The Plymouth Shootings, Jungian Psychology, Incel and the Need for Initiation
Most readers from the UK will be aware of the awful shootings which took place in Plymouth last Thursday. Those from other countries may not have heard about this, so here are the details. Jake Davison, aged 22, shot five victims in the city, beginning with his mother, before taking his own life. This has attracted much attention because he was involved with, or at least identified with, the ‘incel’ community. This is an abbreviation of ‘involuntary celibates’, a group of men deeply frustrated by their continuing virginity and inability to form meaningful relationships with women.
They are described in an article by Laura Bates, who went undercover in this online community to try to understand them, and is the author of Men Who Hate Women. She says that:
- “they blame women for their lack of relationship success and share a starkly misogynistic worldview”
- “online incel forums are steeped in extremist misogyny, with members regularly suggesting women should be raped and murdered”
- “this is an ideology dedicated expressly to incitement of violence and hatred against women”.
She says that Davison uploaded hate-filled rants, “appeared obsessed with being a virgin, (and) repeatedly described his affinity with incel ideology. ‘I’m socially isolated, have no social circle and don’t know any girls’, he said in one video”. “He described himself as a perpetual victim — ‘me against the world’ — with life rigged against him”.
She also lists some men immersed in incel ideology who, in the past 10 years, have committed real-life atrocities, and one case of attempted murder by Ben Moynihan, who wrote in a diary: “I was planning to murder mainly women as an act of revenge… I’m still a virgin at 17”.
Older people in the UK might remember a similar incident in Hungerford in 1987, when Michael Ryan killed sixteen people, including his mother. The shootings “occurred at several locations, including a school he had once attended. Fifteen other people were also shot but survived. No firm motive for the killings has ever been established”. Various experts tried to understand what might have led him to do this; two suggestions were acute schizophrenia, psychosis (“matricide is the schizophrenic crime”), and a psychologist in a BBC documentary described how Ryan had “anger and contempt for ordinary life”¹.
Laura Bates, despite being appalled by the incel community, acknowledges very generously: “Of course, some men drawn into incel groups are vulnerable, have real problems, or haven’t found healthy spaces to explore issues like sex and relationships elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that the incel community has swelled as government cuts have led to a significant reduction in youth-focused services”.
Even if these government cuts had not been made, it is unlikely that such events could be prevented without an understanding of the underlying psychology. I will attempt to do that in the remainder of this article.
The first point to note is that in both massacres the men killed their mother. This should immediately make us suspect that what is involved here is what in Jungian psychology is called a ‘negative mother complex’. The prime target of their hatred was their mother, and they then vented their rage against her on other unfortunate random individuals.
Of course not all mothers are like this, but some have a tendency to be extremely possessive, to cling on to their sons. Babies and young children are totally dependent on the mother for everything, a situation which she enjoys, since it fulfils her motherly instincts. She ‘loves’ her son so much that she cannot bear the thought of him growing up, leaving home, and wanting other women. She can be paranoid at the idea of her son having sex with another woman, which signifies that she is no longer the focus of his love; he no longer needs her in the way she wants. His developing sexuality is therefore perceived as a threat and she, either explicitly or implicitly, forbids the son to have sex.
In the incel cases above, we can say that the men concerned have bought into this scenario; they have unconsciously accepted the mother’s possessiveness, and feel unable to rebel against it. They are therefore locked into the childhood psyche, so is it any wonder that they are incapable of forming relationships with adult women? Their hatred, the target of which they at least unconsciously believe is their own mother, is then redirected towards women in general. In reality it is their own inadequacy and cowardice, their own failure to rebel against their possessive mothers, that is at the root of the problem. They are unwilling to take on the challenge of becoming a normal, mature, responsible adult, having meaningful relationships with the opposite sex, which is the proper task for any individual. This involves growing up psychologically, and achieving separation and independence from parents.
This may sound simple enough, but is not always easily achieved. The possessive mother is often symbolised in mythology by the figure of a terrifying Devouring Mother. A symbol for the sometimes great difficulties involved in this process of separation is the fight with the dragon. We find hero figures engaged in battles with dragons that they must win, the best known example of which is St. George. This is the archetypal aspect to this problem, in that each individual human mother is acting out some aspects of the Great Mother archetype.
An example which clearly indicates this meaning of the dragon is provided by Marie-Louise von Franz, the most important follower and collaborator of Carl Jung:
“I once listened to the dream of a young man who was living still with his mama. He was twenty-nine years old and had never had a girl in his room. We seriously discussed the possibility of his getting a room outside his mother’s home. He was terrified. He was a very sensitive, delicate boy, and his mother had a very brutal, strong personality and he was just terrified of the moment he would have to tell mother, ‘Look here, I’m going to take a room outside, and I’m not going to live with you anymore’. When he was trying to make up his mind to move out, he dreamt that he had to slay the dragon. Though telling his mother that he had to move out seems like such a little thing to us, for him that was slaying the dragon. It was overcoming a monstrous neurotic difficulty within himself. His whole mother complex was involved, not only facing the scene with his actual mother, but overcoming also the inertia and the anxiousness of his own mother complex. His mother has sown in him an anxiousness, a fear of life. He had to overcome that terrific fear to make that step.
