Mother Complex of the Daughter

In the daughter, Jung distinguishes four typical configurations of the mother complex (CW 9i §§166–172): hypertrophy of the maternal element, overdevelopment of Eros, identification with the mother, and resistance to the mother.

The first hypertrophies the maternal instinct: the woman’s life is lived only through husband and children, “in more or less complete identification with all the objects of her care… Like Demeter, she compels the gods by her stubborn persistence to grant her the right of possession over her daughter. Her Eros develops exclusively as a maternal relationship while remaining unconscious as a personal one. An unconscious Eros always expresses itself as will to power” (Jung 1959, CW 9i §167). The third produces “identification with the mother and to paralysis of the daughter’s feminine initiative. A complete projection of her personality on to the mother then takes place” (§169).

Only the fourth — resistance — yields differentiation: “resistance to the mother can sometimes result in a spontaneous development of intellect for the purpose of creating a sphere of interest in which the mother has no place. This development springs from the daughter’s own needs” (§171). It is from this resistant fourth that Marion Woodman’s patriarchal-daughter descends — the daughter who escapes the mother into the father’s logos and then must work back, decades later, to reclaim a feminine body she never inherited.

Jung’s late observation in §193 anchors the asymmetry: “Whereas for a man the mother is ipso facto symbolical, for a woman she becomes a symbol only in the course of her psychological development.”

Relationships

• mother-complex
• patriarchal-daughter
• neumann-great-mother
• devouring-mother

Primary sources

• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959, §§166–193)
• neumann-great-mother (Neumann 1955)
• leaving-my-fathers-house (Woodman 1992)