The Devouring Mother

The negative pole of the mother archetype — the mother who, as esther-harding describes her from carl-jung‘s formulation, “considers her child to be her puppet, her plaything, her unique possession” (Harding 1970, p. 185). The prototype, Harding writes, is the animal “which eats her newborn young” (Harding 1970, p. 185). The devouring mother is not a pathology of individual character but the shadow side of an archetype: “if she is to release herself from this necessity, she must be willing to give up her point of vantage” and refuse “to shelter herself behind the all-wisdom of the mother imago” (Harding 1970, p. 186).

Harding’s clinical contribution is the recognition that the daughter’s bondage is mediated not by the personal mother alone but by “the imago of mother which her individual mother carries” (Harding 1970, p. 185). The daughter cannot release herself from “the childish conviction that her mother is always right and is all powerful, as she was when the child was a helpless infant” (Harding 1970, p. 185) until the imago itself is distinguished from the woman. The citation is explicit — “Jung, ‘The Dual Mother,’ jung-symbols-transformation” — and Harding is building directly on jung-symbols-transformation.

The concept is load-bearing across the Lineage. erich-neumann‘s neumann-great-mother (1955) gives it its most thorough structural treatment, mapping the devouring aspect alongside the nourishing, the transforming, and the elemental feminine.

Relationships

• neumann-great-mother
• mother-imago
• feminine-individuation
• shadow

Primary sources

• the-way-of-all-women (Harding 1970, pp. 185–186)
• jung-symbols-transformation (Jung, CW 5, “The Dual Mother”)
• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)