And that is an archetypal motif all over the world. The young man has to do the heroic deed of killing his mother, or the mother dragon, or the mother demon, which is his lethargy, or anxiety, or fear of living a masculine life. And it won’t help the young man only to understand that he has a mother complex and that his neurotic symptoms come from his mother tie. He has to actually take the other room and stand the battle”².
She had earlier said: “The dragon to be slain is the negative mother complex. The devouring dragon is the devouring mother and the violence of the encounter is proportionate to the tyrannical hold of the mother, a hold that saps the son of his strength” (p148). And even earlier: “On entering adulthood, a male must leave the warmth of his childhood nest behind so that he may go into the world and build one of his own. Psychologically, to become a man he must separate from his mother and be reborn into a different mode of relating. Otherwise, he may be devoured by the mother and remain a son whose capacity for relationship is fixated in the nightmare of infantile dependence and psychological incest” (p130). I submit that this is a highly accurate description of the psychology of the incel community.
Laura Bates complains about the appalling attitudes of these men towards women, whom they see as dehumanised sex objects whose sole purpose is to give men satisfaction, not fully human, and suitable candidates for murder, rape or sex slavery. It is interesting therefore that von Franz says: “When the mother complex is overcome, the man is freed to develop the feminine side of his nature. This side Jung called the ‘anima’ which is Latin for ‘soul’. She animates life and connects a man to the deepest reaches of his being. But because his femininity is initially identified with the mother, it is essential for psychic growth that this identification be broken, that the anima be detached from the mother. When the separation does take place, the son may then go on to establish a mature relationship with a woman, one in which she is neither idealized nor degraded” (p148). There is therefore a solution to these problems.
Isn’t it tragic therefore that such psychological understanding is not part of our education system, that every person on the planet is not aware of these issues in our so-called civilised society? Strangely, however, many so-called ‘primitive’, tribal societies had a very profound understanding of this; they had initiatory rituals to help boys separate from the mother and enter into the world of men.
On that theme von Franz says that aging goes in jumps rather than being a smooth process; there are various swift transitions, for example puberty and the menopause. She then comments: “Now, if there is a neurotic disposition or some other mental disease, it generally breaks out at these moments of transition. Then the personality is blasted apart or becomes psychologically sick. This was observed even by original man and therefore, in those societies, all the big transitions in life were accompanied by so-called rites de passage, rites of transition, rituals to help people make the step over the threshold” (p154).
“And so all rituals on earth are healing gestures. They are symbolic performances which heal the psychic wounds and help us to make the great transitions in life… (However), more modern man is lost when he comes to such crucial situations as the death of a relative or making the step toward becoming adult or getting married. These are now the moments when modern people very often become neurotic, or fall into a crisis. They can’t make the step” (p155).
Or, as David Price said very wisely in a recent Medium article: “Indigenous societies know that boys need initiation, otherwise they’ll become dangerous to themselves and the societies they live in. They need deepening. They need to find their path, their strength, their sense of relatedness and responsibility. In our culture we are left to our own devices as we grow up. We struggle with a sense of abandonment and isolation. Luck plays a big role in whether we find a meaningful life or not”.
How does all this relate to Jake Davison and the incel community? Davison and Ryan perceived dimly that their mothers were a large part of their problems; they blamed them and therefore killed them. This is, however, a mistake, merely a symbolic ritual, because their true enemies are the Great Mother archetype, and their own negative mother complex, for which their unfortunate mothers become the sacrificial substitute.
They have a deep hatred of women. It is a common psychological trait to blame others for the faults within oneself. As mentioned above, Ben Moynihan wrote in his diary that he planned to murder mainly women as an act of revenge, blaming them rather than his own inadequacy that he was still a virgin at 17.
It is easy to relate von Franz’s analysis to the incel community. They have monstrous neurotic difficulties, the whole mother complex is involved, there is an anxiety, or fear of living a masculine life. If a teenage boy does not separate from his mother, “he may be devoured by the mother and remain a son whose capacity for relationship is fixated in the nightmare of infantile dependence and psychological incest”. The reason that these men cannot form adult relationships is that they are unconsciously still in a childhood state, unknowingly in love with their mothers. Is it any wonder that such a person might want to kill himself, having vented his rage, and killed his mother?
Who do we blame for this state of affairs? Obviously the individuals involved for failing to understand and take responsibility for their own psyche. Deeper than that, however, we should blame our modern Western society, which seems to understand nothing about depth psychology, claiming for example that no motive for the Hungerford massacre has ever been established. It is therefore incapable of educating its own citizens properly in the great lessons of life. Is that perhaps why Michael Ryan killed people at his former school? Did he unconsciously blame his education?
When are we going to reintroduce ‘primitive’ initiation rituals into our education system?
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. source Hungerford massacre — Wikipedia
2. The Way of the Dream, Windrose Films, 1988, p151
