The more remote and unreal the personal mother is, the more deeply will the son’s yearning for her clutch at his soul, awakening that primordial and eternal image of the mother for whose sake everything that embraces, protects, nourishes, and helps assumes maternal form, from the Alma Mater of the university to the personification of cities, countries, sciences and ideals.
C. G. Jung, 1942, CW 13: p. 47

As the first person who introduces her son to the feminine principle of relatedness, the mother plays an important role in her son's masculine development. While the mother-son relationship can be a safe container in which a boy can learn to connect to his own emotional, relational side, it can also be fraught with enmeshment, regression, and a fear or separation and individuation. In this talk we will focus on some of the ways in which the mother complex affects the development of a son's identity, and the archetypal and collective forces which support or hinder the development of a secure and embodied masculine identity.

Learning Objectives: 2 CEUs available

• Describe the mother complex in a man.
• Illustrate the mother's role in the masculine development of her son.
• Describe the relationship between the mother complex and the Anima in a man.

Speaker biography:
Sherri Mahdavi, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles and a clinical psychologist in private practice in Irvine, CA. She also serves as an Associate Professor of Applied Clinical Psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology in Southern California, where she teaches courses in Depth Psychology. With her background in Sufism and Jungian Studies, her research interest is soul-centered psychology.