JTCrace

I have chosen to expose the true meaning of this song, what Maynard really intended. Why, you might ask? It could my own ego-trip, you know, for attention. Or it could be that I would like to let him know that some people do honestly "catch his drift." But mostly I would like the opportunity to show my appreciation for his courage and insight. And also I am sharing this in hope that others will find as much inspiration and solace as I did in the lyrics, as we all struggle healing our wounds. His words have always comforted me. They have always let me know that there was at least one other person out there experiencing a similar reality to my own. Well, here it goes...

I sincerely hope most of you reading this post have a decent background in some Freudian and Jungian psychological themes. If not, I will do my best to clarify everything.

According to Freud, here is how male development proceeds. Initially, in the first few years, the boy is extremely close to the mother. Son and mother enjoy the closest of relationships, their realities are very, very congruent. Then at some point the boy comes to the amazing discovery that he is a different sex than his mother! He penis is unveiled (cheers from the gallery)! Naturally, he wants to use it. The first candidate for penetration: mommy. The boy looks no further than his own home for his first lay. But then comes the most essential part of his development: castration by the father. The father is to step in, and say, "No, you cannot have your mother, she's mine!" The boy's dinky (yes, pun intended) masculinity then retreats into his unconscious. Hence we have the delightful stage when, "Ugh, girls are gross." Later on in the boy's development, his masculinity again becomes conscious. The feminine principle within himself is safely differentiated, he does not suffer from the infamous "Oedipus complex." . He does not go out and search for a mother surrogate (which sadly is what most guys do), but he can safely go out into the world and court women. He is a man.

Unfortunately due to the fact that there are not too many healthy marriages out there, a majority of the time the most important step does not occur, the father does not do his job. And now the boy is left to his mother. In a psychological sense, they are married. They are in love. She will begin to control every aspect of his life. He will have fantasies (sometimes very conscious fantasies) of copulating with his mother. The pair will be overly intimate, touching, kissing, hugging, cuddling. He never becomes detached from her. He is never allowed to truly develop an ego, an "I", that is separate from her. He can never become a man.

And now, the Jungian interpretation. First of all, our mother is not just our mother. She represents the Mother Archetype; that universal, eternal, Goddess that represents such qualites as security, comfort, tranquility, and unconsciousness; essentially, the womb in a symbolic sense. So a young boy's drive to have sex with his mother is really a spiritual drive. The young boy wishes to return to a state of tranquility, to a state of complete absorption. He wants to lose himself in her, to give himself up and bathe again in her rich, warm waters. And so his personal mother begins to be completely identified with the Great Mother. The boy will project this archetype (which by the way, only truly exists in his psyche) onto his mother.

According to Jung, a man experiences God and relates to God through the feminine. His soul-image is feminine, she is called his Anima. In the beginning of a boy's life, his anima is identical with the mother. And that is where we see the Oedipus Complex come in to play. The boy does not really want to physically have sex with his mother. He is merely relating to God through the only feminine being he knows: his mom. But if he is properly developed, his anima begins to differentiate from the mother. They are both feminine, but they embody different aspects of the feminine principle. This differentiation of the feminine principle is essential for a male's ego development.

In mythology, there is the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent which eats its own tail. It represents unconsciousness, it represents the Great Mother, the feminine motherly aspect of God. We are all familiar with the ancient mythological motif of the knight who battles the dragon to rescue the damsel in distress and then the treasure. Well, symbolically the dragon is the Great Mother, which the knight must slay to rescue his anima, his damsel in distress. This rescue is symbolic of the feminine differentiation discussed above. Then the knight may possess the treasure (enlightenment, salvation, the philosopher's stone).