Will we be stunted by our psychologies (suppressing our soul's code) or expand and individuate? What follows is a brief synopsis of the choice we face sooner or later in our lives, to stay mired in complexes or opt to individuate and start living for our souls.
This is written from a heterosexual male perspective but some of the teaching points are universal.
Whether a man individuates or remains emotionally stunted (never quite getting free of the Oedipal complex - bound to the mother (meaning never evolving into emotional independence) and overshadowed by / dominated by an impersonal father figure, such as the boss or supervisor or destined to work his way up through the ranks in a corporate environment where the most he can hope for is to impress the father-supervisor or become the father (boss / supervisor) - depends on whether he is able to access the archetypes, and this can happen in lots of unexpected and mysterious ways.
My grandfathers were both broken my WW1, so my father was raised by women (his grandmother was headmaster of a girls music school, which he attended after his father died when he was little). My father was a work-a-holic so I was raised by my mother but, because I was creatively talented (in the arts and poetically) I was taken under wing by men both in and out of a school setting, in other words, mentored. My father was a weak male presence for me and I missed the education and initiation that a boy raised by a strong (heterosexual) father would have received, such as fixing cars and building stuff, but, even though this was a setback for me that I had to compensate for later in life, I would not have traded my mother's earlier attentions and teaching for comparable time spent with my head under a car hood or framing a shed or building stone walls with my father.
(To my father's credit, when my brother headed for college he made an effort to spend time with me, but I had nothing to talk about with him. We were in different orbits by the time I was 13.)
What do I mean by accessing the archetypes? If you read James Hillman's "Soul's Code", he says that we carry our soul's code inside us, like an acorn. It might be delayed by certain factors (of birth and chance) but eventually something will trigger the soul's code and then the acorn begins to sprout sometimes in spite of us. That is individuation, in which archetypes play a critical role.. Then, once the souls' code is activated, synchronicities begin to lay the way for the soul's expansion.
Too much is blamed on upbringing, for things that seem to hold us down or hold us back later in life, but there is an age (approx. 31 - 34) when blaming our past no longer cuts it and becomes an excuse for our failure to find fulfillment.
Until approximately 33, we might be stunted by complexes and that can be painful and trying but I agree with Hillman, that around our mid thirties (and often earlier), it is timely to look forward because the psyche (soul) is oriented to expansion and growth. If we don't grow in our thirties, but stay mired in complexes that subvert our individuation, we will become caricatures of ourselves, and we might even get sick (because our immune systems are worn out from responding to trauma-generated (or exaggerated) emergencies.) When we are living by the dictates of our psychologies alone we we are essentially scrambling our own soul's code!
So, having shitty parents or no parents is tough but it is not the end of the world because the collective unconscious and life want to initiate us into creative productive adulthood even under inauspicious circumstances. That is the nature of the psyche, to facilitate the evolution of individuated consciousness in the pursuit of wholeness beyond mere self-preservation and survival. Upbringing is only one factor and a diminishing factor at that, in who we become as we navigate the stages of life.
(Good books, now considered foundational classics, that delve into this, are Hillman's "Soul's Code", Michael Meade's "Men and the Water of Life" and R Bly's "Iron John".)
(Article changed on Mar 08, 2025 at 8:19 AM EST)
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