Matthew 19:5 · World English Bible
Matthew 19:5 Meaning And Said
and said, ‘For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall be joined to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh?’
What does Matthew 19:5 mean?
Before two people can truly become one, each has to leave the parents behind. Not the people themselves, but the giant inner images of mother and father that rule a child's world and go on ruling long after childhood ends.
From the Psychoanalysis reading below.
Matthew 19:5 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Psychoanalysis
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis
Before two people can truly become one, each has to leave the parents behind. Not the people themselves, but the giant inner images of mother and father that rule a child's world and go on ruling long after childhood ends. As long as those images sit on the throne, a grown person is still living inside the family and cannot fully belong to anyone else.
To leave them is to become a separate person in one's own right. Only then can the real joining happen, where a man and a woman meet and each finds in the other the side of life they had been missing. The two become one flesh only after each has first grown into a whole person, because a true union needs two real people to join.
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Psychoanalysis lens
Live Matthew 19:5 today
- Catch one opinion you hold today that is really your mother's or father's voice, not yours. Just name it, you do not have to change it yet.
- In a decision with your partner or closest friend, choose from what the two of you actually want rather than from what your family would approve of.
- When a family text thread pulls you back into the role you had at fifteen, answer as the adult you are now, calmly and without the old script.
Which choices in your life are still being made by voices you did not choose?
The same truth in other traditions
Buddhism
Love that still grasps is not yet love. Only someone who stands on their own can give freely to another.
Taoism · Zhuangzi
The sage does not cling, so nothing he joins turns into a cage. What is held loosely holds together.
Stoicism · Epictetus
What is truly yours is your own judgment. Until you own that, you are living out someone else's choices and calling them your life.
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