Search, recognition, satisfaction of needs, exchange, accumulation and bestowal – mature people almost immediately find themselves at the stage of giving, “in a royal position” …
Relying on the well-known position of K.-G. Jung about the duality of the human psyche, which manifests itself in the fact that the psyche of a man includes not only the masculine, but also the feminine principle (animus), and the psyche of a woman includes not only the feminine, but also the masculine principle (animus), it can be assumed that the masculine and feminine in inner space are not only in the active process of being, but also more or less successfully interact with each other.
The relationship between the male and female principles in the inner world is mirrored in the stages of development of the relationship between a real man and a woman.
1 . The initial stage in the development of relations is the search stage. It consists in the process of searching for reflections of one’s inner male and female parts in real people – representatives of the opposite sex. We are recommended to meet women online at the GoDateNow, because this is a trusted and safe service with a girls online gallery.
In fairy tales, the search for male heroes is their famous campaign for happiness, the search for adventure. For heroines, this is the selection of suitors, classically arranged by kings for their daughters. These plots reflect the healthy canons of search activity: men themselves win their happiness, this happens in competitions, struggles, overcoming themselves and various obstacles. Women, on the other hand, receive the groom who won the competition arranged by her father, that is, the groom approved by the father, which indicates the most important moment in the transfer of paternal responsibility to the chosen one of the daughters. Thus, fairy tales teach that a woman’s search experience should be carried out under the wing of a father’s protective function, the patronage of a strong man, and those who test a woman’s future chosen one should be, first of all, her father.
Since today many women are being formed in the absence of full-fledged paternal protection, the healthy masculine principle of a woman, initiated (developed) to a well-functioning internal paternal protective principle, may well perform the patronizing paternal function.
The decline of the paternal function in modern Western society has led to the fact that today the stage of a conscious search for a partner is preceded by a more unconscious kind of search activity. It can be distinguished as the zero stage of the search. We called it corporal .
We are talking about a deliberately depersonalized process of satisfaction by people of their sexual needs, although these relationships never reach complete depersonalization. Any, even the most fleeting contacts between a man and a woman, have infinite depth. The denial of this depth serves the immature person only as an attempt to protect himself from the fear of rejection and from a vague sense of his incompetence in the field of relationships.
A high level of such competence is typical only for a mature person. The maturity of the male phenomenon (both internal and external) is especially important here. When the masculine reaches maturity, it ascends to the stage of fatherhood, which is a reflection of the divine paternal principle. Therefore, the connection is obvious: to the extent that real fathers emotionally ignore their children, their maturing children are deprived of the spiritual experience of relationships to the same extent.
The bodily stage is dictated by instinctive motives, which, in the absence of paternal protection, act as an archaic mechanism of procreation that has been exposed. The instinctive nature of the zero stage of the search also contains a very specific spiritual goal: to find your true half through some kind of “sexual testing”. The bodily stage of the search is common not only among young people, but also among people of other age groups, when they are directly or implicitly engaged in the search for a “life partner”.
Everyone who has experienced the collapse of relationships, as well as married men and married women who are experiencing family, age and other personal crises, return to the search stage. Unmarried men and women live in a state of search without always being fully aware of it. An obsessive search for a partner is a sign of a certain immaturity of the individual. This statement suggests a simple conclusion: the initiation of the maturation of the personality brings relief from the compulsion of seeking.
At the search stage, marriages are often concluded and children are born. However, to achieve harmonious relations, search motives alone are not enough. In the process of searching, its participants strive primarily for such an important emotional component of relations as recognition. As soon as recognition is carried out, the relationship moves to the next, higher stage of development.
2. The essence of the relationship at the stage of recognition is that a man and a woman, as it were, recognize in each other their inner man and woman .
