Blueprint of a Wound

• In the face of the Mother’s uncontained sexual passion and dementia/rage, the Father realizes his lack of uprightness (falls on his ass), and experiences a wound that will eventually cripple him.
  
  
• Though he resolves to remain, to be as upright as he can, despite the wound, this is itself an avoidance – a way not to go deeper into the wound (which is the solar quest for healing/transformation).

• The Father begins to fear intimacy with the Mother, due to her lack of tenderness, her cold fury, her power and dementia. Instead, he seeks comfort through the pseudo-intimacy of casual sex.
  
  (Note: Jason’s Father was a Taurus; astrologically he has Venus, which rules comfort as well as sexuality, in Taurus.)
  
  
• As a result of this growing estrangement between Father and Mother, the Mother turns to the Son (often the youngest Son, i.e., Jason) as a Husband Surrogate. This might also stem from a desire to protect the Son from an abusive Father or, in Jason’s case, to compensate for the aloofness of the Father.
  
  
• The Father reacts to this Mother/Son bondage (presumably due to jealousy) by becoming further estranged from the Mother, and experiencing/expressing hostility (or indifference) towards the Son.
  
  (Note: if there is more than one Son, the older Son receives the brunt of this hostility, since, the older the Son, the more of a threat he is perceived to be, and the more he can receive the Father’s projected anger and disowned masculinity.)
  
  
• In Jason’s case, at least (and this blueprint is particular as well as general), the hostility of the Father towards the Son (and the Son’s fear of the Mother) leads to an unbalanced relationship with (reliance upon) the power of the Intellect. The Intellect, instead of being a sword to discern, becomes a weapon to defend, a shield to protect, a buffer against the raging uncontained Feminine. Hence, the Father scorns the Son for his perceived lack of Intellect, or even for his femininity. Perhaps the Father is unconsciously challenging the Son to develop his Intellect—to be less feminine—in a misguided attempt to give the Son the means to survive?
  
  
• The result is that the Son receives neither comfort from the Mother, nor guidance from the Father. In the case of two Sons, the younger Son—being a threat to the older Son’s sovereignty—not only doesn’t receive comfort from his Brother, but becomes the object of his anger and hostility, specifically that which the older Brother himself received from the Father.
  
  
• Since what we cannot receive we often try to provide, the younger Son then seeks to comfort the older Son (as well as the Mother, though not the Father). This he does primarily by becoming less of a threat to him, i.e., by suppressing his own nature (uniqueness). In Jason’s case, he developed Intellect as a less threatening way to outshine his Brother, though this backfired because the Father had already made Sebastian feel inferior about his Intellect!
  
  
• For Jason to develop his Intellect is a way to impress the Father, then, but also a means to supplant him. By comforting the (older) Son and developing those same intellectual capacities which the Father values as a means for dealing with (being superior to) the Mother, the second Son is perhaps attempting to replace the Father.
  
  To add a new twist to the tale, in Jason’s case at least: a New Man arrives when the second Son is 2 (his Brother being 7), and things then move to a new stage in the wounding process.
  
  
• With the arrival of the second Man, the Mother’s affection and desire moves away from the second Son. The second Son, like the first, now experiences the loss of his own specialness, as he is “replaced” by another.
  
  
• The Father, on the other hand, receives his deepest wounding yet (in the context of the Marriage), that of betrayal. This then finalizes the Father’s loss of uprightness—as he is metaphorically slain by another Man (though actually by the Mother). He then seeks deeper refuge in two places: sex and work. In both cases, the movement is away from intimacy (vulnerability), which means, most of all, estrangement from his children.
  
  
• When the Father cannot contain the Mother—female sexuality—two things occur. He loses his confidence as a Man, and so becomes even less upright than he was before. And secondly, the uncontained female sexuality strikes at the Father and wounds him more deeply still—completing the emasculation process started by the Father’s own Mother. This second wounding is often fatal, and results in complete emasculation. (In the case of Jason’s father, he became a cripple.)
  
