The Devouring Mother: When Son is Emotional Food

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

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 seeking relations with 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 that can be appropriately fulfilled by other adults. 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 partner. A mother who does this subjects her son to what the psychologist, Kenneth Adams, called “covert emotional incest”:  

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

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 opulently in order to fatten them up and prepare them to be killed, cooked, and eaten.   

Similarly, the mother who subjects her son to covert emotional incest psychologically devours him and kills his potential for independence. Through her pathological mothering, she psychologically fattens him, i.e., weakens his agency and agility. She raises him to be dependent, weak, and 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

In most cases, a devouring mother is not aware of her devouring intentions. Consciously she tells herself that she only wants what is best for her son, and that her preoccupation with him is an expression of love. To outside observers, this can appear to be the case. At a deeper level, what she is unconsciously doing is showering him with care and affection and creating an overly protective environment to satiate her emotional hunger.

[The devouring mother] is compelled by a force beyond her control to nourish herself emotionally by consuming those on whom she centers her maternal care and solicitude. She seems most kind and motherly, but there is always a doubt whether she is not in reality seeking an emotional meal.  

M. Esther Harding, Psychic Energy

In her classic book, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz pierces through the devouring mother’s loving pretense in order to reveal her underlying will to power:   

Masculine spontaneity is what the mother who intends to keep, or destroy, her son, instinctively fights…This feeling of vitality is typical in a healthy young person. It makes one feel alive and enterprising, and that is what the devouring mother hates most. She hates it in the son because that is the impulse of life which will lead him away from her.    

Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

The devouring mother starts to weaken her son even before he can walk and talk. In his experiments on the mother-child relationship, the developmental psychiatrist John Bowlby observed that some mothers hindered their child’s explorative instincts. They prevented the child from crawling too far away them, even in the safety-proof rooms Bowlby constructed for his experiments. Bowlby hypothesized that such mothers were implanting in their child the unconscious belief that the world is unsafe and that they are unfit to venture out into it. In following up with these children years later, Bowlby found evidence for his hypothesis as many of these mother-smothered children had developed crippling anxiety disorders. On Bowlby’s findings, Kenneth Adams writes:    

[John Bowlby] observes that, because an enmeshed boy is discouraged from exploring the world away from his mother, he ends up believing that he will never be able to make his way on his own.  

Kenneth Adams, When He’s Married to Mom

Once the son begins to walk and talk, the devouring mother weakens him by being overly controlling and ensuring that he never faces challenges, risks, or dangers on his own. She makes all his decisions for him, helps him with his homework, volunteers to accompany him on school trips and extracurricular activities, and solves his problems for him. As one example, if the boy is bullied at school, the devouring mother calls the principal and contacts the parents of the bullies. She resolves the bullying problem for him without him having to lift a finger. In this way, the son never learns how to stand up for himself, overcome obstacles, and command respect in what is sometimes a cold and cruel world. While this is one of the many possible ways a mother can devour her son, underlying all the actions of the devouring mother is the same intention: to unconsciously sow in her son anxiety – a fear of life – so that he never leaves her and forces her to face her fear of being alone.

Generally…the mother who intends to devour her son begins…when he is quite young, with her perpetual fussing care—putting cream on the sore place—telling him not to go with the other boys who are so brutal, and so on…she turns him into a physical coward, and that forms a base for all the rest, for a coward has no foothold in life.  

Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

When a son becomes an adolescent, the devouring mother attacks his masculinity with manipulations that are more cerebral. Anytime the son contemplates a plan of action that would increase his independence, be it with respect to school, friends, vacations, or relationships, the mother sabotages his plans by infecting him with doubts.   

Von Franz gives the example of a young man who wants to go on a ski trip with friends. Upon hearing his plans, the devouring mother immediately responds with worries. She tells him the trip is too expensive, that it will interfere with his studies, and that it is too risky as she heard last year there was an avalanche on one of the surrounding mountains. These worries are grounded in reality, as everything in life worth doing has costs and risks. But a good mother encourages her son to face danger, go on adventures, and learn from experience and mistakes. In contrast, the doubts of the devouring mother lead the son to conclude that the costs and risks of an adventure are not worth it. She provokes in him a pathological form of worrying and overthinking that paralyzes him, causes him to abandon his plans, and, like a good little boy, remain by his mother’s side.

When the son becomes an adult, the devouring mother manipulates him with guilt. She tells him how it saddens her that he does not want to spend more time with her. She makes herself out to be more helpless than she really is, calling her son almost daily to fix this or that, to buy her food, take her to appointments, or merely to chat. As aging parents do require assistance and company, an adult son is typically not aware he is being manipulated with guilt. He tells himself that his mother needs him, and that as she sacrificed herself to raise him, it is now his duty to be there for her. The fatal error in this line of reasoning is that the devouring mother did not sacrifice herself for him; rather, she sacrificed his masculinity at the altar of her own anxiety and loneliness.

…the reality of a mother’s behavior toward a child in a covertly incestuous relationship is not clear. There is a grave distortion in perception…It is a distortion in perception to believe that the mother’s excess attention given in a covertly incestuous relationship saved the child. On the contrary, it robbed the child of the freedom to be autonomous and to feel worthy. Vitality is lost under the insidious, lifelong trap that “I should keep being there for my mother; after all, she was always there for me.”” 

Kenneth Adams, Silently Seduced

While the degree to which a devouring mother devours her son varies, in the more extreme cases a devouring mother’s behavior crosses over into the realm of evil. Marie-Louise von Franz recounts a chilling encounter she had with a mother whose newly engaged son died in a boating accident on Lake Zurich. A few weeks after the tragedy, Von Fanz ran into the mother on the street, and she invited von Franz in for tea. Von Franz explains:  

She invited me in and took me to the sitting-room where there was a very big photograph of the son on his deathbed, surrounded by flowers, set up like a hero’s tomb, and she remarked: “Look at him! How beautiful he looks in death.” I agreed, and then she smiled and said: “Well, I’d rather have him like that than give him away to another woman.”…I was terribly shocked by what the woman said, but then told myself that this woman had had the naivete to say what many others have thought.  

Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

While this example may be an extreme case for the behavior of the devouring mother, in psychological terms, it is quite close to the reality of many mother-son relationships. The devouring mother finds unconscious comfort in sucking her son’s sap of life and productive capacity to irrigate her bottomless well.

Unless the son develops the skills to separate from mother - on a psychic level – and venture out into his own “hero’s journey”, he will forever be seduced by the devouring claws of lost agency and productive will.