Mother Archetype

The mother archetype is the structural pattern by which the psyche organizes its experience of the maternal — biological, symbolic, cosmic. carl-jung‘s account in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious enumerates its constructive qualities: “maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility. The place of magic transformation and rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants, are presided over by the mother” (Jung 1959).

The archetype carries its own shadow. On the negative side, Jung writes, the mother archetype “may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons” (Jung 1959). The same archetypal pattern that nourishes also devours; the same that gives life also receives the dead. Jung’s dual-mother motif and the chthonic-mother of the underworld are facets of the single archetypal structure, not separate archetypes.

The archetype is not the personal mother. The personal mother is one site at which the archetype constellates; the mother-complex is the autonomous psychic configuration that forms around that constellation. Distinguishing the archetype from the complex is one of the central labors the depth tradition asks of the analysand and the reader alike.

Relationships

• neumann-great-mother
• devouring-mother
• dual-mother
• chthonic-mother
• mother-complex
• ratio-matris

Primary sources

• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959)
• jung-symbols-transformation (Jung 1952)
• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)