Meeting a person who sufficiently reflects certain features of the inner male and female aspects of our personality brings a state of special delight. This is a well-known period of falling in love , which in an analytical sense can be considered as a moment of successful “throwing out of projections”. At this stage, for the first time, partners really find and recognize male and female parts of your soul in each other. A man finds in his beloved features of his inner woman that are significant for him, and a woman finds in her chosen one an aspect of her inner man that is especially relevant for the development of her femininity. It is noteworthy that at first the ideal aspects of the male and female projections are “thrown out” onto the partners. But as the relationship develops further, more and more traumatized fragments of the anima (feminine in a man) and animus (masculine in a woman) are “thrown out”, those that require healing in the first place. Fortunately, partners with cosmic precision contain in the inner world a sufficient number suitable for each other, both ideal and damaged fractals of male and female. It follows that any final separation indicates that the personal “mirror” of partners ceases to take place to the extent that is necessary to maintain their union. In other words, they cease to be reflections for each other due to the fact that the structure of the personality of one of them changes at a rate different from the rate of change of the other.
In fairy tales, recognition (falling in love) corresponds to the moment in the plot when the meeting of beautiful heroes takes place. Falling in love, which is usually symbolized by the magical, wonderful acquaintance of the characters, is only the initial, starting point of the relationship. In the language of fairy tales and myths, the experience of collective consciousness tells us that the moment of the meeting of a man and a woman is not sufficient to conclude a harmonious union. Therefore, separating forces soon invade the paired space of the heroes in love, and the blessing characters sooner or later show them the way to overcome obstacles.
So, lovers always face a number of tests , which means the need to go through a number of stages in the development of relationships. Climbing the “ladder of relationships” is an inevitable work, and only by climbing these sacred steps, a man and a woman achieve joint happiness.
3. The stage (stage) of recognition is replaced by the stage of satisfaction of unsatisfied needs. This is a period of healing of internal traumas, living those “missed” stages of personal development, where the children’s needs of partners were not satisfied or insufficiently satisfied, and in connection with this, certain psychological deficits and “holes in the Self” were formed (G. Ammon). These include the early childhood desire for unconditional love (love me for who I am), when the baby needs complete and absolute acceptance, understanding and timely care and participation. Deficiency of the Self can refer to the sphere of bodily, creative and other needs. At the stage of satisfaction of needs, a man and a woman involuntarily and passionately expect from their partner those actions, actions and feelings that they did not expect or did not receive enough from their own parents in childhood.
The “mirror” reflections of a man and a woman in each other that are present here are also explained by the fact that each of the partners actually contains a rich potential in the structures of his personality to satisfy (or pseudo-satisfy) the unsatisfied needs of the other.
Often the unconscious principle of “satisfaction from the opposite” is used here. For example, if a woman was rejected by her father or mother as a child, she finds a man who will reject her. In the course of such relationships, a woman finally gets the opportunity, not realized in childhood, to throw all her strength into ensuring that she is still recognized “by all means!”. In this case, a woman manifests a hypertrophied childish need to recognize not only the significance of her personality, but also to recognize her femininity. If satisfaction does not occur or it is not enough, the relationship between a man and a woman can get stuck at this stage. A simple example of such a stuckness is the vicious circle of parting-reconciliation in relations with dependent (alcoholism, drug addiction) partners.
A man, who has not been able to psychologically separate from his mother and does not have a healthy male model in the person of his father, strives for a relationship with an authoritarian woman. His main unconscious motive is the desire to defeat her and free himself from her controlling influence. The illusion of victory and liberation is given not only by alcoholism and drug addiction, but also by workaholism, as well as other infantile forms of behavior, which are based on the avoidance of responsibility for relationships: spiritual, material, sexual, and others.
On the other hand, partners at the same time expect and demand from each other absolute love and unconditional acceptance, which they have lacked since childhood. Since the stage of satisfaction of needs has the character of mutual dependence, and the latter, as a form of captivity, always causes a desire to be free, such relationships hide large reserves of repressed aggression, which breaks out from time to time.
Thus, at the stage of satisfaction of needs, a man and a woman, like babies, strive for “absorption”. They want to receive, absorb, absorb the missing love and acceptance not only from each other, but also from parental families and even each other’s family branches. They are ruled by an acute desire to saturate their Self as much as possible, to fill its voids, that is, to get everything that is possible from some large undifferentiated object of the “parent world” (“primary group”), the relationship with which once led to a feeling of an equally acute deficit. in the field of the emerging I. The unconscious greedily “discovers” this “large nourishing object” in the partner.
