Battle for Deliverance from the Mother

Jung’s title for chapter VI of Symbols of Transformation names the structural task that every consciousness inherits from infancy: the wresting of libido from the maternal source without falling back into it. “When he recoils, doubtful of his strength, his libido streams back to the fountainhead — and that is the dangerous moment when the issue hangs between annihilation and new life. For if the libido gets stuck in the wonderland of this inner world, then for the upper world man is nothing but a shadow” (Jung 1952, CW 5 §450).

Erich Neumann gives the developmental schema in The Origins and History of Consciousness: the ego‘s emergence from the uroboric mother is a graded series of separations, each ritualized in myth as the hero’s encounter with the dragon. “The hero devoured by the monster cuts off a piece of its heart and so slays it” — the symbolic image of consciousness recovering libido by splitting up the archetype it could not assimilate whole (Neumann 1955).

The battle is not won once. Every later constellation of the mother-complex reactivates it. Surrender in the alchemical sense — the willing return to the source — is permitted only after the differentiation has been achieved; surrender before it is regression.

Relationships

• mother-complex
• neumann-great-mother
• devouring-mother
• ego-consciousness
• neumann-origins-history-consciousness

Primary sources

• jung-symbols-transformation (Jung 1952, ch. VI)
• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)
• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1949)