‘I’ve been seeing her in my dreams… vivid dreams… scary dreams’
- Anima, Episodes I - III

Jung said that ‘the serious problems in life… are never fully solved. If ever they should appear so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in out working at it incessantly.’[1] It is the more explicit return to this theme of honouring both Mother and Anima in Episodes I-III that suggests this is, for Lucas, the ‘serious problem’ with the heroic quest.

For a start, Anakin’s mother Shmi Skywalker is a self effacing presence on the screen, usually entering a scene alone and without any apparent friend, partner or ally. Although she is to become a powerful figure in his psyche, Anakin’s actual mother is a marginal, distant presence in his life, regarded by herself and others as bearing no very close relation with him. Mother and son rarely even touch each other. Strangest of all in this depiction of the mother-child relationship, when it becomes clear that Anakin is to be freed from slavery but his mother is not and they must therefore separate, she puts up no struggle to stay with her son and expresses no anger, in fact no emotion at all other than resigned acceptance. She even encourages him to leave Tatooine with Obi Wan, though Anakin is only around eight years old: ‘son, my place is here. My future is here. It is time for you to let go… to let go of me. I cannot go with you.’ The scene of Anakin’s separation from his mother is one of only three occasions on which they are seen to touch. Even so, neither appears to shed a tear at what is likely to be their final goodbye. Anakin’s departure from Tatooine, like Luke’s, is not an occasion for strong emotion. Perhaps this illustrates the sterility and danger of the initial identification with the Mother that is always indicated by Tatooine. It certainly reflects the emotional rigidity of the Star Wars movies. But there is something particularly uneasy about the relationship between Anakin and Shmi; and it sets the pattern for maternal punishment in Episodes I-III. In this second trio of films the Mother does not devour, she withdraws herself and her love. It is loss and absence that Anakin fears in his complex and yet this is necessary for separation. It’s a fear present in all six Star Wars films in the visual motif of derring do above a vertiginous drop: Luke and Leia swinging over a chasm to escape the imperial guard, Luke and Vader duelling in Cloud City’s reactor shaft, Luke falling out of the base of the city into Leia’s craft, Luke and Vader’s final duel in the Death Star, Mace Windu and Palpatine struggling at a vast broken window high in a Coruscant mega block. In view of this is significant that Anakin’s final battle with Obi Wan takes place the bottom of a ravine; he has received his punishment, taken the step into the void. But as an object of real anxiety, it is in Episodes I-III that the Mother’s withdrawal of herself as punishment comes to the fore.

In the mean time Padmé is associated visually and functionally with Shmi and as soon as Anakin leaves Tatooine in Episode I a transference of the maternal relationship to Padmé is effected. Both are awake during their night flight from Tatooine to Coruscant; Padmé is too concerned about the plight of her oppressed people to sleep. That maternal and also goddess-like anxiety is elided with her feelings for Anakin:

Padmé: Are you all right?

Anakin: It’s very cold.

[Padmé gives him her jacket]

Padmé: You’re from a warm planet, Ani. Too warm for my taste. Space is cold.

Anakin: You seem sad.

Padmé: The Queen is worried. Her people are suffering, dying. She must convince the Senate to intervene, or I’m not sure what will happen.

Anakin: I’m… I’m not sure what’s going to happen to me. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. I made this for you. So you’d remember me. I carved it out of a japor snippet. It will bring you good fortune.

Padmé: It’s beautiful, but I don’t need this to remember you. Many things will change when we reach the capital, Ani. My caring for you will always remain the same.

Anakin: I care for you too. Only… I… miss…

Padmé: You miss your mother.

Thus Anakin’s departure from the warmth of identification with the mother (Tatooine) to embark on his psychic quest (through the cold of psychic space) towards maturity is marked by this early experience of the tension between the longing for the personal mother, the longing to be free of her and the longing for relationship with Anima, onto whom many of the aspects of the maternal relationship have been transferred. For the male psyche, relationship with the Anima is often coloured by the personal mother complex: the relationship with each reflects the other. For Anakin it seems that to have one means to lose the other.