  
• Thus the relationship becomes sadomasochistic and vampiric: the Female feeds upon the Male’s wound, growing drunk upon it, until there is nothing left but an empty shell.
  
  
• Because the Man does not provide containment for the Woman, the Woman does not give comfort (nurture) to the Man. Instead, she offers only heartbreak.
  
  
• This is why Marriage so rarely works. Each partner seeks pleasure and comfort in the other, and loses sight, in fact never actually realizes, the true nature and purpose of Marriage, which is surrender of the personal to the archetypal, allowing for the alchemical transforming of lead into gold. Sensing the pending annihilation that a true Marriage forces to occur, the two Players, in terror for their identities, strike out at the other, attempting to destroy the other rather than surrender together, to mutual annihilation. Ironically, tragically, it is only in this surrender that any true, lasting comfort or pleasure exists. The other route leads only to anguish, despair, and divorce.
  
  
• Symbolically then, this process is designated in the Tarot by the Moon card (Pisces, for female) and the Tower card (Mars, for male), both of which relate to a form of annihilation, the Moon spiritual/emotional, the Tower psychological/ physical. Both also relate to powerlessness, and both represent the respective energies of male and female in their destructive or overwhelming forms: the Moon signifies madness, despair, dementia, while the Tower represents war, violence, and extreme crisis. Yet, as means and not ends, the Moon signifies initiation, and the Tower signifies regeneration.
  
  
• Bringing it back to the personal: As he enters into adolescence, the Son(s), following the Father’s example, seek comfort through sex. This may be done by imitating the Father (as in Sebastian’s case, whoring and alcoholism and work-fixation), or by going against it, as in Jason’s case (celibacy and vagrancy).
  
  
• Inheriting the Father’s wound, the Son also receives the Father’s disowned hostility and rage against the Mother. This is then added to the Son’s own, somewhat more conscious hostility towards the Mother, from the terror and instability of growing up with an uncontained Female. (He would also then develop Intellect—and the cold contempt which Intellect allows—to keep the Mother’s annihilating influence at bay.)

• Since no comfort is forthcoming from the Mother (in fact the reverse), the Son seeks comfort in sexuality that is empowering and violating (rape fantasies), which is the inverse of intimacy. This betrays the Son’s shame of his sexuality. On the other hand, using rape and murder imagery for sexual stimulation is a more extreme way of avoiding intimacy, since rape and murder are an inverted form of intimacy. Rather than mutually sharing the same feelings, rape/murder allows the Male to experience the opposite feelings to those of the Female, and to experience a supreme sense of power and control. At the same time, such activity still relates to shame, being an attempt to banish it through shamelessness, i.e., committing acts (even if only in fantasy) in cold defiance of any “moral” (empathic) considerations. The effect may be the inverse, however (as is often the case), because by indulging in dark practices, the shame that has been suppressed actually forces itself back into consciousness.
  
  
• This also relates to the development of the Intellect as a buffer against female sexuality, since the Intellect is cold and removed, potentially cruel, and is the inverse of female Mother energy, which (ideally) is warm and nurturing.
  
  
• Mercury/the Intellect also serves as an ideal (tho false) surrogate for the true masculine energy of Mars. Intellect allows the Son to feel manly (and the Father to feel upright) when actually he is not, wielding his Intellect when he cannot wield his sexuality (i.e., through casual sex, prostitutes, and through a dominant role in work place). Yet, because it is being wrongly applied, in a compensatory fashion, the Father’s (and Son’s) Intellect becomes distorted, ineffective save as a weapon, or shield. This is because Mercury is not an exclusively masculine energy, as Mars is, but is both masculine and feminine (in the Tarot, the Magician/Mercury is androgyne).
  
  
• There ends the first layer of the blueprint for the male wound.
  
  
• The next phase of mapping the blueprint/wound, then, is to look more closely at the Brothers. The Cain and Abel myth is the abstract core of this wound, as made abundantly clear by Jason’s relationship with Sebastian. If there is only one Son, however, then the Cain/Abel dynamic must play out inside a single Psyche.

For this, the interested observor is referred to the current series of Warty Theorems podcasts, starting tomorrow.