The Archetypal Feminine

In The Great Mother, Neumann distinguishes the Archetypal Feminine from the Great Mother proper: the Feminine is the larger archetypal field; the Great Mother is its most encompassing figure within the elementary character. “Archetypal Feminine, 11–12, 28, 51n, 92, 130, 225, 336; and Great Mother, 18–23, 25, 94; structural diagram of, see Schema III; and transformation mysteries, 58–59, 63” — the index entry (Neumann 1955, par. 103) records the distinction as load-bearing for the book’s architecture.

The Archetypal Feminine appears through two characters: the elementary, whose accent falls on the maternal (containing, holding, nourishing, binding), and the transformative, whose accent falls on the anima (provoking change, initiation, ordeal). Each character has a positive and a negative pole: the elementary runs from Good Mother to Terrible Mother along axis M; the transformative runs from positive to negative along axis A (Neumann 1955, par. 27). The schema’s four concentric circles — elementary, transformative, spiritual transformation, uroboric Great Round — translate the numinous dynamic of the archetype into “quasivisual terms” without reifying it (Neumann 1955, par. 27).

The concept is load-bearing because it distinguishes the projective field from the particular figure. A given goddess — Isis, Demeter, Kali, Cybele, Mary — is an image at a point in the structural diagram; the Archetypal Feminine is the field through which such images crystallize. “The functions, concepts, and conceptual symbols, which we situate at certain ‘points’ in the schema, are all to be taken as ‘concentration zones’ of psychic processes, for which, as it were, they merely provide group headings” (Neumann 1955, par. 27). The book’s systematic ambition depends on this distinction.

Relationships

• neumann-great-mother
• elementary-and-transformative-character
• anima
• matriarchal-consciousness
• vessel-symbolism
• erich-neumann

Primary sources

• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)