In this way the connection between Mother and Anima complicates the relationship with the latter, which is necessary for consciousness and maturity, by introducing the guilt both of incest, as in Episodes IV-VI, and of infidelity. This dilemma plays out in Episode II, by which time Anakin is old enough for it to be mediated through his adolescent sexuality. The erotic desire for Anima is established as relating to Anakin’s burgeoning mother complex in a sequence of scenes in which he rescues Padmé from an attempt on her life. The section begins with a conversation between Obi Wan and Anakin as they guard Padmé’s chamber – a position evocative of erotic and chivalric possibilities. Anakin is tired because dreams about his mother are disturbing his sleep. He tells Obi Wan, ‘I’d rather dream of Padmé. Just being around her again is intoxicating.’ The reference to Shmi appearing in Anakin’s dreams indicates the activity of the mother complex in the unconscious. His wish to replace that influence with Padmé’s shows clearly the projection of the mother onto Anima, providing a route to relationship with Anima but also obscuring her.

Meanwhile the assassin Zam Wesell has sent two deadly Koununs into Padmé’s chamber while she sleeps. Sensing danger, Anakin bursts into the room and destroys them, ending the scene standing astride over Padmé as she lies prostrate on her bed, lightsabre held aloft. Anakin’s adult phallic strength brings him closer to realising his sexual desire for, and exercising power over, Anima – both impulses previously expressed by Jabba the Hutt towards Leia. This uncontained desire indicates, in the morality of the films, Anakin’s confused and potentially compromised moral compass, even though it is intrinsic to the progress of the quest.

As the relationship with Padmé develops and is further eroticised, the presence of the Mother in the unconscious becomes more troubling. Sent to Naboo with Padmé to ensure her safety, Anakin is bothered by nightmares about his mother. The two women are again associated:

Anakin: You’re exactly the way I remember you in my dreams.

[…]

Padmé: You were dreaming about your mother earlier, weren’t you?

Anakin: Yes. I left Tatooine so long ago; my memory of her is fading. I don’t want to lose it. Recently I’ve been seeing her in my dreams… vivid dreams… scary dreams.

Instead of accepting his literal separation from his mother Anakin is trapped in a pattern of transference and projection of her, hoping ultimately to find permanence and a restoration of the original identification. As Luke’s father complex is animated by the archetypal Father/Shadow, so Anakin’s mother complex brings him into discussion with the archetypal Mother. This is the ground of his complex and a familiar pattern for those dominated by the Puer: a desperate desire for restoration and returning that cuts across any hope of questing, moving forward to maturity and individuation (becoming a true Jedi). Amidala tells Anakin their love isn’t possible given the paths they are each on, and he acknowledges ‘it would destroy us’. Anakin’s desire for Padmé is therefore connected to his quest (to become a Jedi Master) because she inspires him; but also threatens that quest. What is emerging in Anakin’s story is the moral ambivalence of pursuing the quest and even the possibility of successfully completing it. It’s not clear whether the Anima relationship can ever be freed of the jealousy of the Mother who is the source of psychic life, and therefore whether the quest can ever truly succeed.

It is notable that this struggle and the subsequent love relationship between Anakin and Amidala takes place on Naboo, a planet that continues to be ruled by a woman (Queen Jamillia, still flanked by four handmaidens) and in this film represented as a place of lush natural landscapes, waterfalls and lakes. ‘Everything here is magical’ remarks Anakin at one point and indeed the love story between the ego and the Anima is taking place in a kind of Eden, the archetypal maternal to which he so desperately want to return. He wants Anima to bring the Mother back; he cannot accept that she moves the Mother further away in promoting the journey to consciousness.

As Anakin and Padmé’s relationship grows closer his nightmares continue and worsen as he fantasises/foresees his mother’s death. Unsurprisingly, this complex and compromised relationship with the feminine is increasingly associated with corruption of the archetypal power of the Spirit and loss of Jedi status, in other words a balanced masculine consciousness. But it is also striking that the Jedi institutionalise the principle clear in the world of Star Wars that erotic association with the feminine acts against the development of morally acceptable masculinity. To achieve the status of Jedi knight Anakin must deny his corrupting desire for Anima. The Jedi are now in league with the Mother to prevent total separation and the pursuit of quest.

