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her with a husband who shares all the essential traits of her mother’s character. All instinctive processes meet with unexpected difficulties; either sexuality does not function properly, or the children are unwanted, or maternal duties seem unbearable, or the demands of marital life are responded to with impatience and irritation. This is quite natural, since none of it has anything to do with the realities of life when stubborn resistance to the power of the mother in every form has come to be life’s dominating aim. In such cases one can often see the attributes of the mother archetype demonstrated in every detail. For example, the mother as representative of the family (or clan) causes either violent resistances or complete indifference to anything that comes under the head of family, community, society, convention, and the like. Resistance to the mother as
uterus
often manifests itself in menstrual disturbances, failure of conception, abhorrence of pregnancy, hemorrhages and excessive vomiting during pregnancy, miscarriages, and so on. The mother as
materia
, ‘matter,’ may be at the back of these women’s impatience with objects, their clumsy handling of tools and crockery and bad taste in clothes.
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    Again, resistance to the mother can sometimes result in a spontaneous development of intellect for the purpose of creating a sphere of interest in which the mother has no place. This development springs from the daughter’s own needs and not at all for the sake of a man whom she would like to impress or dazzle by a semblance of intellectual comradeship. Its real purpose is to break the mother’s power by intellectual criticism and superior knowledge, so as to enumerate to her all her stupidities, mistakes in logic, and educational shortcomings. Intellectual development is often accompanied by the emergence of masculine traits in general.
    1 But the father-complex also plays a considerable part here.
    2 [Cf.
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
, pars. 16ff.—E DITORS .]
    3 In the present section I propose to present a series of different “types” of mother-complex; in formulating them, I am drawing on my own therapeutic experiences. “Types” are not individual cases, neither are they freely invented schemata into which all individual cases have to be fitted. “Types” are ideal instances, or pictures of the average run of experience, with which no single individual can be identified. People whose experience is confined to books or psychological laboratories can form no proper idea of the cumulative experience of a practising psychologist.
    4 This statement is based on the repeated experience that, where love is lacking, power fills the vacuum.
    5 In my English seminars [privately distributed] I have called this the “natural mind.”
    6 Here the initiative comes from the daughter. In other cases the father’s psychology is responsible; his projection of the anima arouses an incestuous fixation in the daughter.
    7 Herein lies the difference between this type of complex and the feminine father-complex related to it, where the “father” is mothered and coddled.
    8 This does not mean that they are unconscious of the
facts
. It is only their
meaning
that escapes them.
    9 This type of woman has an oddly disarming effect on her husband, but only until he discovers that the person he has married and who shares his nuptial bed is his mother-in-law.

4. POSITIVE ASPECTS OF THE MOTHER-COMPLEX
I. THE MOTHER
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    The positive aspect of the first type of complex, namely the overdevelopment of the maternal instinct, is identical with that well-known image of the mother which has been glorified in all ages and all tongues. This is the mother-love which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange