An excerpt from Breaking the Mother-Son Wound: Resetting the Patterns of a Man’s Life and Loves scheduled to be re-released April 30, 2025.
Parsifal was born to a woman named Heart’s Sorrow. Parsifal’s father is absent, and he is raised by his mother. In his important book He, Robert Johnson points out, “The redeeming hero in mythology often has no father and is raised in humble and lonely circumstances.” Heart’s Sorrow keeps the boy with her, always fearful that someday he’ll want to be a knight like his father and brothers before him, and she’ll be left alone. One day Parsifal sees five knights in full armor and is so impressed that he decides to join them. His mother bursts into tears, realizing she has failed to keep her son from discovering the ways of men.
How many men today have seen these knights and felt a similar longing? These “knights,” Johnson says, might have appeared in the form of a football hero, a poet, a doctor, a movie star, or a telephone lineman. When we saw them, we thought, “I would dearly love to go and become a rider [or a writer, a star, or a lineman]. But I would have to leave my mother behind, and she depends on me. So, I’ll take a job at the local factory instead. I’ll move into a house just down the road. I’ll come up every evening to check on her, and we’ll have dinner together every Sunday until we die.”
Unable to hold Parsifal any longer, Heart’s Sorrow lets him go. But before he leaves, she weaves a garment that is very fine and lightweight, in contrast to the heavy, male, masculine armor he will soon wear over it. I believe the homespun garment symbolizes the Mother’s overprotection, while the armor symbolizes the Father’s abandonment. Together they insulate a man from the world around him. As long as we wear these things, we remain disconnected, distant from those we wish to be close to, and less creative than we’re meant to be. The homespun garment plays an important part in the boy’s adventure because it symbolizes not only his need to please his mother but later his guilt at leaving her.
Parsifal hasn’t had a father, an older brother or uncles to instruct him in the secrets vital to manhood. All he has is his mother’s teachings and wisdom – useful, but not complete. He meets maidens and challenges other knights, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing until he meets his mentor: Gournamond. This older male figure teaches him two very important things: (1) he must never seduce or be seduced by a fair maiden, and (2) he must search for the Grail Castle with all his might. It is clear these injunctions should not be taken literally; in psychological terms they refer to Parsifal’s inner world. The “maiden” is the interior feminine, or anima, as Jung calls it, and the castle is Parsifal’s “kingdom within.”
When Parsifal left, his mother instructed him “not to ask too many questions.” Compare this with the teaching of Gournamond, who tells Parsifal that when he finds this wonderful castle, he is to ask the most important question a man or woman will ever ask: “Whom does the Grail serve?”
Yet as soon as Gournamond gives him these instructions, Parsifal suddenly remembers his mother and goes in search of her again, only to find that shortly after he left, she dies of a broken heart. We always remember our moms just before we do something they wouldn’t approve of.
Similarly, many men think about and miss their wives or lovers as soon as they get into a “men-only” situation. I remember one young man who left a men’s weekend retreat the first day, saying, “The way for me to do good as a man is to be with my girlfriend.” (See At My Father’s Wedding: Reclaiming Our True Masculinity.) Another man I know was always afraid to tell his mother he wasn’t coming home for Christmas because he thought “it would break her heart.” So, he and his wife would defer their dream of enjoying Christmas in the Bahamas because of his mother, who might just as well be named Heart’s Sorrow.
Every man must separate from his mother – or else he will carry his mother with him out into the world. Men who don’t separate never quite attain their masculinity.