The symbolism of fairy tales contains an indication of a direct way out of the “imprisonment in the dungeon” of unsatisfied needs. This is the symbolism of battles with villains – internal traumas, split off aggression, etc. This is a period of struggle with the dark aspects of the personality for the liberation of the miracle of female nature, full of healing powers. In other words, in order to liberate the fabulous beauty – the treasure of the highest femininity – it is necessary to overcome the whole complex of internal imperfections contained in the damaged areas of the male and female principles.
With a lack of resources in the field of the protective function of the male and the restoring forces of the female, partners during this period may experience depression, psychosomatic disorders and painful breaks in relationships.
If a man and a woman overcome the stage of satisfaction of needs, having managed to saturate the deficits in the Self (having received the necessary recognition from the partner and his family, and also – due to their social successes or – directly working on changes in personality, etc.), the relationship rises to the next stage – the stage of exchange .
4. During the exchange stage, each partner is released from their own inner projections and can see one another for who they really are. As individuals become more independent of one another, a natural sense of complementarity develops between them. Each person recognizes his/her worth as an individual as well as in relation to the other – forming a strong bond that provides mutual joy and fulfillment. At this stage, parting is not too painful, and creating together becomes more productive than ever before. A man and a woman exchange their specific qualities and properties: he gives her his strength and protection, she gives him healing support and care. They are already able to easily perceive each other as they are, they can already admire (“Oh, what (what) you are wonderful (s)!”), And not be proud (“look, what (what) value I have!”) each other, as in the previous step. Each is able to recognize and appreciate the reality of the other, different from his own, and its inevitable changes.
The internal union between the male and female parts of the personality at this stage of the relationship has already been concluded and is bearing fruit . The sacred male and female forces of any of the partners, having united to a sufficient extent, as a universal generator, now “produce” in the inner world all the energies necessary for happiness and personal development. This is the secret of healthy spiritual independence of mature partners.
In fairy tales, this corresponds to the final marital union of many experienced heroes. The outside world no longer poses serious threats to their relationship; it is common for such an alliance, as a whole, to enter into bold contacts with society. Relations here are distinguished by the presence of healthy boundaries between the couple and the outside world, an accurate perception of physical time, the real responsibility of partners to each other and in relation to external phenomena. Here the opportunity to build your life and the life around you in accordance with your plans and dreams is most fully manifested, to be the cause of what is happening, to be yourself.
5. Exchange relations at subsequent stages lead to the accumulation of huge internal resources and the emergence of a need to give one’s strength and experience, to give love and an excess of vital energy not only to each other, but also to the world. Therefore, we called this stage of relations the stage of giving .
Such a high level in the development of relations is not necessarily achieved in the final period of the joint life of a man and a woman, although it represents a significant spiritual peak. If a mature man and woman enter into a new relationship , they can immediately find themselves at the stage of giving.
Getting into the emotional atmosphere of a couple who has reached this stage, people feel “at home”, more clearly feel their own value in their presence, and invariably receive an impetus to further development from communication with such a couple. Moreover, this happens regardless of how the participants in the interaction are aware of these processes. Relationships at the stage of giving are distinguished by the ability of a mature couple to automatically harmonize the world around, change it in a creative direction, create something new and broadcast it outside.
The stage of giving can be symbolically described not only as a married couple, safely nurturing numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but also as a couple owning an eternally fruitful garden. Figuratively speaking, the canning of vegetables and fruits has already reached such a scale that, due to the cans filling the house, there is nowhere to put your foot. In this situation, distributing supplies to others is a natural urgent need, the only way out, the only way to keep the house in order and comfortable.
In symbolic language, this corresponds to the moment of the fairy tale plot, when the heroes united in a happy union reach the royal position at the end of the story: concluding a marital union, the fairy-tale bride and groom become King and Queen.
Considering the stages of relationship development, it is easy to see how great the healing power of the relationship process itself is for the spiritual development of both men and women, and their offspring.
It is important to note that often relationships in married couples have the characteristics of several stages at once. The conditional division of the process of evolution of relationships into stages is a convenient way to analyze and comprehend this process, and in life it proceeds in the same way as the flowering of plants: some are already fading, others are just beginning to bloom, but at certain periods we can see flowers of both those and other plants at the same time.
