You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In Part I of this essay (Vol. 55, No. 2), I presented a typical character structure resulting from Jocasta mothering, as illustrated in that prototype of genius, Michelangelo. The salient features are an unresolved Oedipus complex, the fear of love, an underlying sense of guilt, strong masochistic tendencies, paranoid trends,72a a significant homosexual component, extraordinary egocentricity, exorbitant striving for recognition, and overall narcissism. This personality seems to develop in a typical family constellation whose core is dominated by the affect-hungry mother and by the absent, inept, distant, or aloof father. This constellation results in an unusual mothering process which is exclusive, intense and symbiotic.
I have come to call this “Jocasta mothering” because its dynamics are clearly described in the Jocasta complex within the Oedipus myth. The causes of the mother's affect hunger are the absence of a fulfilling love life, hungering for children, the death of her only child, and, finally, the death of the husband. This complex of factors drives the mother to fulfill her own craving in a continually fused symbiosis, with no effective father to help in the child's separation, self-differentiation and growth towards maturing autonomy and identity. The Jocasta complex appears to be quite as significant in the myth and in life as is the Oedipus complex and should be reevaluated to assess its place in psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Part II of this essay will devote itself to illustrating the similarity of this character structure and its family dynamics in other geniuses, and further to support a hypothesis that Jocasta mothering is a significant factor in the germination of genius.