The Dual Mother

In Symbols of Transformation (CW 5, ch. VII), Jung names “the dual mother” as the structural double face of the maternal archetype: the personal woman who bore the body and the archetypal mother who bore the soul. The hero is born twice — once of flesh and once of spirit — and the second birth requires that the first be relinquished. “It is absolutely out of the question that all the individuals who believe in a dual descent have in reality always had two mothers… one cannot avoid the assumption that the universal occurrence of the dual-birth motif together with the fantasy of the two mothers answers to a primordial image” (Jung 1952, CW 5).

The motif organizes the hero’s struggle in chapter VI (“The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother”): when the hero “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.” The dual mother is the answer to that danger: a second mother, an archetypal one, who can receive the libido the personal mother cannot hold without devouring.

Paracelsus’ two mothers — the visible woman and the invisible mater natura — give the alchemical version of the same structure. The dual mother is what makes the mother-complex interpretable as a developmental stage rather than a fate.

Relationships

• mother-complex
• neumann-great-mother
• divine-child
• jung-symbols-transformation
• paracelsus-two-mothers

Primary sources

• jung-symbols-transformation (Jung 1952, chs. VI–VII)
• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959, §95)