Tony Crisp Interpretation:
fugitive To forever feel you must avoid intimate human contact; to forever be running from something that is hard to define; to never be able to feel that where one is in life is home, a place to relax in, a place where you can feel peace and look around and take in the world instead of looking around to see where danger is—these are signs of the fundamental feeling of alienation or aloneness. All of these have anxiety, the fear reaction, and perhaps feelings of desertion at their root. As fear is one of the major reactions to life, some archetypical patterns of behavior have developed around the fear response. See Am I meeting the things I fear in my dream? under processing your dreams. the Great Mother The symbols are Virgin Mary, sometimes one’s own mother, a divine female, an old or ageless woman, Earth, a blue grotto, the sea, a whale, a cave, a tree. Whatever the image it often contains great religious feeling or spiritual uplift. After all, mother was the most powerful being in our early world. “Did she admire hunters; then we would kill dragons and cleanse the world. Did she feel the weight of the world; then we would be the peacemaker and bring her joy.” (W. V. Caldwell) The symbols of mother represent not simply our relationship with her, but also how it influences our growth toward independence and mature love. As a baby we do not feel separate from mother. The gradual separation is difficult. In some people it is never managed, even though they separate physically. Their mother, or their sense of their mother within them, still directs their decisions. The old joke about “My mother wouldn’t like this” is true. In many older cultures this break was worked out in ritual tribal custom. At a certain age the children were taken from their parents’ home and lived together with the other young males or females. Today we have to manage these subtleties of our psyche alone. A woman must find a way of transforming the pleasure—or absence of it—of her mother’s breast into a love for a male. If she cannot she may wish to return to the breast of another female, or be the man her father never was for her. A man must find a way of transforming his unconscious desire for his mother into love of a woman which is more than that of a dependent or demanding baby or youth. If he cannot he may seek his mother in a likely woman, ignoring who that woman is as a real person. And this acceptance of our mother as she really is—a human being—precedes the acceptance of ourselves as we really are.