Anakin’s desire for Amidala risks the permanent loss of the Mother. His declaration of love for her is followed by an especially horrifying nightmare involving his mother that prompts him to go and find her. He arrives on Tatooine in time to see Shmi die from wounds received from the Tusken raiders who have taken her prisoner. The impossibility of redeeming his early experience and returning to the mother is made ineluctably apparent. In a frenzy of anger he slaughters not only the raiders but their wives and children. The activation of the negative mother complex has opened the way to the Shadow, as the Emperor attempted to do when he taunted Luke with his own anger with the father/Father at the end of Episode VI. Palpatine will refer to this incident in Episode III when he is tempting Anakin to the Dark Side; at this point in Episode II conflict has emerged between Anakin’s love for his mother, his feelings for Padmé and his duty to the Jedi. From now until the epic finale on Mustafar Anakin will have few associations with the maternal imagery of moons, forests and caves; he is losing contact with the inspiration of the unconscious.

Padmé is doomed from now on to be both substitute for and usurper of the maternal relationship. She will, for Anakin, incorporate the ambiguities of the Mother as well as of Anima – the threat of the withdrawal of love, absence and/or destruction, a limiter of the ego’s power but also the instrument of male destiny, nurturer and lover. As Anima she is for the journey of the individual psyche; as Mother she is for keeping Anakin identified with herself through the Jedi and the Republic. In Episode III Padmé will express confusion about whose side she is on, and it’s no wonder.

No surprise then that the maternal is at the core of the emotional, psychological and political action in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Hard upon Anakin’s rescue of Chancellor Palpatine, his latest father figure, he is reunited with Padmé, who tells him ‘something wonderful has happened’ – she is pregnant. Nonetheless she appears anxious and despite his assurance that ‘we’re not going to worry about anything’, so is Anakin. When he suggests they finally stop hiding their relationship it is Padmé who tells him not to ‘say things like that’; she has taken on the role of the Mother in assigning guilt to erotic relationship with Anima and this puts her, narratively speaking, in a position of total deadlock. Later, she points out that they could both lose everything if their relationship, and their children, are discovered; she won’t be allowed to continue as a Senator (it’s not explained why) and Anakin will be thrown out of the Jedi Order. And yet she is entirely committed to it.

Padmé’s impending motherhood makes her the object of all the resentment, guilt and desire Anakin experiences through his mother complex and this is expressed in his nightmares about her dying in childbirth. Killing in her in dreams, he becomes desperate to save her in actuality and this sets him on a path of true personal destiny, free of the institutions of the Jedi and the Republic – institutions Luke Skywalker will work so hard to restore, though our faith in them is now shaken, having seen them through Anakin’s eyes. Anakin’s love for Anima and its confusion with his feelings about his mother lead him to embark on a personal quest that is clearly, in the morality of the film, immoral. He is guided away from it by Yoda, Obi Wan and Mace Windu. By now the values represented by these figures are sufficiently muddies for it to be unclear what quest Anakin can hope honourably to pursue.

After spending almost all of the film confined in her apartments by her shaming pregnancy, Padmé breaks free to precipitate the final convulsion of Anakin’s crisis. Following him to Mustafar, unwittingly carrying Obi Wan as a stowaway, she tries to bring him back to the side of order and the Jedi, an attempt that ends with his brutal attempt to strangle her. Despite the fact that no lasting damage is done she soon dies in childbirth, for no readily apparent reason. In pursuit of his quest and of Anima, through the conflicting demands of the mother complex, Anakin therefore loses all three and becomes the creature of the Shadow. As Lucas has grown older he, and we, apparently believe less and less in the possibility of succeeding in the heroic quest, sabotaged and wrong footed at every turn by the desires and jealousies of the feminine; and we have begun to question even the goal for which the quest is pursued.

[1] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 8, para. 771.