“If the mother, because she is lonely,…chooses to override the instruction to attenuate the [mother-son] bond, she will turn into a devouring mother…”
Anthony Stevens, Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self
A present and committed man in the household is crucial not only in the role he plays as a father, but also as a husband to his wife. For when a woman’s emotional and intimacy needs are satisfied by her husband, she is able to use him as an emotional anchor to hold onto as she navigates the difficult process of watching her son sever his dependence on her and cultivate an independent life.
But when a husband is physically or emotionally absent, a woman must satisfy her emotional and intimacy needs elsewhere. She can do this by cultivating a rich social life, or by dating other men with the intention of finding a more fulfilling relationship. But this requires the courage to be vulnerable and the maturity to recognize that she has needs which it is only appropriate for other adults to fulfill. When a mother lacks such courage and maturity, there is the danger that she will take the easy road and try to satisfy her emotional and intimacy needs with her children, particularly her son – whom she raises to be her surrogate husband. A mother who does this subjects her son to what the psychologist Kenneth Adams called covert emotional incest, oras Adams explained:
“Covert incest occurs when a child becomes the object of a parent’s affection, love, passion, and preoccupation. The parent, motivated by the loneliness and emptiness created by a chronically troubled marriage or relationship, makes the child a surrogate partner.”
Kenneth Adams, Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Cihldren Partners
In contrast to sexual incest, which is overt, taboo, and punishable by law, covert emotional incest does not involve sexual contact but the formation of a mother-son relationship that is too psychologically close, emotionally enmeshed, and mutually dependent. The purpose of such a relationship is to satisfy the emotional needs of the mother, at the cost of the boy’s masculinity and independence.
“When a mother’s emotional needs are satisfied only by her son, she will not be able to tolerate his natural separations. She will greet his efforts to venture outward with various forms of discouragement and disapproval.”
Kenneth Adams, When He’s Married to Mom
While Kenneth Adams coined the term covert emotional incest in the 1980s, this type of incest has been depicted throughout history in myths and fairy tales. One of the more psychologically revealing of these tales is Hansel and Gretel, which tells of a witch who feeds children cake and sweets in order to fatten them up and prepare them to be killed, cooked, and eaten.
While the witch in Hansel and Gretel physically devours children, the mother who subjects her son to covert emotional incest psychologically devours him. Rather than physically fattening him up with sugar, through her pathological mothering she psychologically fattens him, i.e., weakens him. She raises him to be a coward who is so fearful of life that he never leaves her. In his 1949 book The Child, Erich Neumann described the devouring mother and her relation to the witch in Hansel and Gretel.
“There are mothers who…fling themselves on their children, not in order to give away a super-abundant love, but in order to fill their own emptiness with the child. This is not a real spoiling but a pseudo-spoiling. Such a mother cannot release her “beloved” child, because if she did, she would be left not with an overflowing heart, as in the case of authentic spoiling, but with a hungry heart…In mythological terms, this “false” spoiling is that of the witch-mother who lures the child into her candy house (spoiling with sweets) and once the child enters becomes the Terrible Mother who “eats it up.””
Erich Neumann, The Child
