Marie-Louise von Franz and her notion of the <i>puer aeternus</i>, popularly known as the Peter Pan complex. The paper also supplements Capps’s understanding of possible treatments for the mother-bound man by looking to Jung’s “Jonah and the whale” complex. In a counterintuitive way, escape from the mother complex often involves going further inside it to discover its deeper archetypal dimensions—a kind of mystical-religious quest. A case study is offered to illustrate this. This “regression in the service of rebirth” correlates with certain rites of passage and mystical experiences in a variety of traditions, which may themselves correlate with the infant’s early and even intrauterine experiences of the mother.</p>

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Mother and Mysticism: Religion and the Mother Complex in Boys and Men

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年2月21日

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  • Glenn J. McCullough

摘要

Psychodynamic approaches to pastoral counselling and spiritually integrated therapy with boys and men often attend to the mother complex and its influence on spiritual and religious beliefs and experiences. While Freud himself pointed mainly to the paternal and paternalistic aspects of religion, Freud’s brief discussion of the mystical “oceanic feeling” in Civilization and Its Discontents opened the door to the maternal aspects of religion, which Jung had already explored in his seminal Symbols of Transformation. This paper is an appreciative expansion of Donald Capps’s Freudian theory of male religious melancholy, which supplements Capps’s view of the mother complex using the work of Jungian therapist Marie-Louise von Franz and her notion of the puer aeternus, popularly known as the Peter Pan complex. The paper also supplements Capps’s understanding of possible treatments for the mother-bound man by looking to Jung’s “Jonah and the whale” complex. In a counterintuitive way, escape from the mother complex often involves going further inside it to discover its deeper archetypal dimensions—a kind of mystical-religious quest. A case study is offered to illustrate this. This “regression in the service of rebirth” correlates with certain rites of passage and mystical experiences in a variety of traditions, which may themselves correlate with the infant’s early and even intrauterine experiences of the mother.